Hope and History

He looked like a
hero, and that was the problem. Barack Obama seemed
almost reckless with the truth, implausibly idealistic --
and (though we might not have said this out loud) we
worried that America wasn’t “ready for a
black president.”

After eight years
of George W. Bush, we were sick of being excluded, sick
of being hated. Hillary Clinton seemed the safer choice. We
knew that she knew how power worked, and we wanted
someone who could win. Moreover, many gay leaders --
the men and women with money and influence, whose
success was built on cunning -- looked at her and saw
themselves: making her way by wile, unafraid to
sacrifice integrity when the game demands it.

But truth will
out, and many placed their bets on Barack Obama, and when
he took the lead in the primaries, he won over most of the
rest. He talked to us -- and about us -- more, and
more explicitly, than any nominee before him. And not
just when he had to. Not just at Human Rights Campaign
dinners. At black churches, in his stump speech, on the
night he was elected: He said the word that every
major candidate before him had found every excuse not
to say. He named us. He said gay.

After his
election Obama named someone else. The world’s most
influential Protestant minister, Rick Warren, who
campaigned against gay marriage, was asked to give the
inauguration’s invocation. Obama tried to quell
outrage and concern by restating his commitment to be
“a fierce advocate of equality for gay and
lesbian Americans.” And during his first months
in office, while he worked with Congress on the economic
stimulus package and the wars, and laid groundwork for
legislation to protect the environment and reform
health care, we were on our best behavior, waiting for
him to reveal his plans to keep his promises to us.

Momentum for gay
equality kept building -- in the courts, in
legislatures, and in culture. Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont,
and Maine legalized gay marriage -- which was,
significantly, also endorsed by the U.S. Conference of
Mayors. Dick Cheney too announced his support for
marriage equality, as did top Republican strategist Steve
Schmidt, who managed John McCain’s presidential
campaign. Polls showed clear majorities supporting
repeal of “don’t ask, don’t
tell,” even among conservatives and churchgoers
-- constituencies that had long been in favor of the
antigay military policy. Still, through all of this, one
word was conspicuously absent from the president’s
vocabulary.

The hero was a
player after all.