1115.org

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to watch the San Francisco Gay Pride parade with two gay couples I’ve had the good fortune to know for almost my whole seven years in the Bay Area. It wasn’t difficult to understand what everyone was celebrating: San Francisco has long been one of the most gay-friendly cities in the world, and in addition to last year’s rush of same-sex marriages, the California Supreme Court just upheld the state’s domestic partner law. There’s a long way to go, but the road is shorter here than anywhere else in the Religious Right’s America.

Gay rights, along with civil rights and a woman’s right to choose are among my core values, my articles of faith. I’ve long since made up my mind, and I’ll be six feet under before anyone could persuade me differently. But because of this, the issue turns two dimensional. I can go out with my gay friends or speak with them via phone or email without the subject of sexuality or their daily battles even being discussed. But watching wave after wave of the parade humanized it in ways that get lost sitting behind a keyboard documenting the latest atrocities from Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum, James “SpongeBob” Dobson and the rest of their hate-filled allies.

Human beings are products of their experiences, and I am no exception. In addition to the couples with whom I watched the parade, I count many gay friends, some among my oldest. Though I try, it has become impossible to avoid taking personally the constant barrage of insults, attempts to marginalize, and campaigns to limit the inalienable rights of gay Americans by religious extremists, many of whom have probably never had so much as a conversation with those they wish to eliminate. I don’t care what their operations manual says. This is the only authority I recognize, and it doesn’t allow for gay-bashing.

When I hear Dobson railing about protecting marriage from the evil gays, coupled with Republican-created tax incentives for married couples, I think of Bud and Brian, a gay couple I knew growing up who owned a business, yet then, as now, wouldn’t be eligible for the same protections and privileges afforded a straight couple in the same situation. When Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blame gays (among others) for 9/11, I think of all the people I know who have been forced to live (both partially and fully) in the closet for fear of the persecution such statements incite.

But the defining experience, the one that made me an absolutist on gay rights, renders all intolerance intolerable. When these ignorant evangelists attack homosexuals, they attack the same people who went out of their way to help someone they barely knew. I’ll ask your indulgence for a brief personal story.

In 1997, I left my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA for Los Angeles. Shortly after arriving in LA with everything I owned, exhausted and delirious from five days on the road, I discovered that neither the apartment nor employment I had arranged were viable. Possessing few marketable skills beyond running nightclubs, I applied for a retail job in an effort to buy enough time to put the pieces back together. Truly at a low point, I considered a return trip across the country, giving in to the surprisingly strong tractor beam of the Steel City. But in a completely unexpected move, I was offered a job in the corporate office, and even more unexpectedly, a place to live by some of my new coworkers. I’d had gay roommates previously, but never strangers. Still, in no position to argue, I accepted both offers. In the following year, I got to know some of the most kind, caring and generous people I have ever met. My roommate Nikki was the first person I knew who had AIDS, and from him, I learned what grace under pressure really is. Here was this beautiful young man who had already lived a difficult life, facing the rest of his life taking toxic medication, fighting off secondary illnesses and knowing that all of it would still result in a painful, withering, lonely death. Yet each day as we walked to work he would sing Madonna songs (most often Ray of Light), and decide what parties we’d be hitting that night. Battling hangovers we would hit the trails at Runyon Canyon Park and then start all over again.

I only stayed in Los Angeles for nine months before finding a place to live and a better job in San Francisco, but the friends will last forever. Though I disliked LA to my core, they made it fun, and their selflessness taught me lessons that school could never teach. In the years since I left LA, the gay rights movement has made gains on many fronts, some of them quite significant. “Lipstick Lesbians” made the cover of Time magazine, Queer Eye was a bona fide crossover hit, my father’s favorite show is Will and Grace, not to mention the growing political and economic power enjoyed by gay and lesbian Americans using the same organizational tactics as their enemies on the neanderthal right.

But for all the progress made, there is still resistance where there should be none, applied by people who think the American dream is reserved only for born again Christians. With their representatives and allies in government and on television, they are able to withstand the small defeats (civil unions, shared insurance, anti-discrimination laws etc.) while working under the radar to roll everything back by intimidating sitting judges, pushing through new judges and packing government agencies with those who share their ideology. The federal budget is used as a weapon, with taxpayer money flowing to some of the same religious groups seeking to ostracize homosexuals while budgets for rights enforcement and research are cut and the remaining funds go unspent.

My friend Nikki died a few years ago. Toward the end, he had wasted away to almost nothing. Smoking marijuana was the only option to manage his pain and stimulate his appetite. Yet the federal government and the Republican Supreme Court are making it a priority to make medical marijuana illegal. More importantly, in an age when Medicare pays for Viagra, discrimination works against people suffering from illnesses like AIDS, which is incorrectly associated as being a gay disease. The government’s AIDS agency is in disarray, and programs to fight and learn about the disease in Africa are subject to the same chicanery as everything else this administration does. AIDS isn’t a priority to this administration because their most critical voting block thinks it is an appropriate punishment for people who live a different lifestyle. As I wrote a few weeks ago, this intolerance can’t be tolerated.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I’m not sure how the above passage from the Declaration of Independence can be as misinterpreted as it has been by the religious right, but it has to stop. Americans for generations have been snobs about living in the greatest country in the world, yet people in Canada and Spain enjoy more freedom. Not just gays in Canada and Spain, but everyone. After all, a society’s freedom can only be measured by its least free.

At the Pride Parade, I watched one of our society’s least free subcultures revel in their freedom to peaceably assemble. There was every reason to celebrate recent successes, but with one (and maybe two) new Supreme Court justices, the advancement of their cause—simply to be treated the same as every other American—is in serious doubt. States like California and Massachusetts can make laws creating havens of freedom for gay people, but there are certain issues that can only be remedied by the federal government. And beyond the tactical level, we live in the United States where “liberty and justice for all” is supposed to be a shared value.

Complete set of Pride Parade photos here.