Andrea Grimes brings us the latest from the gay fray:
Not only do the gays and lesbians these days think they have the right to do things like get married and raise a family, they are now demanding to dance in the same rooms as their peers! Fucking ridiculous.
Naturally, when a lesbian high school couple decided to attend their school prom, the only logical thing the school could do was threaten to cancel prom. After all, what straight person in her right mind would shake her ass within miles–let alone feet–of a lesbian? Heck, she might even be tempted not to go back to a hotel room with her sexually inexperienced boyfriend and feel pressured to lose her virginity through vaginal intercourse, which is the only right and proper kind of sex to have. (Except you shouldn’t ever ever have it, ladies!)
I have to disagree with Miram at Feministing (linked in the above excerpt), who said, “I’m really tired of these stories.” I suppose I should be exhausted by these constant reiterations of bigotry and stupidity around the country, but I’ve recently become more and more hopeful.
There are, of course, happier stories to be found; Miriam herself notes a couple in her post:
- Students at an Albany, New York public high school voted for a lesbian couple as the school’s “Best Couple” for the yearbook.
- A Los Angeles high school last spring elected a gay male as prom queen.
And, for the record, as Miram points out in an update, the school has reversed its decision, and will allow the pair to attend as a couple.
Meanwhile, the gay fray continues, with both good news and bad (and worse), but as bad news has long been the par in this fight, the increasing frequency of good news holds sway over my hopeful outlook.
I’ve recently come to the opinion that the gay rights fight is, essentially, over. That is, there is certainly much work still to be done, but it is, for the most part, tallying up the result over and over and over again for the satisfaction of bigots who are determined to remain unsatisfied.
For me, the gay fray has lasted half a lifetime. I had never even stopped to consider the concept of “gay rights” until a bunch of Christian zealots in Oregon asked me to. And since that time, the argument has only accelerated. The issue made me politically active insofar as I started attending vigils, registering voters, and even handing out leaflets—like how many other annoying bastards in the parking lot at a football game—but at the time we were simply fighting to make sure that homosexuals could keep their jobs, not be evicted, and, well, the implications of that ballot measure ran deeply enough that it could have hampered a prosecutor’s ability to convict an accused killer if the victim was gay, and possibly instructed public medical schools to teach that doctors should withhold potentially life-saving medical advice.
But gay marriage only registered on our radar as part of the conservative scare rhetoric. After all, if we can’t fire or evict or censor a faggot, the next thing you know, they’ll want to get married.
And in the intervening years, nobody has done more to advance the possibility of marriage equality than the horde of frothing bigots who are so damn scared of it. Really, without a hard push against homosexuality through the ’90s, the marriage equality debate might not have happened. But that is how it works when you drag something out into the bright light of day and demand that your neighbors judge it: Some of them will judge it sympathetically.
So while I would agree with the underlying principle of Miriam’s fatigue—that this stupid bigotry is already stale—I take a perverse pleasure in seeing weary homophobes make complete fools of themselves. And, of course, there is the cleaner, warmer comfort that comes when they figure out they have no real choice but to do the right thing.
The desperation, the squeaky fury, the frothing hatred—these are symptomatic of a real and simple truth. Or, as Dan Savage recently reminded his readers: “We are winning.“
B.D.'s Last Refuge 