I took this picture of a boat on the beach with a shattered window, and that came off as sad, so I replaced the window with a bucolic autumnal shot (of a cemetery, true, but more peaceful than sad. )
Last night I went to see a cabaret show by a friend who sang some of the best songs of the 60's and 70's (Laura Nyro, Elton John, Billy Joel, Jimmy Webb, Joni Mitchell--you get the idea). It was the kind of walk into nostalgia-land that made you want to slap any 30-year olds in the room, screaming: "You don't know what it was like! 'Summer Highland Falls' was the soundtrack of my first heartbreak, you clueless whippersnapper!" At the same time, I found myself very grateful for being born when I was, for having the memories I have. The soundtrack of my generation is the finest ever.
Well, the California Supreme Court is going to look at the legal challenges to Prop 8, and we are hopeful. Without the courts, civil rights in the country would have idled in the backwaters of social attitudes that change much more slowly than history demands. Changes in attitudes come from personal experience. Fundamentalists and conservatives have gay sons and daughters, brothers and sister and aunts and uncles too. Far too often, these gays have told me "we just don't talk about it." They find it easier to demand recognition from the state than from the family.
If we want to flip that middle five percent, these gays must demand support from their families or be willing to turn their backs on them. Parents and friends who "tolerate" express a form of conditional love that must be defined as such. I have seem COUNTLESS families go through the change they never thought they could go through, but only because the choice was accepting their gay son as he was or having no gay son at all, and that includes Mormons.
When I was 17, in 1976, I made that choice starkly clear to my parents, who were as progressive as they came for the time, but still saddled with the homophobic attitudes of their generation. My mother wanted me to go to a therapist to change my sexual orientation, and I allowed not a smidgen of light through that crack. My zero-tolerance-for-intolerance stance--combined with massive re-education--was extraordinarily effective. She had a rough year, (my father less so) but both made the strides they made because it was that or no relationship with me at all. By the time my brother came out a few years later, they couldn't be bothered to be bothered by his sexual orientation.
I think this is a crucial difference we as gays have with the traditional civil rights movements. With African-Americans, legal protections drove social change, with us, social change drove legal protection. Rosa Parks needed the right to sit in the front of the bus before she could make friends with the white lady next to her. But liberal democrat that he was, I don't know if my father would have voted against Prop 8 if he never had to accept and embrace his gay son, much less two of them.
With us, change begins at home.
MCO 2008
