Thoughts on the United States of America’s 233rd Birthday

There is a school of thought in the study of American history—now considered anachronistic and politically incorrect, but quite popular a hundred years ago—called “American exceptionalism.” Its premise is basically that, because of the circumstances of its founding and the ideals of its Founders enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, America is unique. Because America could (depending on how you look at it) be considered the most successful modern democracy, it is somehow special. Worthy of note. Exceptional.

Of course, such an idea fell out of favor later in the 20th century, when historians and everyone else began to talk about the fact that for all that America might have seemed exceptional to white male property owners, it routinely disenfranchised racial minorities, women, the economically disadvantaged, immigrants, LGBT folks, young people, old people, the disabled, and really anyone who didn’t meet the profile of a Founding Father. It’s all very well, historians and civilians realized, to celebrate the ideals to which the Framers of the Constitution aspired, but it is also necessary to be aware that America has been an “exception” in some incredibly awful ways—slavery and its legacy being a prime example, of course. Indeed, one of the incredible things about the system of American government so celebrated by the exceptionalist school of thought is its imperfection. Throughout its two-and-a-quarter centuries (give or take), it has seemingly disenfranchised nearly as much as it has enfranchised.

But despite all this, what is truly incredible about America (and what, I believe, is worth celebrating on this most patriotic of all days) are the voices that come from this tension between America’s ideals and its all-too-frequent failure to live up to them. Sounds of struggle have defined America for as long as it has existed, and while those sounds may include the conventional narrative of battles to win independence from colonialism, or a fight to keep the fragile union together, they are at their strongest when they represent the voices of the oppressed and downtrodden, those Americans who have been relegated to the sidelines, who for whatever reason are not canonized in the elementary school social studies curriculum.

One of the greatest successes of the whole “American ideals” thing is the freedom of expression. This evidences itself not so much in the court battles fought to defend that right on formalized grounds (though those have often been remarkable too), but rather in the general cultural sense that there is no reason why Americans should not use their voices. This has given American history some of my personal cultural heroes, people whose poetry or music or political battles I celebrate despite the fact that they usually are not incorporated into the usual list of American heroes. I am talking, naturally, about Walt Whitman, whose poetry is adulatory of humankind in such an American fashion, and who lived so much as part and parcel of his time, reacting to the turmoil of a young country struggling with slavery and division—you could consider the Civil War the greatest test of those exceptionalist ideals, and throughout it all Whitman’s themes are unity and universality and “the varied carols” of “America singing.” I’m also talking of the folk heroes of the 20th century, such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, who were reacting to and singing through other great tests of American exceptionalism: the Great Depression and the McCarthy era. Despite impoverishment, despite blacklisting, they sang songs like Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” which aspires to an America “made for you and me,” or his “Pastures of Plenty,” which is written from the perspective of a migrant worker who, despite his disadvantaged life on the outskirts of society, will fight to defend America “with my life if need be/For my pastures of plenty must always be free.” I would be remiss, of course, if I did not mention the incredible vocal tradition of the civil rights movement, which had a dream, which sang “we shall overcome someday.” I would be remiss if I did not mention the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, and students who could not vote until the 26th Amendment was passed in 1970 and who therefore shut down their campuses instead. I would be remiss if I did not mention organized labor’s struggle for living wages and fair treatment, and the fierce sense of unified defiance that came from those battles. There are far too many other struggles to name, so many that my mind is racing with those I have left out.

These heroes of American history—not the usual American exceptionalist heroes who fought the British, pursued Manifest Destiny, defended the sanctity of the union, became captains of industry, and made the world safe for democracy, but heroes all the same—speak to this incredible contradiction between what America has aspired to and what it has been. They speak to the universality of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in the American psyche, and the fact that, whatever our situations in life (and in this country, they certainly do vary greatly), we have learned and been taught that we have the right to aspire to something greater. We continue to do this, as Americans, on a daily basis, whether it’s in our personal struggles to give our children better lives than we had; or in politics, when we make choices at the polls or when we march in the streets in celebration or protest. Throughout it all, the culture permeates, and our art and our music and our literature and our film and our commerce and our daily lives reflect the constant fight to make sense of the dichotomy of promise versus practice, to understand what we are to do with the ideals Thomas Jefferson and a few other overeducated middle-aged white men with land and slaves entrusted to us.

I largely passed today by not observing the Fourth of July, which didn’t seem strange to me: the day is essentially an arbitrary one on which to wave a flag, and as someone who grew up in the wake of September 11, flag-waving has been pretty much spoiled for me. I have spent too much of my life being told that I am a traitor for not reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with my class, or for questioning the justness of the Vietnam War, or for vocally opposing the Christian rhetoric of “In God We Trust” and “one nation under God” to feel any differently now. But at the end of a long and delightful normal Saturday, I went up to my friend’s roof to watch the DC fireworks explode over the Washington Monument, the first time in many years that I’d seen a fireworks display, and as I watched I couldn’t help feeling a frisson of excitement. Today is as good a day as any to say that I exult in the cultural legacy of enduring and irreconcilable contradiction, the exceptionalism of ideals that are nearly impossible to achieve, though not for lack of trying and trying and trying again.

I am seeking a conclusion to this pattern of troubled perseverance with which I can end this essay, and of course my favorite American to quote provides one by moving us forward in the ongoing struggle. At the end of a 1956 poem about his relationship to his country, he writes, “America, I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” That’s always struck me, at least, to be as good a plan as any.

Allen Ginsberg and AIDS

Or, the sorts of nerdy obsessions that keep me up at 1 in the morning.

In all of the published poetry Allen Ginsberg wrote between 1978 and 1990, he mentions AIDS only twice. His poetry is weirdly free of the constant allusions to the disease that appear in the work of any gay male writer living in New York in the ’80s, as Ginsberg did. In addition, if his poetry (which is invariably autobiographical) and his journals are any indication, he remained sexually active throughout the period, which boggles the mind somewhat. How did he manage not to die of AIDS (he died of liver cancer in 1997), much less ignore the phenomenon as his friends and fellow writers and neighbors in the East Village died around him?

The first time Ginsberg mentions AIDS, it is in a poem called “Sphincter,” dated March 15, 1986 (very much after the disease’s initial terrifying outbreak). Here, the reference is an entirely self-serving one; Ginsberg stresses that his “good old asshole” must now, due to AIDS, only admit “the condom’d orgasmic friend.” Usually a faithful commentator on current events, here he has managed to go seven years without a peep about the thousands of deaths in his microcosm and now his only remark is that AIDS necessitates that he practice safe sex? This isn’t the poet I’m used to.

The second reference to the syndrome in question comes two years later (February 13, 1988), and the poem is called “Grandma Earth’s Song.” Ginsberg talks about how he encounters a crazy homeless woman who then chants in rhyming couplets a crazy homeless chant about what an awful state the world is in. Many of the observations “Grandma Earth” makes are the ones we’re used to hearing about the Reagan years—the chant references the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians and violence in the Middle East in general, the state of the economy, quite a lot about the state of the environment, and—in one little offhand reference—AIDS. It’s an interesting commentary on the world of 1988, and the gay literary/cultural world in particular. What little exposure I’ve had to the gay literature and popular culture of the period suggests that the gay male community was completely traumatized by AIDS, shut down to the point that it couldn’t think of anything else. And yet Ginsberg, in his treatment of AIDS, chooses to put the concern expressed in a lot of very high-minded literary endeavors into a crazy woman’s ravings—the sentiment couldn’t be farther removed from that of, for example, Angels in America. And yet, if Ginsberg’s intention is to suggest how paranoid all such fears seem—fears about violence and war, money, even the ozone layer and an epidemic—the attitude towards AIDS does make sense, albeit seem a bit of a strange way of confronting such a huge and omnipresent issue in Ginsberg’s world.

I suppose that Ginsberg was never so much a figure of gay liberation; he never placed himself within a thoroughly gay world, the way a great many other 20th-century gay writers did. Perhaps this was a result of his early repression and self-loathing, perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the men he lusted after and fell in love with were invariably heterosexual (Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and even to an arguable degree Peter Orlovsky), or perhaps it was more to do with the fact that Ginsberg’s Buddhist sensibilities suggested the bridging of subcultural boundaries and the oneness of humanity, just as they did two decades before when he was an avenue of communication between Berkeley student protestors and the adults trying to combat them. And so it seems reasonable that he wouldn’t have seen himself as a spokesperson for the gay trauma in a way that many of his contemporaries did, and that his struggles would have been more cerebral or spiritual and not a question of the daily fight for survival that seems to have characterized much of the rest of the gay community in the ’80s.

There is a poem from March 1990, “Numbers in U.S. File Cabinet (Death Waits to Be Executed),” in which Ginsberg does a sort of by-the-numbers of problems in the world: things like “100,000 alcohol deaths yearly,” “$100,000,000,000 to 200,000,000,000 estimate nuclear weapons complex cleanup costs,” “3,000 citizens disappeared in Government custody Peru 1972-1979.” But whereas my reading suggests that any number of gay writers would have placed (and still place) the thousands of gay men lost to AIDS quite prominently in that list, there is no mention of these deaths in the catalog of what is wrong with the world.

On some level I believe that the always-self-centered poet really just wasn’t interested in the personal struggles of other people; AIDS lacks the high-minded idealism of the radical student movements or even the nascence of the Beat Generation, and I imagine there was less to interest Ginsberg there, particularly in his later years, when he seemed primarily occupied in summoning up the spirits of the friends of his youth or of his poetic influences (usually Blake and Whitman, his particular favorites). Practically, it’s incredible that Ginsberg didn’t contract AIDS himself, and wildly implausible that he wouldn’t have had at least one lover or close friend who died of it—even if he had stayed at Naropa in Boulder or abroad for all of the ’80s, which is not at all the case, as I know that was living in the East Village for at least some of that time, he couldn’t have avoided the reach of AIDS.

But I suppose that, here, Ginsberg provides some much-needed perspective. After immersing myself for quite a while in writers to whom AIDS is critical and life-changing and traumatizing and galvanizing, it’s a reality check to note that it was not quite so central to every literary figure in America, or indeed every gay literary figure. And perhaps that was the point; Ginsberg always stood out, and perhaps he wanted to be the one gay poet in the ’80s who wasn’t writing about AIDS. I guess that if that were the case, I couldn’t really blame him.

QOTD II (2009-06-30)

Apologies for the just completely gratuitously gay second QOTD (the last one at least had literary merit), but I’ve been YouTube-ing Rachel Maddow because… well… because I was, and she has a great aphorism in an appearance on Conan O’Brien last year. She’s talking about how she sometimes receives hate mail saying “you’re gay”:

That is the single best thing about coming out of the closet, that no one can insult you by telling you what you’ve just told them.

Come out come out wherever you are! Rachel Maddow said so!

QOTD (2009-06-30)

I am finally reading Wilde’s De Profundis for the first time, just now, and it is truly wonderful. There’s no question that he knew how to use language—and, of course, the context only heightens the words’ poignancy:

When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else – the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver – would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

Of course, I am reminded, too, of the last stanza of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” which I read in 10th grade English and which can perhaps be given the credit for spurring my obsession with all things Gay Male Lit. Quoting from memory, so apologies for errors:

And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word;
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Tragic.

QOTD (2009-06-29)

President Obama, speaking today to important LGBT people at a White House reception to honor Pride Month:

Now, 40 years ago, in the heart of New York City at a place called the Stonewall Inn, a group of citizens, including a few who are here today, as I said, defied an unjust policy and awakened a nascent movement.

It was the middle of the night. The police stormed the bar, which was known for being one of the few spots where it was safe to be gay in New York. Now, raids like this were entirely ordinary. Because it was considered obscene and illegal to be gay, no establishments for gays and lesbians could get licenses to operate. The nature of these businesses, combined with the vulnerability of the gay community itself, meant places like Stonewall, and the patrons inside, were often the victims of corruption and blackmail.

Now, ordinarily, the raid would come and the customers would disperse. But on this night, something was different. There are many accounts of what happened, and much has been lost to history, but what we do know is this: People didn’t leave. They stood their ground. And over the course of several nights they declared that they had seen enough injustice in their time. This was an outpouring against not just what they experienced that night, but what they had experienced their whole lives. And as with so many movements, it was also something more: It was at this defining moment that these folks who had been marginalized rose up to challenge not just how the world saw them, but also how they saw themselves.

As we’ve seen so many times in history, once that spirit takes hold there is little that can stand in its way. (Applause.) And the riots at Stonewall gave way to protests, and protests gave way to a movement, and the movement gave way to a transformation that continues to this day. It continues when a partner fights for her right to sit at the hospital bedside of a woman she loves. It continues when a teenager is called a name for being different and says, “So what if I am?” It continues in your work and in your activism, in your fight to freely live your lives to the fullest.

In one year after the protests, a few hundred gays and lesbians and their supporters gathered at the Stonewall Inn to lead a historic march for equality. But when they reached Central Park, the few hundred that began the march had swelled to 5,000. Something had changed, and it would never change back.

The truth is when these folks protested at Stonewall 40 years ago no one could have imagined that you — or, for that matter, I — (laughter) — would be standing here today. (Applause.) So we are all witnesses to monumental changes in this country. That should give us hope, but we cannot rest. We must continue to do our part to make progress — step by step, law by law, mind by changing mind. And I want you to know that in this task I will not only be your friend, I will continue to be an ally and a champion and a President who fights with you and for you.

It’s obviously much too soon to say how Obama will wind up on gay rights; I look forward to being able to reflect after four or eight years on what his administration has accomplished. Today, I was left very ambivalent about Obama’s commitment to LGBT issues (my Twitter feed today probably speaks to that), but there’s nothing like Obama soaring rhetoric to make you feel good of an afternoon.

QOTD (2009-06-28), and other matters

From David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, one of the too-many books I bought today:

At bottom, [Whitman’s] distaste for pornography was linked to his hostility to prissiness and sexual repression. The scabrous and the repressed, he thought, were two sides of the same cultural coin. Both reflected skewed versions of womanhood and manhood.

That quote was basically the point at which I stopped skimming and said, “This book is too interesting not to bring home.”

Today was one of the best days I can recall in some weeks, possibly since I left Princeton. I slept late, had coffee and a sandwich at my neighborhood coffeeshop; wrote an essay that is not particularly PC, but with which I’m quite pleased; discovered a canal with a very pleasant accompanying towpath; bought and ate a very expensive but very delicious cupcake; bought and began to read some awesome books from my thus-far favorite DC bookstore; and even put in a good three hours’ worth of work-I-get-paid-for. For the first time in quite a while, I sat and read 100 pages at a stretch—one of the books I bought. I assuaged my guilt at having spent the money, and at the fact that it is yet another gay male book, with the thought that at least I was reading for pleasure. I don’t do that nearly enough.

I realize that this is the sense of perfect life I’d built for myself by the time I left Princeton in May, revolving around the Bent Spoon and Labyrinth and walks down to Lake Carnegie and afternoons and evenings spent in the library. All that is absent now, in DC, is meals in the Rocky dining hall with my friends whom I miss daily. It’s a very weird experience to go from seeing a set of people every day to not seeing them at all for months, and I suppose that’s what happens to normal, well-adjusted people with social lives every summer—I remember my first summer after I began to have a social life in my sophomore year of high school, and how desperately I missed my friends then; how I, too shy to phone them, begged them to call me while my family was on vacation in Canada. I have built up more independence and self-sufficiency since then, and I congratulate myself on my ability to move to Washington and live on my own; I look forward to the isolation that our yearly family vacation in Canada imposes. I’m excited, after all, about all the books I’ll have time to read.

Not wanting to eclipse the issue to which I most want to draw attention, I should mention that today, too, I celebrated Stonewall by not feeling guilty about how many gay books I bought, how many gay issues I wrote about, or how many gay links I posted on Facebook. We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re going to post silly things about our personal lives anytime we damn well please.

The Modern Gay Rights Movement Turns 40; or, Continuity and Change

Last night, at around 9:30pm, I was waiting for a bus in Dupont Circle. Dupont, for those of you who don’t know, was once Washington’s gay ghetto, and still houses many of its gay bars and businesses and the one remaining gay bookstore. It being Saturday night, the circle was filled with all sorts of people—young and old, gay and straight—out on the town.

One group whom I noticed in particular, and who spurred me to begin this post this way, was a cluster of three young African-American women who were waiting to cross the street by the bus stop. Two of them had long hair in dozens of braids, and wore short spaghetti-strap dresses and high heels; the third, who was holding hands with one of the more femmey women, had short hair and was wearing baggy jeans and an oversized polo shirt. They looked young enough to be in high school—though so do I, so that doesn’t say much. They giggled with each other as the light changed and they crossed the street, and the couple clung to each other in that way that young couples do, in my experience—so delighted with each other that they don’t realize their PDA is attracting attention. I mention these women who walked past the bus stop in Dupont last night because as I was thinking how I would write about the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, I realized that they are as good a representation as any of how the LGBT world has changed since June 28, 1969, when a group primarily composed of gay men, notably fronted by a phalanx of drag queens, fought back against a police raid of the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street.

People speak of the Stonewall riots as the flowering of the modern gay rights movement not because it was the first attempt at a call for fair treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual and/or transgender Americans, but because it was a different kind of call. The advocacy, writing and publishing, discussion, and awareness-raising done by early “homophile” groups such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis (men-oriented and women-oriented groups respectively) was somewhat less confrontational, and with good cause—if these activists had published their magazines under real names, or met in anything other than secrecy, they would have lost their jobs. Some were married, with families. It was not easy to be out in 1950s and 1960s America, especially if you had any sort of professional life or standing in your community.

By contrast, the queers who rioted on June 28, 1969 were young, by and large. They had less to lose, and they were fueled by the atmosphere of direct action of student movements and the African-American civil rights movement. They added their voices to the chorus angry at the American society run by their elders for all sorts of reasons, and by fighting back they declared themselves in a “we’re here, we’re queer” way that was, as far as my sketchy knowledge of the historical timeline is concerned, a relatively new phenomenon. Of course, history does not develop in terms of discrete watershed moments; to canonize the Stonewall rioters is to give short shrift to the flowering of a larger gay culture in the late ’60s in New York and in other major cities around the country. But Stonewall galvanized the gay community—particularly in New York—in a way, I think, that few other actions or institutions had. It was a uniting event, and in the conventional narrative of queer history it began the outright fight with federal, state, and local governments and with social standards and institutions that characterized the next forty years of fighting for LGBT rights. Since June 28, 1969, LGBT activists have fought to not be fired from their jobs or ostracized from their communities; they have fought for the right to have sex and to get married; they have fought for the right to serve in the military and to have (and work with) children. They have campaigned to elect their own into office and to beat back the hegemony of the religious right. They have agitated for awareness of the AIDS crisis. And they have always fought for the basic recognition and acceptance of their existence, to be able to come out and not be disowned by their families, their friends, and their communities. They have fought to walk down the street with their significant others and not be harassed, to be depicted positively in television and film and literature, to be regarded as part of the variegated thread of American culture.

And forty years on, this is happening in a way that, I expect, it must have been very difficult to imagine back in 1969. As someone who spends a lot of time steeped in the history of this culture and this movement, it is even difficult for me to conceive of the degree of public acceptance of LGBT Americans. I see this in the federal government, where the President’s (gay) Office of Personnel Management director apologizes to gay activist Frank Kameny, who was fired from his federal job over fifty years ago; or where (gay) Representative Barney Frank—who, indeed, would have been fired from his federal job fifty years ago—holds a press conference to introduce a sexual orientation and gender identity-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act into the House; or in the New York Times, which once had an editorial policy of not printing the word “gay,” and today included no less than three positive LGBT-oriented articles in the Sunday paper. I see this in state government, where six states have passed legislation that raises same-sex relationships to the level of recognition of opposite-sex relationships—a result that would have seemed impossible in the aftermath of November’s Proposition 8, much less on June 28, 1969. I see this on the local level, where the pride parades that Stonewall initially spurred are an annual event attended and supported by public figures and ordinary citizens—in my native San Diego, a city which trends Republican, the Pride parade is the largest street event in the city, larger than the St. Patrick’s Day or Fourth of July parades, and features prominently the Republican mayor, who on account of his gay daughter is supportive of his gay constituents. Queer folk are everywhere: on TV, in politics, and most importantly, I believe, in schools and universities. LGBT folks continue to come out at younger and younger ages; the increasing visibility of gay people in our society causes them to understand what they’re feeling; the increasing acceptance, especially among their peers, renders it possible to come out. Regardless of whether their parents or their families accept them (a serious problem, of course, that I do not wish to belittle), queer youth are no longer alone, and things have never looked so good for the promise that they will be able to live lives as free and full of possibility as straight youth can.

And so now we come back to the three young women I saw last night at the bus stop in Dupont, and the realization that, for many young people—people my age—being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender is incidental. For urban teenagers and young adults, being gay has a status of normalcy it didn’t have in 1969; gender fluidity is also accepted in an entirely new way. The overwhelming majority (we’re talking 80%, according to some polls on some issues) of young Americans support social and legal equality for LGBT folks. And without putting words into the mouths of the three young women, I think that it must not have been too consequential a decision for the one woman to cling to her girlfriend. I think that such an action would not have seemed important to her, any more than it does when a girl takes a boy’s hand, because her culture does not distinguish between the two actions. And I know that because it’s my culture too, and I know that because so often it is difficult for my peers to understand why I react with wonder at every step forward for LGBT recognition. It is more surprising, I think, to many young, urban men and women that things have not come further by now.

This is the generation which came of age not just after Stonewall, after gay liberation, but after AIDS ceased to be labeled a “gay” disease, and after the influence of the Moral Majority began to wane. This is the generation—and I can speak for it, because I am of it—which came of age after Ellen and Will and Grace, which voted for the very first time in an election that chose the first black president, and attended its very first protest rally in the wake of Prop. 8. This is the generation that has put more effort into mocking the National Organization for Marriage and its “gathering storm” than it has into seriously opposing or supporting that group’s stance. This is also, though, for all that political and legal questions dominate the discourse of LGBT civil rights, an apoliticized group, a group which, because it does not seek to get married or have children or get health insurance for its domestic partners or file taxes jointly, can focus on the now-so-uncomplicated tax of simply being out. It can benefit from the work of its forebears to establish LGBT community centers with youth programming, to establish Gay-Straight Alliances in middle and high schools and queer student groups on college campuses. This is a generation which does not only not have to fight back at a police raid of its social space, but can be publicly affectionate with its significant others as it takes full possession of its no-longer-ghettoized social space.

As we observe the fortieth anniversary of Stonewall, and as New York, San Francisco, and Chicago (among other cities, I assume) hold their annual Pride celebrations this weekend, LGBT civil rights are in the news more than they have been in the past decade. Outrage continues at President Obama for his hesitation in acting on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act; the House with its three gay members is working on legislation, while the major mainstream gay activist groups continue to lobby and fundraise and raise awareness. The more distributed, non-Washingtonian LGBT rights movement continues to debate strategy and fight for state-based marriage rights and consider the merits of a march on Washington. But my judgment of where we stand forty years after the beginning of the modern gay rights movement is that the truest sense of acceptance of LGBT Americans, their relationships, and their lives will not come with the repeal of DOMA or the passage of a hate crimes bill; it will not come with a march on Washington. It is coming even as I write this in the hearts and minds of the young people—who forty years to the day after they fought back at Stonewall can walk down the street holding hands (yes, in Dupont, but even that couldn’t have happened forty years ago). Speaking personally, it is an exciting time to be 19 years old and queer, a declaration I could probably not have made at any other time in American history.

And where will we be when the modern gay rights movement turns fifty? Well, I suppose my generation will be the ones to decide that. Good luck, millenials: we’ve got an awesome legacy to live up to.

QOTD (2009-06-26)

Anne Kronenberg in The Times of Harvey Milk, the original Milk documentary:

It was more than just, you know, a candidate winning, it was the fact that all of these lesbians and gay men throughout San Francisco who felt that they had no voice before now found that they had someone to represent them.

As Jared Polis said, an elected body “can function best when it reflects the broad diversity of our country.”

Tooting My Own Horn

The interview I did with Representative Jared Polis (D-CO), a.k.a. one of my favorite people ever, is now online at Campus Progress. In researching (rather exhaustively) Polis’s career in preparation for this interview, I definitely found a good chunk of issues on which I disagree with him. But anyone who champions education, environmentalism, and of course equal rights for LGBT Americans still gets my support. What’s more, he’s funny and personable, and didn’t treat me like a kid. For that reason, this interview is my favorite thing I’ve ever done in the year-plus I’ve worked for Campus Progress.

I’m making an effort to step outside the LGBT bubble and cover other issues affecting young progressives—just as Polis, I think, would like to further his work on the wide variety of issues that are addressed by the House instead of having to devote so much time to being one of only three point people on LGBT issues. But I’m so grateful that my summer job affords me the opportunity to meet and talk to people like Polis who, whatever their way of dealing with LGBT identity politics, represent incredible advances in diversity and equal representation in our country’s most august institutions. Fifty or so years ago, Polis, as a federal employee, would probably have been fired on the basis of his sexual orientation. Yesterday, I saw him stand at a press conference with Barney Frank and Tammy Baldwin, all three of them able not just to be out but to introduce a bill that, if signed into law, will ensure that such things won’t happen again. What’s the line about the arc of history bending towards justice?

QOTD (2009-06-24)

Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO), speaking to me in an interview yesterday:

You know, the more Congress can look like our country, in general: we need more women around here, we need more minorities, we need more gays and lesbians. Congress can function best when it reflects the broad diversity of our country.

That whole interview will be up at Campus Progress tomorrow, and I’ve been doing plenty of other reporting these past couple days. Expect something early next week-ish on topics related to this afternoon’s Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) press conference, where I got to ask Barney Frank a question! (That’s still the most exciting thing that’s happened in my life recently.)

Also something on health care and university adjunct faculty. Because hey, I need to write about something that isn’t gay.