On Prop 8--From Someone Who's Been There (Twice)

I try to be an understanding person, but more and more, people just make it hard for me. The other day, a little old lady on a street corner tried to hand me a Christan pamphlet, I smiled and said no thank you. A few paces ahead I passed a younger man sitting on a square block of cement. He glared at me menacingly.

“Take it,” he said. “You should.”

It seems like everyone's edges are a little sharp these days, with the election a little over a week behind us. With oppression and discrimination written into the state constitution, you'd think the bigots would be happy. But they seem even more incensed, perhaps angered by our own shows of force, that we're not just rolling over and playing dead.

What bothers me most about the Yes on Prop 8 crowd is their use of the word “morality”. What morals could be better than to love and be good to one another, and try not to do anyone harm? If we follow their example, morals are just arbitrary rules by which one lives one's life. How can two people marrying be immoral, when taking someone else's rights away is not? The way I see it, they're the ones who are immoral. Heartless. Cruel.

And it hurts. Even more than the first time. You see, I've done this already. Four years ago, I was living in Michigan when Proposal 2 passed in a decisive victory for the homophobia brigades. Gay marriage never did happen in Michigan, but now it's really, really illegal. The language of the proposal banned the government from recognizing same sex marriage or “similar unions,” meaning that now public institutions—like city and state governments, public schools, and universities—now cannot offer same sex domestic partner benefits. Queer folks at my alma mater, Michigan State, used to get domestic partner benefits. Now they don't.

Prop 2 won by a landslide in Michigan. Everyone expected it. Since we never had gay marriage there, I didn't feel like I'd lost anything. I was more incensed by a second Bush victory than some ballot initiative pushed by some right wing zealots that only confirmed what I already knew. They hated us. It only gave me more reason to stick inside my little bubble of activist and queer friends, rest of the world be damned.

But then a year later, I moved to San Francisco. I didn't do it to be a queer refugee. I was happy enough in my little pocket of the Midwest. I left my home town for the same reasons anyone else does—to find change, direction, something different than the old familiar landscape I was accustomed to. But what I found when I got here was that I wasn't an outsider anymore. It took some getting used to. In Michigan, people saw me as interesting or different—because I was queer, because I was an activist, because I was politically radical. It took a while to get used to the idea of being just another face in the crowd. But the erasure of these distinctions from my identity forced me to see who I was beyond those labels, to become a whole person. In Michigan, my sexual identity was never far from my mind. Would new people I met at a party turn out to be homophobic? If I came out to my boss, would I face retaliation? Would I get gay bashed walking down the street with my girlfriend? But gradually, since I moved to California, I stopped thinking about it so much. Queerness stopped being the number one big thing that defines my life, and started just being another trait, like the timbre of my voice or the color of my hair.

And then the marriage thing happened. I was at a work training in Oakland when I got a text message from my sister congratulating me on my ability to get married. I texted back that I'd better find myself a bride now, and our mom would be so proud.

Before last June, I'd never really thought about marriage as a concrete thing that I could actually do. Sure, I thought about the concept in my Womyn's Studies classes back in college, when I decided marriage was just a patriarchal institution meant to exert a man's ownership of his wife. But it was never tangible. I came out when I was 19, and I certainly never thought about getting married before that. And after that it was never really an option for me so I didn't bother with it.

But in June, on the hottest day of the year, the news came in that I was no longer a second class citizen, and I'd forgotten that I even was. The powers that be, a group of straight people sitting in a room somewhere, had finally decided that they were not morally superior to us, that our lives and relationships were every bit as valid as theirs. That day was so hot I could barely peel myself from the couch, but I felt like an enormous weight I'd forgotten I'd been carrying was finally lifted from my shoulders. I'll always remember that day as Gay Marriage Day, when celebrants spilled into the streets and partied into the night. It was like the universe gave us two things we hadn't expected that day, gay marriage and real summer weather in San Francisco. For the first time in our queer lives, the stars were finally lining up in our favor.

I remember thinking I hoped to feel this way again on election night, when we'd finally rid ourselves of the Republican regime. I almost got to feel that way again. Obama's victory speech brought tears to my friends' eyes, but I kept saying I couldn't rest until I knew the results from Prop 8. I still can't rest. I feel like I'm carrying that enormous burden again that I thought for a moment I was free of. For a moment, I actually let myself think that my sexuality could no longer be a source of contention between me and people of a different orientation. For a moment, I thought I could just be another person, not defined by the “damning” labels of lesbian or queer. It was a nice moment. But we're not quite there yet.

In 1960, a group of young black students sat down at a segregated white lunch counter in Greensboro, South Carolina. They were arrested. In 1848, the first wave of feminists began demanding the right to vote. They did not achieve it until 1929. In 1977, San Francisco elected its first openly gay city supervisor. He was shot and killed the next year. And in 1969, a movement for queer liberation began with a riot at the Stonewall Inn in New York. Many of the queers at Stonewall were beaten and arrested, but one year later the first Pride March was held in New York City, and who knows where we'd be today without them. It's a law of physics that that for every action, there is a reaction. For every push for equal rights, there is a backlash. Whenever we push, they will push back. No one's liberation was ever won without a fight. This is our fight.

And yeah, it hurts. It hurts to know that some people in this state still think their lives, relationships, and choices are better or more valid than mine. It hurts that people define morality as something that essentially excludes me. It hurts to see television ads that frame my existence as an attack on theirs. It hurts that people are so horrified to think that their daughters might want to marry a princess someday. I say, let her have her princess.

When Prop 2 passed in Michigan, I just pitted myself against the world. But more and more, I've begun to see myself as part of it. And now this attack on gay marriage really feels like an attack on me. But it's also awoken me from my relative complacency in my Bay Area bubble. From a look around, I think I can say the same for a lot of others. Last Friday I participated in the most vibrant, energetic march I've ever been a part of, and I've been to a lot of marches. We were at least 2,000 strong, and, stopping traffic, we marched from Civic Center to Dolores Park, then back to Civic Center, and finally to the Castro, where a smaller group occupied an intersection until 6 in the morning. The crowd was queer and straight, transgender and gender normative, hugely diverse and overwhelmingly hopeful. I got the feeling that many of these people had never been politically active before. I saw the usual folks from my community—drag queens, dykes, gay guys, trans folks, genderqueers—but I also saw straight couples, Christians, and heterosexual families with kids. And that made me realize maybe this isn't over.

For every action there is a reaction, but that doesn't mean we lose. It means we keep trying. And maybe trying doesn't just mean fighting this battle in courts and governments, although that's certainly a part of it. Maybe it means breaking out of our safe little bubbles and talking to those people who think their morals are better than ours. Maybe it means challenging people's privilege, making them see that our rights aren't just a vague, abstract, political idea. We may never change the biggest bigots' minds, but we can wake up the people who follow them, who are so blindly comfortable in their lives they forget that although we are “other”, we are still human. Because we're all in this together. If we can start to see that, maybe they can too.