I’m not normally one for these memes, quizzes, etc. on my blog, but…

And really, was there ever any doubt?

Round about the 12th of August, I was taken to a wonderful event by my new friend, Dana (as opposed to my old friend, Dana, who calls new Dana “Zuul,” which new Dana finds amusing). It’s called Bawdy Storytelling, as many of you who follow my Twitter stream already know. I went and enjoyed it immensely…and thought to myself, “Talking? About sex? And getting applause and laughter? I can do that!”

And the theme for September was kinda cool and a bit challenging to me, so I had to do it. I approached the instigatrix of the thing, the bodacious Dixie de la Tour, and volunteered. Her handy helper, Kitty, worked up the ad I used based on my input to her, and I came up with the following story.

Now, there’s also been a lot of story going on around my involvement with Bawdy, and I’m going to tell it. Just not in this post. Oh, and what I did on stage only bears a family resemblance to the below, but I’m working on getting video from Dixie et al so I can embed it here, allowing you all to compare and contrast.

Overall, I think I did rather well for a first-timer who hasn’t graced any kind of stage since high school, but I could have done a few things better. (Note to self: Better time management!) Still, I felt surprisingly comfy up there and felt like I had achieved a good rapport with the audience so, oh yes, I will be doing it again.

First, the ad, which I put up on Craigslist W4W.

==

I’m only into other femme-identified queer or bi women (cis or trans women included). NOT into boy/masculine energy at all, so no butches, FTMs, andros, or genderqueers. Sorry, bois! Big pluses for dangerous curves, dangerous wit, or dangerous desires…I’m more of a RACK girl than SSC.

I’m serious about meeting and playing if it feels right, so let’s make a story we can both tell for years to come (and come and come…you get the idea. )

Femme-azon seeks fellow fabulous femmes

I’m a 5’11″, curvy 37-year-old femme switch looking for some good ol’ fashioned kinky geek-on-geek action. A night, a week, a month, more…? Up to our chemistry, really!

I’m only into other femme-identified queer or bi women (cis or trans women included). NOT into boy/masculine energy at all, so no butches, FTMs, andros, or genderqueers. Sorry, bois! Big pluses for dangerous curves, dangerous wit, or dangerous desires…I’m more of a RACK girl than SSC.

Sexually & kink-wise, I’m a very physically/sensation-oriented person. S&M is delicious fun to me! Things like power exchange and bondage don’t interest me much in and of themselves, but can make fine accompaniments to a decidedly sensual main course.

I want someone who isn’t a newbie to women, kink, or polyamory. Been there, done that, got the toaster.

I’m not much into bars and not at all into clubs, so let’s think of something where we can hear each other for a first meeting. The Academy of Sciences? Soak in a hot tub? You tell me!

I’m serious about meeting and playing if it feels right, so let’s make a story we can both tell for years to come (and come and come…you get the idea. )

Your pic gets mine. Put “amazon” somewhere in the subject line so I know you’re not a bot.

==

And now, the story…

==

Hi…I’m Sonya. Since most of you don’t know me and this is my first time doing this—so do please be gentle—let me start by saying that I’ve been meeting partners over the Internet for 20 years now. Real Internet, too…none of this dialup BBS stuff! That’s right, I got online at UC Santa Cruz all the way back in 1989. For those in the know, I was a “b-geek.”

(Aside: Anyone here remember finger files? They were the old-school version of a profile page. You just typed “finger so-and-so” and got whatever info they posted about themselves. And no, laughing at that never got old!)

So I got all the classic blunders out of the way relatively early—falling for someone halfway around the world, importing lovers, exporting myself to a lover, being taken in by someone’s well-crafted but fraudulent identity…hell, I even got over cybersex—which we TinyMUDders called “TinySex” at the time—right around 1992 or so, and we used to do it well back then.

Over the years, I’ve met people over email, on forums, on irc, on MUDs (remember MUDs, MUCKs, and MOOs?), over IM, on dating sites, on social networks, at geek parties and cons…every which nerdy way you can imagine, except for one: Craigslist.

Somehow, that particular sex and dating phenomenon passed me by. Maybe it’s just that I didn’t think of it as anything but a hookup medium when I’m something of an intimacy junkie. Maybe it seemed “too easy.” Maybe it was some of the horror stories I’d heard. I dunno. But then I came to this very room a month or so ago and heard that we had an assignment and I was pretty jazzed about that. On the one hand, it felt like a challenge, but on the other, I’d been ‘net-dating for decades and lately I’d had some unexpected mojo between meeting amazing women in person and over good lo’ OKCupid. Surely, Craigslist couldn’t be that hard!

I can see you’re way ahead of me here….

Now, I’m going to assume that you’ve all committed my Craigslist ad to memory by now, and you’d better have. It will be on the midterm.

The delightful Ms. Kitty Stryker did a brilliant job of condensing my slightly rambling email into a few short, sweet paragraphs summing me and what I was looking for up quite nicely. So now it was time for me to do my part of the job…to post it and start sorting through the responses.

So I did. And I waited. But I didn’t have to wait too long. This was easy! Or so I thought…

No one told me about the bots, you see. At first, for a short while, I just thought I was dealing with incompetent pseudo-literates…

I would rather chat with you than just reading your post and see what your like. If your a real person then hit me back here and if your not, then you won’t see this. If you are, Im lookn forward to chattin with your.

Uh-HUH. But when one of them tried to pitch me a skeevy-looking dating site, the penny did finally drop.

Then there was the pic-trader, who lured me in with a few pictures of some random nymph, no doubt harvested from some porn site or some other unsuspecting dupe. Whoever it was lost interest when I stopped short of nudes, some healthy suspicion having finally crept in on my side.

I was still waiting for a real human to reply…that is, aside from the two of my friends who replied to say, “Sonya? Is that you?”

Greeeeaaaat.

But then, finally, one reply. And what a reply! I thought for sure that my story was now assured and I would be able to appear before you today, triumphant. (Silly, silly me…)

My first real response to my ad came from a woman who’d actually been in one of the very few pornos I had ever sought out and bought myself—Good Vibes’ “Voluptuous Vixens.” Her picture was beautiful…a curvy, smoldering, tattooed latina temptress with piercing eyes and a playful arch of the eyebrow that said, “Well? What are you going to do about it?”

Naturally, I wrote her back.

But before I get to that, her reply had already illustrated a screw-up on my part in the presentation of the ad…I’d provided the headline, and the initial one read, “Femme-azon Seeks Same.” So, here I had this goddess, this porn-star, responding to MY ad and apologizing for not being “a big tall Amazon woman.” Clearly, that would have to be changed if I ever wanted or needed to use the ad again.

And, fortuitously enough, there was going to be one of the entirely-too-rare women’s play parties at the Citadel that weekend. So, we arranged to meet there. I was cruising on this assignment! I might even have time for extra credit, I thought. (HAH!)

Things started to go wrong when I got a call from her apologizing profusely, saying that she hadn’t been able to secure a volunteer shift at the party and couldn’t afford to pay her way. And, just my luck, I was a bit light myself so I couldn’t be all suave and sugar-mama-y and just say, “Hey, no problem…I’ll cover yah!”

So, the play party plan was canceled. But we made a raincheck for some Indian food the following Tuesday. Hmm, I thought…a restaurant date during the week seems a lot less likely to produce immediate sexual interaction than a play party. Maybe I need to hedge my bets and re-post my ad…

I came up with a better headline (“Femme-azon Seeks Fellow Fabulous Femmes”) and tried to re-post it. I thought all had gone well, but for some reason I couldn’t browse the ad. It was acting like it wasn’t there, even though I could go right into the editing page again. Something wasn’t kosher.

“No biggie,” I thought. “Must be some transient glitch. Maybe I’m better off deleting and re-posting.”

BIG…MISTAKE!

In dear old, 20/20 retrospect, I should have just waited 5 minutes or so to see if there was any lag in publishing on a site as big as Craigslist.  But noooooooooooo…I delete the post. It shows as deleted. So far, so good.

I go to RE-re-post it, and get an error telling me that the post was “substantially similar” to another recently-posted ad—namely, the one I’d just deleted—and that it wouldn’t allow it again in the interest of keeping people from feeling spammed. And I’m fine with that. As a former social network admin, I’m a booster of anti-spamming technology! But I’d deleted the other ad. It was no more…it had ceased to be…or at least it had anywhere except in whatever overactive watchdog database Craigslist was using.

Now I wasn’t going to be able to re-post my ad for what I figured to be at least a good, solid 24 hours.

But hey, why was I worrying? Dinner with a porn star was approaching. Surely, I’d be charming and scintillating and we’d be firing on all jets and soon. And I was! Not that it helped, of course.

She showed up looking as if she’d just stepped out of her picture, only far more wondrous for being in 3-D and full-motion. Her curves and hauteur made her look like she should be a queen on a litter being borne by Aztec bearers. Her tattoos read like war-paint in life and in love. And we ate Indian food and talked and talked until she had to run home to the primary…without us ever really having broached the topics of sex, BDSM, and comparative tastes.

Watch carefully, ’cause here’s where I blow it.

‘Cause you see, I’m SO not “cool.” I’m not smooth. I’m not suave. Somehow the scarcity sexual economy that was my virginal pre-college years left its mark on me. When I want someone a bit too much, when my hormones get over-carbonated, I get a bit too eager, too puppy-like. I’m no stalker, mind. I try to resist this, but it’s insanely intense and that intensity has a way of ruining things with anyone who isn’t frightfully secure in herself and patient with someone suffering the carbonated hormones. Some women find it cute…just not enough of them.

So…back to the story at hand…she emails me shortly after midnight that same night expressing concern that our talk hadn’t headed in that direction and that she was worried I might be too much of a top given that she herself was very toppy. I happened to be up and online when it came so I replied immediately to reassure her that, no-no! NONONONONO! I’m a switch, and one with a rather neglected bottom side at that since people don’t meet an outgoing, assertive, brassy, large woman and think to themselves, “piggy bottom,” much to my eternal dismay.

But she had only sent the email a few minutes ago! She must still be up…maybe it would be OK to call? So I called, and got voicemail. And got nervous. And blew my cool. And tried to ping her a few more times that day over email and IM.

And, when I did get to talk to her next over IM, she said she felt that I’d been “coming on a bit strong.”  And that’s pretty much where things stand today with her. I star-crushed, I wanted my story way too much, I spazzed…and I managed to scare off a bloody porn star.

Meanwhile, back on good ol’ OKCupid, I found myself getting mad responses from bloody amazing women. Some to me messaging them, and some without any prompting from me whatsoever. Whatever mojo I had that was abandoning me on Craigslist seemed to be going strong here.

So I set up a few dates…but they were going to be entirely too close to tonight and I wasn’t really expecting sex on the first date with any of ‘em. What was I going to do?

But then, a lifeline. Another reply on Craigslist. A reply that started, “You sound way too good to be true.” *squee!*

My respondent was a library assistant who, in her spare time, plays rugby in queer leagues I hadn’t previously known existed. Geeky…physical…what a combination! And the picture…coy, slim but not skinny, chestnut-brunette, bob-haired, looking somewhere between a librarian and a demure Catholic schoolgirl, but with such a wicked little half-smile.

We made contact and made our date…for this past Friday. Oy. That’s cutting it too close! We’re going to have story rehearsal on Monday! *auuugh* Why do I feel like I’m in college again, grinding out a paper at the last minute? And why on Earth is it SEX I’m finding a way to procrastinate on?

I take her to a friend’s party in the East Bay. We nibble gourmet hors d’oeuvres, chitchat amiably with some of the most delightful people I know, play an amazing round of Rock Band…including some of the new Beatles game. ooOOOooo…

And, despite a truly delightful chat about sex and BDSM and all the yummy stuff, as I drove her back to her car I knew that I had failed in my Craigslist assignment. I would have to take an incomplete. Maybe, if I was very lucky, Dixie or Kitty would spank me.

But the next night, I had one of my “first dates” with one of the wonderful women I’d met on OKCupid. And I have to admit, this one had me in a complete lather. She’s smart, wise beyond her years, open and bold to the point of intoxication for a blunt kinda girl like me, and she writes Harry Potter slash. But we won’t hold that against her.

And physically? It was like she had walked out of a highlight reel of every sexual fantasy I’d had since I was a teenager. Long, coppery red hair, porcelain skin straight out of a Keats poem, a delightfully goth flair, tall enough that I don’t feel like Andre the Giant next to her, blue eyes with a mischievous twinkle, pouty “snakebite”-pierced lips just designed for kissing, hips you want to grab and pound with the nearest available strap-on, an ass begging to be spanked or plowed..or both!…big, beautiful, creamy-complected, rose-nipped breasts I don’t think I could have possibly stopped sucking on once I got started.

But she was young, not terribly experienced, and I didn’t want to repeat my earlier mistake.

I shouldn’t have worried. A few drinks and a very strong “magic” brownie later, and she’s having her way with ME in such a way that I feel so used, so violated…so fucking happy I couldn’t believe myself.

After a time of happy snogging and petting, of slow discarding of article after article of clothing, the pot kicked in. It turned her every touch into fireworks. When she sucked on my nipples, it was like they’d been hardwired right into my clit and all I could do was come and come and come helplessly…ecstatically.

I don’t think I could tell you how long it lasted. It was simultaneously eternal and criminally short. We kissed, we explored, we tasted and nibbled and caressed until she had to head home.

Ironically, though, we had to stop short of anything much beyond “2nd base.” (Albeit 2nd base with a very long lead toward stealing 3rd.) To go farther than night would have necessitated a mood-killing call to the skittish primary boy who’s new to sharing.

But right in that moment, as much as I might have liked to rip off her panties, I was content not to. It was a reminder of how profoundly sexual extended foreplay and delayed gratification can be. Besides, we have another date coming up next weekend and I don’t mind quivering in antici…pation.

So, I may have failed at doing things a new way on Craigslist, but it was nice to know that doing things my usual way on OKCupid was working so well!

And oh yeah, maybe Craigslist didn’t treat me so badly after all…I do have another date with a certain rugby-playing library assistant coming up soon, too. Maybe I’ll tell you about it the next time you see me on this stage.

Pardon me if I ramble. I couldn’t let another night go by without putting a post up and so this one might not be polished to my usual standards. I already see way too many parenthetical asides, but I’m just too damned tired and annoyed to be able to fix them right now.

The Good:

I went to my brother’s wedding in Baja, in scenic Rosarito at a wee spa resort called Las Rocas. The natural beauty of the place simply cannot be overstated, the staff were unbelievably friendly and helpful, Todd, Amanda, and her family had thought everything out brilliantly…the logistics of it were tighter than Mussolini’s train schedule!

Speaking of the blushing bride’s family, I got to meet them finally and they were beyond lovely. Liberal, funny, warm, friendly, supportive, open, and they even have one daughter who managed to marry her partner during the window before the loathsome Prop 8 passed. Even their cats were wonderful. I think I want them to adopt me.

The folks in the groom’s party along with me (myself and a tuxedoed Libby were the lone “inverted” folks in the two parties) were also really great, starting with Todd’s Best Man, Brad, and his winemaking partner, Matt, and along down the line. Lovely people all.

The ceremony itself was amazing. It was on the grass in front of the sea, with flowers accenting but not overwhelming the layout of everyone involved, participants and guests. Their personal vows and the readings were beautiful (I got the honor of reading the English translation of a wonderful Neruda sonnet, while Amanda’s sister, Libby, read the original Spanish), and they even included a most delightful dedication to Todd’s and my recently-passed father and an entreaty of the world toward sanity in the form of allowing any two consenting adults who love one another to marry if they so choose. Did I mention I love everyone involved?

I also had the delightful opportunity to toast my brother at the rehearsal dinner, so I took some time and effort to do it up proper, with a wee bit of roasting (but not too much) thrown in for good measure. I’ll put the full the text in a separate post. I was very gratified, if a bit befuddled, to receive lots of compliments both on the toast and the Neruda reading afterward by lots of people, many of whom I’d never previously met.

The food and drink? There was lots of both and it was all bloody amazing, both what we had at Las Rocas and our big dinner out at a restaurant called El Nido. (I had venison and garlic-butter shrimp that was to die for. Mmmmm.)

The transportation of everyone involved was mostly done with buses, which had the delightful benefit of greatly reducing our time coming back over the border to the US.

I got to see my Aunt (on my Dad’s side) Harriet, and three of my for cousins, Julie, Ilyse, and Fern. I was so happy to see them all in the same place that I can’t even tell you. That there was no major skirmish in the Hatfield & McCoy action between my Mom and Aunt Harriet was a bonus.

And I have to send a great, big shout-out of “THANK YOU!” to my mom, for giving me the travel and resort expenses as a birthday gift. (Oh yeah, it was my birthday on the 23rd, which was also lovely, but that falls outside the Week of Ambivalence.) Ditto to one of my very bestest friends, Dana, for tending to my cat, Pi, while I was away.

Upon my return, despite The Ugly below, I was able to climb and got my belaying pass so I can finally be useful to the climbing group. It’s hardly rocket science, but yay.

OK, that brings me to…

The Bad

I’ve had a non-stop string of personal brain farts, bits of bad luck, and embarrassments all week long. I also have a “The Ugly” section, so don’t stop.

I forgot my passport, but was able to get that overnighted at a fairly ludicrous rate by Dana so that it arrived before we left for Mexico, so crisis averted there. I also forgot my bathing suit, which resulted in a multi-day odyssey of being unable to find a single suit of any style or color that would fit my lard-ass. Apparently, while there are large women in Mexico, they must never, ever have to swim to the extent that they would need a bathing suit…either that or there’s some kind of critical spandex shortage south of the border.

In further lard-ass/giantess news, with no more than an hour to go before the ceremony, I managed to pop the seam of the zipper (but thankfully not the zipper itself, so thank goodness for small favors) in my sausage-skin…er, I mean “bridesmaid’s dress.” And, by the way, I swear they cut these very fucking tight for their rated size because everywhere else I buy the exact same size it fits me just fine, thanks! They so know they have you over a barrel with this one-time-only kind of clothing, those greedy-ass motherfuckers. Come back later for the name of the company so you can know to avoid them for your wedding. Thankfully, Amanda’s mom, Marianita, was Janey-on-the-spot with a sewing kit and some mad skillz. She had me back in it in all of about five minutes and it was fine until I shed it for more comfy duds before the reception.

Then, after having done so well for the whole rest of the long weekend, my social anxiety finally kicked in as I felt like the alien as the lone unattached gigantic trans lesbian in the room, seated at the far end of the main table at my Mom’s side for maximum isolation, and then confronted with my ages-old nemesis, the #@!%^~*(%ing dance party. If only someone there had a more active cooling mechanism for some of the choice herb I was smelling around the place, I might have been able to smoke some and felt better. But I just plain can’t inhale burning plant smoke or vapors without something like that.

So, I went to bed feeling like a great, big, fat alien loser when I should have been able to put it aside and just be there for Todd like I should have been and had managed to be for the rest of the weekend.

My flight was delayed about an hour and a half thanks to SF weather, and then I had to wait around for the Super Shuttle only barely sheltered from said wet and nasty weather…and when it did finally come, it was full to the gills and I had to deal with people in the back complaining that they were smelling exhaust fumes. Either way that really was, it’s not good.

And then, in addition to The Ugly below, I managed to have a marathon session of outsourced tech support with my ISP (Earthlink) to fix what should have been a teeny, tiny issue. Now it looks like I need to get a whole new bloody DSL modem. *grrrr*

The Ugly

Somehow, some way, the Tuesday night before I left, I must have rolled a set of critical fails in my sleep (tabletop gamer’s reference…just means I flubbed it unbelievably badly) and managed to tweak my upper back all across my shoulders and spine to the degree that, from Wednesday through Friday, the simple act of reaching forward at all (much less bending forward) was screaming agony.

A hot tub (in my sports bra and panties, since I did remember to bring my gym gear, which I ironically couldn’t use thanks to the pain) helped a bit on Thursday night and a massage from the spa staff improved things further on Friday afternoon, but I can still feel the faintest echoes of it even now. Like I said before, that hasn’t kept me from exercising or climbing and those don’t seem to have aggravated anything as I continue to show improvement there.

BUT, starting yesterday, I’ve managed to be laid low by some kind of really nasty Creeping Crud™ that includes all-over stiffness and pain; sore throat, coughing, and phlegm; fever; dehydration (been taking lots of fluids!); and nasty, garden-variety, non-migraine headache. Oy!

The Just Plain Weird

Giant Robot Statue Jesus constantly overlooking Las Rocas. ‘Nuff Said. o.O

So this is what the anti-LGBT backlash has come to…picking on the least understood, least in numbers, and most vulnerable part of that community: the “T” part. They know they’re on the wrong side of history. They know that their “triumphs” with laws like DOMA and Prop 8 are going to be short-lived. They know the tipping point is almost upon us, if it’s not here already, and why? Because they know that, more and more, people know they have lesbians, gays, and bi’s in their families, their circles of friends, their neighborhoods, and their companies, and that they find it harder and harder to discriminate to their faces.

Enter the trans “menace.” Transfolk are (in most parts of the country) rare as unicorns, utterly misunderstood, and consequently easy to demonize. The wingnuts increasingly can’t sell most people on the queer teacher or scoutmaster trying to recruit your good and godly children, but they can on the “pervert” trying to get into a women’s bathroom. And when the “mainstream” LGBT advocacy groups like the HRC are so willing to through transfolk under the bus, well then…bonus for the enterprising evangeloonie culture warrior!

Well, as it happens, I’m a male-to-female transsexual. I’ve been post-op for about three years, but lived pre-op for about 12 years previous to that owing to our health insurance industry’s discrimination against what every creditable medical professional agrees is a medically-necessary course of treatments. Once upon a time, I would never have thought about posting about that so openly once I hit my post-op life, but more and more I see that being out and open is more necessary than ever right now.

And I’m going to give the world all the openness it needs on transgender people and bathrooms. Are you ready? It goes a little something like this:

When I walk into the ladies’ room, all I want to do is go to the fucking bathroom, wash my hands, and leave.

Same as any other woman. And it’s the exact same for every other transwoman on the fucking planet, too. We’re not in there trying to sneak furtive peeks into anyone else’s stall. The very fact that the religious reich gets so worked up about this prospect should tell you a lot more about their psyches than ours. 

So, when I see stories like this one, or this one, or (worst of all) this one, my blood boils.

They want to legislate us right out of existence and, if that fails, beat or shoot or stab us to death. They want to make sure we can’t so much as use a bathroom or go to the gym. They want to make sure we can’t marry anyone of any sex, and they’ll shred any laws on the books in the process.

To them, we are truly less than human. 

(Oh, we’re fine as a fetish object when they need to get their ya-yas out, but that seems to be their only use for us!)

And that’s exactly why we all need to come out to everyone we know and fast. We transwomen and transmen can’t count on others to be the example that legitimizes us to our friends, loved ones, co-workers, and neighbors. There just aren’t enough of us. Show the people in your life that trans people aren’t a “they,” but the are a “me!”

So, we’re going to use the bathroom we need to use…the women’s for the MtFs and the men’s for the FtMs. We’re going to use the locker room. We’re going to go to the schools. We’re going to, in short, live our lives. The rest of you can actually be adult enough to deal with it. It is not too much to ask.

I warned you this was coming in my last post. Now you’re stuck reading and are just going to have to deal with it!

This past Thursday night I went and saw Milk with my very good friend, Deborah. There are simply not enough superlatives to describe this movie, and I’m saying this as someone who generally doesn’t enjoy either biopics or “message movies,” even when the message is one I strongly agree with. Gus Van Sant, Sean Penn, James Franco, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, and all the other talented people involved in making this movie completely outdid themselves and took it right up to eleven…and they’re all pretty damned good to begin with. But I’m not writing to review the movie.

Now, having come out into both sexually- and gender-based queerness at UC Santa Cruz, Harvey Milk’s life and place in history was a subject with which I quickly became familiar. Since learning about him, I’d always found him to be an inspirational figure and had always tried to live by his motto, “Ya gotta give ‘em hope.” But seeing this amazing depiction of that life at this moment in time really moved me (and, really, the movie couldn’t have been better-timed if they’d planned it that way).

The question I found myself asking was, “Where’s the Harvey Milk of today?” (Or, perhaps, “Where’s the queer Barack Obama?”)

Milk got it when it came to advancing the cause of LGBT rights. He blended superhuman tenacity with maximum inclusiveness and outreach to achieve milestones considered impossible even by the queer political establishment of the time and ended up being quite possibly the most important sub-mayoral, city-level officeholder of all time without even holding that office for two full years before being gunned down along with then-mayor George Moscone by fellow supervisor Dan White.

He knew that, without building coalitions with other organizations and demographics, the LGBT cause would wither, relegated to backwater status in politics by a combination of our low numbers, religious objections to our very existence, and the “squick factor” that many hetero folks would never get over without someone queer in their lives to help them. With nothing but grit, savvy, and charm, he forged seemingly unlikely alliances with local unions, seniors, youth, and women’s groups to finally get himself elected (with, admittedly, some help from a redistricting of San Francisco’s Supervisorial Districts). He did everything he could to be an indispensable liaison between the then-warring factions of queers and city authorities. He also forcibly bridged the internecine prejudices in the LGBT scene of the day by bringing a lesbian woman into his boys’ club to be his campaign manager.

It would hardly be an overstatement to say that he almost singlehandedly birthed much of the LGBT political movement as we know it today out of disparate, even warring, component parts he knew had to get over it and work together if any real progress was ever going to be made at a time when the initial sallies of some more progressive local governments into starting to grant LGBT folks equal protection under the law were being wiped out by bigoted ballot initiatives and hateful celebrities like Anita Bryant. (The more that things change, eh?)

But what happened?

Well, the one-two punch of AIDS and the Reagan revolution set us more than two steps back, for starters. And, in their wake, a new/old kind of mainstream LGBT rights movement appeared…one dedicated to seeming as small, normative, and harmless as possible to get legal table-scraps while a lot of the more radical groups (your ACT-UPs and Queer Nations) were more fixated on AIDS awareness, simple visibility in a time when you couldn’t get the President to even talk about us, and the rather controversial strategy of outing or threatening to out public figures. And, in all fairness, that worked surprisingly well. With the hot-button exception of marriage, most LGBT (well, LGB anyway…”T” is another story for another time) protections have been accepted as civil rights every bit the equal of protections based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or sex.I’m not saying there haven’t been challenges or setbacks to other LGBT rights outside of marriage, though. Certainly, there have been attempts to strip away protections in employment, housing, and services, as well as in partner health care and insurance benefits, but they’ve been successfully defended in most cases.

Then, the focus all seemed to shift to marriage, starting in the ’90s when it looked like the State Supreme Court of Hawaii might actually rule to give same-sex couples the right to marry. Then Massachusetts, then California. Suddenly, the evangeloonies and culture warriors had a wedge issue to chisel away the support of some of the groups that would normally ally with LGBT folks on other rights. Now, in almost every state of the union and at the federal level, anti-same-sex-marriage laws (and, often, State Constitutional Amendments) have been passed, culminating in the shocking passage of Prop. 8 in California which rendered the election of Barack Obama and the massive new Democratic majorities in Congress bittersweet for the LGBT community.

So, what now? I think we need to get back to doing things the Harvey Milk way. I’ve already talked about the need for the LGBT community to engage in better outreach to other communities, going beyond just seeking allies in the organizations that represent those interests (no civil rights group I can think of was for Prop. 8 or any of the other horrible anti-LGBT ballot measures people have voted on in quite some time). But we also need to start “horse-trading” with other traditionally liberal movements and communities to get them on board with marriage rights and things like gender-identity protection laws by offering them something they want in return, just as Harvey Milk got the Teamsters on his side by initiating the long and successful queer boycott of Coors. which was repaid by securing the right for LGBTs to work openly without being allowed to lose their jobs just for being queer. Hell, there are still gay bars where you will simply not find any Coors product.

In addition, Milk advocated a radical stand on openness, and I think he was right. The more people know that they actually have LGBT family, friends, and loved ones, the harder a time they’re going to have voting against us in these hateful referenda. We all need to be out and open to everyone we know. No playing the “pronoun game,” no giving in to fears of losing people or jobs…or even life and limb. If we were all out of the closet, more people would have to confront their feelings and opinions about LGBTs with that nagging example there working to keep them from embracing xenophobia guilt-free. If they’re going to discriminate or be prejudiced against us, we have to make them do it to our faces. Yes, some of them — even many of them — will, but many if not most of them will end up in the right place, even if their initial, knee-jerk reaction doesn’t get them there. We need to be both fearless and patient.

Furthermore, I also think that we need to reverse the trend of voluntarily ghettoizing ourselves. Believe me, I understand the instinct to escape all the cultural backwaters and head to the greener pastures of the major metro areas and their queer and bohemian enclaves. I have no illusions that people won’t continue to do exactly that, or that it would actually be the right choice for many of them for a variety of reasons. I just hope that more people will choose to stay and serve as that example to their neighbors and tough out the initial reactions.

Finally, we need more LGBT representation in the halls of government. And, once again, Harvey gave us the blueprint. So, where are the Harvey Milks of today? Where are the charismatic leaders willing to go to City Hall, the legislatures, the Statehouses, the Congress, and even…dare we even hope?…the White House? I love Barney Frank despite his centrist politics, but it isn’t him. Sheila Kuehl? Again…love her to death, but no. Tom Ammiano really, really wants to be the new Harvey, and has managed to get into the CA State Assembly, but nope. I really wish New Jersey’s Jim McGreevey hadn’t resigned. A sitting, openly gay governor would be kinda nice. He has some potential, assuming he’s still interested in politics. I’d also love to see Pam Spaulding of Pam’s House Blend make a run. She’s sassy, smart, and right on with all the issues.

I can certainly tell you that it’s not someone like HRC’s Joe Solomonese, after the HRC was so willing to through trans people under the bus to get a truncated version of ENDA passed that we all know would only have been vetoed by ol’ George W anyway.

It really makes me wonder if it’s going to take someone like Melissa Etheridge or Ellen Degeneres just up and deciding to change careers. But then, maybe I’m wrong about one of the existing local or state-level pols I’ve mentioned. And maybe there’s one out there I just don’t know about yet who isn’t local to me who has the right stuff. One can always hope. One must always hope.

I know that charismatic queer leader isn’t me. I walked out of that theater wondering what I can do to help when I have a hard enough time getting 5 people over to my house for a movie night. What with being semi-employed and trying to start up my own business, I don’t exactly have money to give, either. But I’m sure I’ll figure something out, and I’m always open to suggestions (hint: Comment, people!).

Now just ask yourself what you can do!

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
—Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride 

OK, here’s the thing…you can’t be as fundamentally different from the average person, or even the average “deviant,” as I am and have a brain without having some ideas, peeves, and raging neuroses which go against even the groupthink of those closest to you, ideologically speaking. So I figure, since it’s cheaper than therapy, I’ll tell the whole wide Internet (read: the 12 people who actually care about this blog and all future prospective employers) about some of them. I mean, I’m enriching all your lives by telling you all about great obscure music, so the least you can do is let me vent a little.

Now, I could probably do a whole post just on my notion — seemingly quaint in the age of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory™ — that people can disagree, even vehemently, and come away friends. I’m sure I will sooner or later because, let’s face it, some people (many of whom Americans, since Americans seem particularly prone to this) act as though debating their ideas or opinions is somehow invalidating them as a person and hurting their feelings yada yada yada…tell it to someone who cares. (Was that bitchy? Oops! But seriously, folks, don’t forget to tip your waitresses…)

But instead, I’m going to start with one of my all-time pet peeves and one that Saint George would no doubt approve of. I call it “semanticide,” which, if you parse the roots, roughly translates to “the death of meaning.” Semanticide is the practice of stretching the meanings of words until they no longer mean much of anything, usually because some other perfectly fine word more apt to the intended description is getting a bad rap.

I first developed the idea of semanticide thanks to my largely involuntary participation in queer and gender theory and the communities associated therewith. As a representative of both the “L” (ergo, queer) and the “T” (hey presto! gender) in “LGBT,” you would hardly think that someone with those characteristics would find herself feeling like a reactionary in the aforementioned theoretical areas…and yet, thanks to the rise of the “genderqueer” movement, that’s exactly where I find myself. More on them in another article, though. That one really deserves its own rant, ’cause I can go on for pages on the logical fallacies inherent in first granting commonly-accepted definitions of and differences between the words “sex” and “gender” and then taking the exact same modifier, “trans,” applying it to both of them, and coming up with meanings completely different from what you’d expect for the words “transsexual” and “transgender.”

Now, please do not misconstrue what I mean by reactionary. I’m not allying myself with the Camille Paglias of the world or anything here at all. The post-feminists and post-queers actually piss me off far more than the genderqueers ever could do short of actually showing up as a pitchfork-wielding mob on my doorstep.

And with all that preamble out of the way, here are some concrete examples of what I mean.

Going to college at UC Santa Cruz as I did in the early ’90s, I was there to see the cultural “vanguard” (hah!) of what I call the “trendy-bi” movement. These were people, mostly but not always women, who used the appearance of bisexuality mainly to appeal to members of the opposite sex. I got into all kinds of trouble by pointing out that a “bisexual” with no sexual experience with members of both sexes (and more on “both sexes” in a minute!), or even any specific intent to gain such sexual experience didn’t exactly seem very “bi” to me.

As a practicing bisexual at the time myself, it bugged the high holy crap out of me. Some stripes, I felt, need to be earned. And on that, I’ve never really changed my mind. But if these people got to be “bisexual” simply by verbal fiat and with no corroborating evidence to move them beyond the “bi-leaning” or “bi-curious” category, and they got to be lumped in with me, then this simple, descriptive term lost some of its descriptive power.

In fact, as a direct response to this very phenomenon, I now see actual, practicing bisexuals saying, “I don’t identify as bi…I don’t like that word. I identify as ‘queer,’” and thereby compounding one semanticide with another. If I ask someone their sexuality and they say “queer”, that doesn’t tell me much at all. If someone says “bisexual” or even the more recent favorite, “pansexual,” I at least have some idea about who is and isn’t eligible to be a part of this particular individuals sexual and romantic life. Ditto words like lesbian, gay, straight, homosexual, and heterosexual.

To me, a statement like, “I identify as ‘queer,’” can only invite the question, “Why is it you have a problem with words like ‘bisexual’ or ‘pansexual’, even though they’re more accurate and descriptive of your sexual preferences and behavior than ‘queer’, which is so vague?” Would it not be better to reclaim the word from the poseurs the way that the LGBT community took back words like “queer,” “fag,” and “dyke” from their places as slurs on us?

(Of course, “dyke” has lost its meaning over the last decade or so as well. It used to mean a lesbian woman…usually, but not always, one who is very obvious in her lesbianism, such as butch lesbians or women with visible tattoos of labyrises, linked venus symbols, and the like. Now, it seems like any non-heterosexual woman will lay claim to that one. And don’t even get me started on someone like JoAnn Loulan writing an article entitled, “Why I’m Still a Lesbian Despite the Man in My Bed” in Girlfriends. I still think the world of JoAnn Loulan as a person based on what I know of her, and I love her books on lesbian dating and sexuality, but that’s still first degree semanticide.)

“But Sonya,” I hear you cry, “they’re only words. Why get so worked up about them?”

Simple. I have this odd fondness for being able to communicate with people. So, when you render words effectively meaningless as the value-judgment-free taxonomical descriptors they’re meant to be, you end up having to re-define those words every time you use them in every conversation you have on the related subjects with every person you have them with.

What’s even worse is when people engage in semanticide based on a clearly shaky grasp of the words whose meanings they’re so busily rendering moot. The trans* and genderqueer “community” (HAH! I’ve seen herds of cats with more cohesion) is the worst offender in this regard. If you ever hear anyone tell you that there are some discrete number of sexes or genders greater than two, you’re dealing with either someone who’s only devoted very shallow thought to the subject or else someone with a very particular agenda, though the two so often seem to go hand in hand.

Yes, it’s patently obvious that there’s more than just binary “male/female” and “masculine/feminine.” But in each of those cases you’re still dealing in a continuous spectrum with only two poles. Everyone exists somewhere(s) between zero and one on the axes of sex and gender, but there’s no two or π or any other number to be found. To shift metaphors, you’ve got your a, your b, and your “some a and some b”…but what you don’t have is any option c. Chuck in the Kinsey Scale on a third axis and allow for variation over time and you’ll quickly see that even that level of abstraction in quantifying the sex, gender, and sexuality of human beings will allow for infinite variety. All the words we coin to describe people represent particular areas or vectors (or even quantum phenomena!) in that space. We’ll never be able to name them all, but at least we can usefully name 99.99% of them, presuming we could ever agree on those words.

At this point, I should probably take a moment to say that this is hardly an absolute thing. There are times when semanticide is not just necessary, but simply a good idea. It’s only the needless verbal killings that offend my sensibilities. Any definition of masculinity that includes words like “logical” or “assertive,” or likewise any of femininity that use “emotional” or “passive” need to just go. None of those characteristics ought to be “gendered” at all. In fact, I would go so far as to propose that gender be left strictly in the realm of kabuki…costuming and performance. Long hair, emphasizing (or creating) bodily curves, and so on…that’s all that should be seen as “feminine.” Likewise emphasizing or creating angularity and crew cuts “masculine.” Everything else is just “human,” if you ask me.

Take me for instance. Look at any picture of me. All the signals I choose to give with my hair, makeup, clothing, etc. says “feminine” to greater or lesser degree. But some would hold that my fascination with and profession involving all things computational is somehow inherently “masculine.” That’s exactly the kind of horrible gender-based “definition” that needs to die a quick and painful death. Until men can be seen as no less “manly” for being nurturing or collaborative and women no less “womanly” for being ambitious, technically-inclined, or commanding, then society will continue to be just that much more fucked up.

Some would, of course, argue that they see the exact examples I cited as being needless cases of semanticide as being worthwhile and necessary, too. I’d be happy to debate those points. In fact, I recently have done so both with a new friend, Joyce, about a month back and the wonderful women of the Chasing Amy Social Club just this past Sunday. And a fine thing it was in both cases!

If you ask me, every idea everyone has should always be challenged, and the intellectually honest should both give a respectful dissent the floor to make its case and modify their positions when the argument is persuasive enough to change their minds. (For the record, no, that does not mean “you all should change your minds because I’m right and you’re wrong.” I’ve been brought around to new opinions by compelling arguments made to me in the past, and will no doubt have it happen again in the future.  Also for the record, I have admittedly gotten better at the “respectful” part of “respectful debate” over the years. I deeply apologize to those who, in my younger days, I might have treated more shabbily than they deserved simply for disagreeing with me. Of course I knew everything back then, and have oddly managed to forget so much in the intervening time.)

I simply put it to you, gentle reader, that taxonomy is not harmful in and of itself. I also assert that much-maligned “labels” are only problematic when we make them problematic. I don’t think that any reasonable person expects that in a messy, analog world, all definitions will always be completely concrete and no interstitial example will ever challenge them. I don’t think that language will do anything but change and evolve, or that we’ll keep finding examples of people and things who just plain need a new word coined to describe them usefully, thus preventing the need for unwieldy sentences about what they’re not.

The map, as they say, is not the territory. But that doesn’t make the metaphorical map, or the or the real-world taxonomical terms useless. They still generally get you most of the way to where you want to be so that you only have to tailor them slightly to any given situation unless you’re actually dealing with one of those .01% or less of instances that are truly exceptional and require neologisms to describe them. The trouble only happens when people start assigning value judgments to simple taxonomy and therefore feel a need to throw the semantic baby out with the bathwater because we don’t like that emotional baggage which ought not to be there in the first place.

And yet, despite all that, I’m still a huge fan of Emperor Norton. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself!“

OK…allow me to state for the record that I do, in fact, know that there are very open-minded and tolerant Christians and other people of faith out there. I also know that there are even some self-described “conservatives”, though their number seems to dwindle daily, who actually have the intellectual honesty to extend their beliefs about individual freedom to people they don’t agree with. I number at least one example of each in my circle of friends. No, this post isn’t about them. It’s about the other ones…the evangeloony wingnut right.

Rant mode on.

Where in all the infinite Hells dreamed up in the minds of humanity do these megachurch assholes get off acting like they’re somehow victims in a society where it’s easier to be elected President as a black man than as a non-Christian? There have actually been studies in which the minority group which fares worst in its electoral prospects for high office have nothing to do with race, sex, or sexuality…it’s atheists. And yet, for all that, the religious right and other culture warriors are somehow systematically victimized by “the culture”, as they like to call it…and also, paradoxically, by the very people they seek to disempower, disenfranchise, and cynically manipulate.

Trying to stop them from oppressing others somehow constitutes oppressing them? Oh, I do not think so.

Take the example of these health care “professionals” — doctors, pharmacists, etc. — who suddenly have issues of conscience about providing the services and products that their job entails, which is something they knew full well going into it. And yet, when someone going about the perfectly legal and essential business of managing their (mainly “her”, of course) reproductive life and gets denied the care and medicines they need — even to the point of having the prescription confiscated by the “professional” in question — and tries to seek redress, that person is somehow the “oppressor”?

And these people need “protection” by state and now federal laws?

They cynically have chosen to put themselves in place as gatekeepers with the ability to fuck around with the lives of others and they’re the ones that need protecting?

These assholes are taking away my rights!

And now let’s look at the wingnut response to the LGBT community’s outrage over having its rights systematically stripped from them in virtually every state in the union, with California (and Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas) just being the latest. Yes, we’re pissed. Yes, some of us may have crossed some lines in our response. But what do they expect? Like I said before, and will say again before this rant is through…

These assholes took away my rights!

And yet, somehow they’re all oppressed by our taking our “pink dollars” elsewhere and swearing not to support any individual or business which harbors individuals who spent large amounts of time, money, and effort to strip us of our rights and make us into second-class citizens with second-class relationships not only under law, but actually at the bedrock Constitutional level of both the various states and even at the federal level if they can manage it. They and their ilk have taken our rights, our jobs, your homes, and even our lives, and they call some chanting and boycotts a “campaign of violence“?!?

Newt Gingrich calls us “fascists”? Michelle Malkin calls our perfectly justifiable furor “insane rage” and compares our boycotts to the McCarthy-era blacklists? These hateful, right-stripping bastards want to “Rise above the Hate“?

Hate?!? No, fury. There’s a difference. Hate (which they have) is based on who someone is. Fury (which we have) is based on something someone’s done to us. And that something, lest we forget, is that…

These assholes took away my rights!

The members of the wingnut right can squeal all they want about how an actual oppressed minority is “oppressing” them by simply existing and starting to flex its political muscles with some efficacy, but the fact remains that we’ve never done a damn thing to them. We’ve never done anything to their marriages. (They do fine at that themselves…the divorce rates are highest in the reddest states. Go figure.) We’ve never done anything to their ability to believe what they want or worship how they want. We don’t stop them from indoctrinating their children in a way that is arguably child abuse and is certainly socially irresponsible. 

All we ask is to be extended the same courtesy under the secular laws of the land.

Ah…there it is. That’s how they’re “oppressed”! It’s by that looming “wall of separation” that was described by Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father of the same America they fetishize despite it actually standing for the very opposite of what they think it does. They claim a “right” to impose their way of life on us. But, of course, they accuse us of being the ones doing that to them by simply claiming the right of equality and to otherwise be left alone to live our lives and, in turn, to not bother them.

So listen up, assholes. I and the rest of my LGBT brothers, sisters, and those in-between are going to take our rights back.

My main consolation right now is that the data shows that we, not you, are on the right side of history. Your days of being able to kick us around with the backing of “the tyranny of the majority” are numbered as old age kills you off and replaces you with people who get it.

In the meantime, get used to the fact we’re on to you and aren’t going to let you play your utterly unearned “victim card” unquestioned anymore.

Rant mode off.

There are a lot of reasons the heinous Prop. 8 in California passed and a lot to be done to fix it. I post this solely to see these problems rectified and not as any advocacy of hateful sentiments aimed at any “culprit” identified herein. That kind of thinking is also part of the problem, people! So, here are the culprits, ranked in descending order by my deeply subjective assessment…

Culprit #1: The California State Constitution

On what planet does it make any sense to have a State Constitution which makes the bar to pass a full-fledged Constitutional Amendment no higher than that required to pass basic legislation via the Proposition system? We need to repeal this monstrosity, then after that’s done (and only after that’s done) amend the Constitution to require a supermajority (I’d say either 60% or a 2/3s vote, with a similar supermajority vote also required in both houses of the legislature) to amend the Constitution further. I would argue that the US Constitutional standard of 2/3s of both houses plus 75% of the states would be a bit too onerous…look how popular the ERA was and it still went down to the squeakiest of defeats. But a big part of the purpose of a Constitutional document is to protect unpopular minorities from “the tyranny of the majority”, and the CA State Constitution fails miserably in this regard. If not for the ludicrous ease of amending, I don’t think the “Yes on 8″ crowd would have even tried, and it certainly wouldn’t have succeeded.

Culprit #2: The California LGBT Community

Nostra culpa. We have a real public relations and outreach problem here with regard to communities of ethnicity and of faith (as pointed out most eloquently on Pam’s House Blend), and a marked unwillingness to rectify them. Now, I’m probably the wrong person to even say “boo” about exactly how to approach this problem what with being lily-white and atheistic, but there is a problem and it needs to be rectified. We also had a real sense of complacency about Prop. 8 after months of polling told us it would fail which only started to lift too late toward the end once it became clear just how badly the “No” side was being outspent and out-organized. Which brings me to…

Culprit #3: The “No on 8″ Campaign 

From the moment the Mormons and the über Catholic Knights of Columbus started pouring millions of out-of-state dollars and lending untold organizational support to the “Yes on 8″ side, the “No” side was pushed back on its heels never to fully recover. This campaign simply wasn’t the kind of well-oiled logistical machine that, say, the Obama campaign was. With any luck, it and we have learned the lesson that we can never, ever work too hard or ask too much to protect our rights.

Culprit #4: Big Out-of-state Money

Why on earth didn’t the “No on 8″ campaign scream from the mountaintops (as in, put into one of their many high-rotation TV ads, among other things) that the “Yes” campaign was being largely bankrolled by out-of-state forces like the Mormons and the Knights of Columbus? “They’re trying to come into California and tell us how to run our lives,” can be gold in a ballot initiative fight.

Culprit #5: The Actual “Yes” Voters

Really?!? All you people of various racial groups and religious denominations want to have your own rights but take away ours when they truly hurt nobody? Hypocrites much? See my previous post.

OK…so now what? How do we fix things?

Well, that ranking system was very deliberate. The message it was meant to convey is this: We, the LGBT community and its allies, need to try harder!

After the aforementioned previous post, I had a rather illuminating pair of discussions with two people I know. The first of these took me to task for what she felt was an implied equivalency rather than similarity and a “hierarchy of oppression” (e.g. we’re more oppressed than you) in my parallels between the gay rights and racial civil rights movements. The second, with one of my closest and smartest friends, reminded me about the often-ambivalent feelings of “intersectional” people toward likening the difficulties they face as members of multiple minority groups simultaneously, as evinced in the first discussion. This is unfortunate, as it was not my intent at all. Clarifying that is part of what I’m trying to accomplish with this post.

Yes, a lot of African-American people in California voted for Prop 8 while also voting for Obama, for other Dems, and against icky Propositions like 4 (requiring parental notification for abortions for minors). But I’m very inclined to agree with the Pam’s House Blend article’s assertion that the primary root-cause of this is a failing on the part of the LGBT community to successfully reach out to the African-American community. Unfortunately, the brunt of this responsibility is going to fall squarely on the shoulders of LGBT African-Americans, an intersectional community which actually contributed a new term into our vernacular specifically to describe their clandestine homosexual activities because they’re common enough to merit it: “the down-low.” The same also applies to LGBT folk of faith—mainly christian, jewish, and muslim faith.

I know it can be extremely hard to be out and proud to a disapproving family, church, and/or community. But it needs to happen. It’s a lot harder to vote in favor of a measure like Prop. 8 knowing that it’s going to have a deep, personal impact on a friend/family member/neighbor/fellow parishioner, when LGBT folk are represented in the mind’s eye by something other than the most lurid possible footage from the annual SF LGBT Pride Parade. To that end, I think that LGBT organizations at all levels—local, state, and national—need to either add or step up their efforts at reaching out to all racial/ethnic groups and religions. We immediately lose any chance with a person or group when we decide that person or group simply isn’t worth our time to talk to. Talking=some chance (however small), not talking=no chance.

We need to learn from the racial and sexual civil rights movements and have each and every last one of us needs to be the example to someone out there in the non-queer world that humanizes us. Talk to your estranged parents, extended family, exes, kids, friends, neighbors, and fellow church/temple/mosque-goers. Re-open the dialogue. It took me 12 years to make a breakthrough with my own mother. Now, she’s not going to be marching in any Pride Parades with P-FLAG, but she at least voted “No” on 8. If I could do it, the odds are good that you can, too. The cost of breaking conversational taboos is a lot less than the cost of staying silent.

As tempting as it is for the LGBT community to construct high walls around itself for protection, those same walls also ghetto-ize us and make it that much easier for the rest of the world to look at us as “the other” because they lack an example in their day-to-day lives contradicting that impression. I’m no assimilationist, but the fact remains that LGBT folk basically want the same things out of life that non-LGBT folk do. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” means much the same thing to us all, and the more we tell our stories and let the commonalities overshadow the differences, the more the rest of society will see that.

Lastly, if you can, volunteer. We need to be as effective in our repeal effort as the Obama campaign was in taking the presidency…it had both strategic smarts and a pounding ground-game, and we need both. Volunteer for the repeal campaign, sign every petition you can, be vocal everywhere you socialize online, and do not let up until this stain on our Californian and American political life is erased.

There are truly no words to describe the historic importance of Barack Obama’s victory in the Presidential election yesterday. It was the culmination of literally hundreds of years of sacrifice and difficult social progress. To have gone from binding Africans in chains to work American plantations to a Civil War to halt that odious institution, then through Reconstruction, “separate but equal”, and the racial Civil Rights movement to get to President-elect Obama is nothing short of miraculous.

And no image, save perhaps for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the Mall in Washington, D.C., is quite as iconic of that struggle as Rosa Parks’ simple, dignified refusal to sit at the back of the bus simply because her skin was a different color than those in the front.

Why, then, have Americans in almost all 50 states of this union voted to force same-sex couples to the back of the bus even as people of color have finally achieved the highest office in the land?

Yesterday, even my beloved home and birthplace of California turned hundreds of thousands of its own residents, myself included, into second-class citizens by passing the hateful Proposition 8 and enshrining bigotry into a document which previously stood as a beacon of American equality and liberty.

Socially conservative people of color hate it when the LGBT community equates their struggle for equal rights with that of black Americans. They want to shut the door behind them and engage in that most dolorously American of sentiments, “I got mine, Jack,” because “we’re not like those people over there.”

While it’s true that LGBTs have never been enslaved in this country, we have been (and continue to be) killed and assaulted simply for being who we are. Thousands per year, and that’s just what’s reported. We’ve seen our social venues raided by the police for decades…centuries, even…and been arrested because, like miscegenation, our simple act of expressing our love to one another was illegal…and still was in over 20 states until Lawrence v. Texas was decided in 2003. We were called a “sickness” by the medical and psychological establishments until my own lifetime, much as black people were told by the medical establishment of the 19th Century that their brains weren’t the equal of caucasians’ brains. What’s more, we haven’t even been given the mockery of “separate but equal”…it’s not even seen as necessary to so much as pay lip service to the idea of our equality.

And the facts remain the same today as they were yesterday:

1. Sexual orientation isn’t a “choice” and never has been…it’s as immutable as the color of one’s skin, as has been shown over and over again. Not one legitimate scientific study has shown that people with same-sex attractions can be “converted”.
2. Same-sex couples marrying would affect mixed-sex marriages not one iota
3. Homophobic bigots would remain just as free to brainwash their children with their bigotry if same-sex couples could marry
4. No church would be forced to perform any marriage ceremony it didn’t want to
5. No child would have been taught anything about same-sex marriages or the mechanics of homosexuality in schools except possibly the simple acknowledgement that such marriages existed and that some of their classmates had two mommies or two daddies (the last of which is still inescapable reality, by the way, no matter how far into the sand you stick your head)

This fight isn’t over, of course. This will only drive more LGBT folks and their non-LGBT allies to activism while history moves inexorably forward. The Millennials are a baby boom almost equal to that of the “Boomer” generation, and they don’t see what the big deal is about treating all loving, committed relationships equally. At the worst, I think we just need to wait until enough of the homophobic fossils in this country die off and their much wiser children and grandchildren reverse the legislative folly of embedding barefaced bigotry into the documents which define our society.

We may not even have to wait terribly long, given that it took only eight years to get from Prop 22 passing 61%-39% to Prop 8 only squeaking by 52%-48%. At that rate of change, we might even get out of the back of the bus by 2010.

But for now, Rosa Parks will still do at least a half-turn in her grave on a bittersweet day showing us how far we still have to go before we truly judge people only by the contents of their character.

(Please feel free to pass this along to anyone you like…just be sure to link back to the original is all I ask!)