No, Kos didn't actually physically kiss me, but on Wednesday, November 5th when I was reading his entry regarding the passage of Proposition 8 in California, I felt as if he had kissed me on the forehead in the cause of solidarity.
I had only recently started reading Daily Kos to follow the 2008 elections and it was on this site that I first discovered that the "No on 8" campaign was trailing in the polls. (It's very telling that I had only read about it on Daily Kos as it had not been widely reported on elsewhere).
While the rest of the country was celebrating Obama's victory (I could literally hear people cheering in the streets in my Upper West Side neighborhood on election night), I felt angry, sad and kicked in the stomach. The mainstream media was declaring that barriers had been broken, while conveniently overlooking the new ones that had just been erected for gay people.
I couldn't help but feel the sense of déjà vu all over again when I thought back on the Bowers v. Hardwick decision announced by the Supreme Court in 1986, right before the country celebrated Independence Day. At that time, while most Americans were celebrating their freedom on the 4th of July, my boyfriend and I discovered that our bodies had just been nationalized and that we were now criminals in roughly half of the states in the U.S. It would be 17 years before the Supreme Court revisited the Hardwick decision in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 and admit its hateful mistake declaring that "Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today." So while it was satisfying to receive an apology from the Court in 2003, it certainly hurt in 1986, which brings me back to Kos.
Amid the euphoria over Obama's win and the mainstream media's declaration that the country had now changed, I once again felt that as a gay man, my rights and concerns were being swept aside as trivial and unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Kos's entry regarding the passage of Proposition 8 not only surprised me -- with such strong passion and indignation coming from a straight man -- but also encouraged me with his clear analysis of what went wrong (including the anemic "No on 8" campaign in the face of the powerful Mormon church and its bigoted allies), but more importantly, impressed me with his strong commitment to the cause of equality for gay people going forward.
Marriage equality, like other aspects of gay rights (such as the right to intimacy) is still often viewed as suspect at best and dangerous or subversive at worst. As William James noted, "A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows."
I hope it doesn't take another 17 years before we get there, but it is of some reassurance to know that while many Obama supporters clearly are also bigots, there are other voices in the straight community such as Kos who recognize discrimination for what is -- and are clearly committed to ending it.