I’m going to do something authors are never supposed to do, because they tell us it will drive away potential readers.
I’m going to talk about politics.
I’m not doing this to be divisive. Far from it. I’m doing it because I am scared to death at what might be coming, and the only way to release some of the pain and fear is to talk about it.
There was a long time, growing up, when I cared nothing for politics. I’ve voted in every election since I turned eighteen, but I never worried much about what it might mean if things didn’t go my way. Presidential administrations in Washington DC came and went. Some were better than others, but there was always going to be another election in four years, another chance for folks who believed more like me to win (or to lose) again.
What I didn’t understand for a long time is that my life, my very existence, is political.
When I was born, being gay in the USA was considered a psychological disorder. You could be rounded up at a bar and locked up, sent to a re-education camp to “turn you straight,” and be shunned by your family, and society would nod in approval, happy that something had finally been done about “those perverts.”
When I was nine, a former beauty queen and singer in Florida railed against people like me, telling everyone that we weren’t fit to be teachers, that we were pedophiles and degenerates unfit to be in polite society.
When I was sixteen, thousands of men like me began to die, felled by a tiny virus that spread like wildfire among the gay community and decimated a generation of artists, authors, lawyers, doctors, and yes, teachers. And our President watched it all in silence, refusing to even say the word AIDS, let alone speak about or take action against the catastrophe that was stalking people like me and afflicting them with horrible, painful deaths.
When I was twenty-five, there was the brief promise of a new day – the idea that the United States was a country where people like me could serve openly and honorably in the military and marry those we loved. Then this new dawn was violently subverted, a victim of political violence against my community, and the acquiescence of a Commander in Chief who traded us away in a political deal. As if it were nothing.
When I was thirty-six, almost exactly one hour after I married my beautiful husband Mark in San Francisco, the state Supreme Court took that marriage away, forcibly relegating us back to single status under the eyes of the law.
When I was forty, Mark and I married again, just three days before the people of our Golden State voted to stop anyone else like us from getting married. This happened on the same day that voters elected our first black President, making that great victory hollow for us, and the millions of others like us.
And then when I was forty-four, Joe Biden stood up for marriage equality:
“Look” Biden began. “I just think — that — the good news is” — he set his elbows on the table and interlaced his fingers, almost prayerlike. Same-sex marriage, he explained, came down to “a simple proposition: Who do you love?” He repeated it for emphasis: “Who do you love? And will you be loyal to the person you love?” He explained that most people believed that was what all marriages were about, “whether they’re marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals.”
—Washington Post
This remarkable act of political bravery brought President Obama onboard with us, and helped lead many other Americans into support for marriage equality.
Just three short years later, when I was forty-seven, the US Supreme Court declared that Mark and I full human beings, deserving of the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else in the country. Our hearts soared.
When I was forty-eight, our world came crashing down.
Yesterday, President Biden did another incredibly brave thing. After his senior aides shared new internal polling with him on Saturday that showed he no longer had a path to victory, he put his Country before himself, and bowed out gracefully. President Biden has been a fighter all of his life, and this decision could not have been easy for him or his family. That he was able to make it at all is a testament to his character.
I am no Biden hater. Although he wasn’t my first choice in 2020, once the party coalesced around him after South Carolina’s primary, we gave him our full-throated support. I watched in amazement over the last four years, as he accomplished a series of major things with no margin for error – passage of a long-stalled infrastructure bill. Substantial climate change legislation. The resuscitation, post-Covid, of an economy that, although to still has many problems (and believe me, I am personally aware of them), is one of the best in the world at this moment. The list goes on, but the point is this. President Biden has been one of the most effective Presidents of my lifetime.
But none of this will matter if his opponent wins. All of those great accomplishments will be undone, one after the other, as we saw happen in 2017 after President Obama’s tenure. And as we also witnessed when the amazing Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to bow out at a time when a democratic replacement could have been made. Sadly, the fall of Roe v. Wade rests largely on her shoulders.
I am fifty-six now, and our rights may once again be on the chopping block soon. Mark and I are frightened that our marriage could be taken away. That our money could be confiscated – it has happened elsewhere. That we could be declared mentally unfit and sent somewhere for reprogramming, setting the country back to where it was when I was born.
Until recently, I thought the chance of these things happening was next to zero, but we are in a frightening place, one I never could have foreseen in January 2021.
Yes, I am scared to death of what might happen after November. But I am not scared to be political. My life is political, and it has been since the day I was born. This is the time to stand up for who and what I am, what we are. What so many of our friends and family are.
So I will take the gift that our President has given us, this a second chance, and run with it. I will support whomever our process chooses as the new standard bearer.
For so long, many Americans have bemoaned facing a match-up between the same two old men we faced in 2020. Now that mold is broken, and many things are suddenly possible, if we just reach out and grasp the gift he has given us.
There is an existential choice coming in November, not just for our country and our democracy, but for people like us. Our very existence may be at stake.
At least now I have hope.