If your only experience with gay people is from watching Will and Grace or cheering for the cute gay kid on Glee, you might not want to read this. I don't want to shatter anyone's fairy tale of how nice, polite and always cheerful we gays are. Because we aren't.
Last Friday the New York legislature passed a law recognizing marriage equality. It was then signed by Governor Cuomo and takes effect July 24. This is great news for the people of New York and LGBT people everywhere. What made this particularly powerful is that it came at the beginning of Pride Weekend in New York, celebrating the 42nd anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.
Something like Marriage Equality has the power to unite the LGBT community the way Pride parades and festivities used to do.
That's right, I said used to do. Don't get me wrong, I don't believe there is anything wrong with having Pride celebrations, but I do think they're a bit hypocritical. We come together under the colors of the rainbow to stand united for equal rights and common basic decency, but after the parades we go back to our lives of separateness and isolation within our own community. We go back to being black, white, twinks, gym bunnies, fit, overweight, bears, cubs, transgender, drag queens, leather daddies, chicken hawks, hustlers, trolls, and dykes.
Of course each subgroup has it's own community, but as we section off and label each other, we become further and further apart. Pride is supposed to bring us together. Not just for one day or one month. How about all the time? We come together when we're fighting for our rights, or fighting for a cure to a deadly disease. I have to believe it's possible for us to stop judging each other and finding what makes us different, and start looking for the similarities in each of us.
Can we live in a world where the gym bunny can have a conversation with a troll in the produce section of Kroger? Where we don't look away from each other for fear that eye contact will obligate us to a quickie in the men's room? Can't we just connect as human beings?
Legislature can give us all the rights we want, but if we can't treat each other kindly and with respect, do we really deserve them?