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Most of the pointy-headed types like to categorize the people born around my time as "Generation X," but for the longest time I've thought of myself as part of the "Stonewall Generation."
Ten weeks before I was born, on the 28th of June 1969, the first major fight in the gay rights movement started with the Stonewall Riots. The night of Judy Garland's funeral, the NYPD led a standard harassment raid against a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. Much to everyone's surprise, the drag queens and other societal cast-offs in the bar fought back. Suddenly the idea of gays standing up for their rights didn't seem all that strange.
Over the decades I've grown to appreciate the interesting position being in the "Stonewall Generation" placed me. I was one of the first people to grow up in a world where "Gay Lib" had always existed. My mother had an openly gay friend when I was 9, one of the most gentle souls I'd ever known. I even had a fourth-grade classmate who somehow had come to the conclusion that he was gay and had proudly announced it to the world. None of this would have been possible a decade earlier.
I remember the ruckus raised by Anita Bryant, and the reaction of my parents when Harvey Milk was killed. I remember the rumblings when "GRID" was first identified and how shocked (SHOCKED! I tell you) everyone was when Rock Hudson died of it after it became known as AIDS. I was the only person on my College Bowl team freshman year to know what the acronym ACT-UP stood for.
When I was struggling with my sexuality in my late teens, coming to terms with who and what I was, I still had a large amount of societal pressure to repress and fight it. But unlike people born in the generation before me I had positive role models to look at as well. Gays weren't just sources of ridicule and creatures to be laughed or feared any more.
At 21, once safely away from a Catholic university, I came out with both guns blazing. I didn't have to (or want to) hide it any more like gay men usually had to before I was born. And I still paid for my decision; in October 1992 I became one of the last people in my state legally fired for being gay when I was forced out of my broadcasting job mere weeks before New Jersey's anti-discrimination law when into effect.
As the generation after me started to grow up I was amazed at how much easier it had become for GLB (we'd broken up the "gay" front into three little Balkanized states by that time) youth. I knew of high school kids who had come out years before I ever would have felt comfortable with it, and who were struggling for their rights while still at the mercy of living with their parents. I'd advised and counseled teens who felt more comfortable in their skin than I ever could have at their age. And now I look at gay teens who, at least in my area, are seen as the "cool kids" and are much more accepted by their peers than I would have ever hoped to be.
I had a few good friends from my college years tell me that my coming out opened their eyes, and changed their opinions about homosexuals. Realizing that someone they knew and respected, even considered a close friend, was gay put a new perspective on how they saw homosexuals. As I counseled gay youth who told me they were thinking of coming out almost a decade ago, I recounted those tales. I said that they might have some major bumps and lose some "friends" along the way, but that those who didn't turn their backs would be forever changed and that in the long run it would help others.
This week I've had the privilege of watching the result of gay people coming out, telling their story, standing their ground. I've watched an African-American President born almost a decade before me into one of the most homophobic cultures out there, who was unafraid to say that "God was in the mix" when it came to gay rights and palled around with "ex gay" preachers and other homophobes, change his mind. I watched him sign a certification that will shortly end anti-gay discrimination in the military. I listened to him call for a repeal to the law that keeps my relationship a second-class one. I finally heard a President call for me to finally have all the rights that every other American would.
The gays at the Stonewall Inn prior to the riots would never have believed that would ever happen. The people who mocked the "faggots" around me in high school and college unaware that they were addressing one would never have believed it would happen. The teens back in 2000 and 2001 who dared to bring same-sex dates to their prom would never have believed it would happen. And needless to say I never believed it would happen.
But it did.
Now my mind turns to the children being born today. Are they going to be the "equality generation" like I was part of the "Stonewall Generation?" Are they going to be the first kids born into an America where gay rights have always been a fait accompli?
I don't know, but unlike even a week ago I can now say that it's possible.
Sometimes the lights all shinin' on me.
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it's been.
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