Tears of joy.

I fell in love, understood myself to be homosexual, in 1971.   I was seventeen and I didn’t have to be told in that moment that people like me were officially categorized as mentally ill…I got that feedback from every direction in my culture.   It was there in books and magazines, newspapers and TV.   When I was fourteen I sat in a sex ed class taught by our gym teachers, who told us that homosexuals were twisted dangerous psychopaths who often mutilated the genitals of the people they had sex with and then killed them.   At seventeen the mirror my culture held up to me in TV and movies…even in many of the underground comix..was that of a sick, twisted pervert, sometimes dangerous, other times just a pathetic faggot, but always to be treated worse then even murderers, rapists, even communists.

Even Mad Magazine was telling me a I was a fair object of universal contempt…

Never mind the asinine poem, look at the people in that illustration. This was what my culture told me I was.   I knew it wasn’t true, but how do you struggle against such a torrent of disgust, contempt and outright hatred?   In the end, it was simply by being brave, and living openly.   I’m not saying all the protests and militancy weren’t necessary, they absolutely were.   The closet was killing us, we had to break down that door and get everyone’s attention or we would never be free.   But once we got that attention, we had to show people that the scarecrow monster that had been made of us simply wasn’t real.   Not everyone would be open to that message…as Oliver Wendell Holmes once aptly said, a bigot’s mind is like an eye: the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes.   But you had to have faith that a nation that could put human footsteps on the moon was not built by bigots. You had to have faith that the evidence of our lives, as they really were, would prevail.

But never forget how hard and bitter that struggle, simply to be able to live our lives openly, was.   I saw the early days of the gay rights movement here in America, the Anita Bryant backlash, the rise of the religious right, and decades of a torrent of venom and hate.   Friends died in the AIDS epidemic.   And month after month, year after year, I saw the news reports of gay people being killed randomly by gay bashers, many of whom escaped prison simply by asserting the homosexual had made a pass at them.

I wish they could have lived to see this day.   All the lost to AIDS, to violence, to despair.   Maryland, Wisconsin, Washington state and Minnesota could not have been won with our votes alone.   I have lived to see us change from dangerous twisted perverts into neighbors.

And now, I can see something else starting to happen…gazing back on so much of a life lived under such absolute and relentless disgust and hatred; those times are fading away, as if unreal, surreal.

I am a neighbor.   How could I have have been not?   Did any of that really happen?