By the "F" word, I mean (cover your eyes, those of delicate constitution) faggot.
That word was hurled repeatedly at me and my boyfriend, walking down a busy street in Brooklyn (of all places, you might be thinking), holding hands while walking home two steamy evenings ago. To be accurate, the man who used the slur addressed us with the calm, casual if loud and clear tone of a lost driver looking for directions. We walked past him while he was retrieving something from his parked car, and when he saw our hands clasped he declared,
"That's disgusting."
"What?" I replied, wondering if I mis-heard this most casually aggressive line. We were on one of Brooklyn's broad, handsome, gentrified avenues, lined with brownstones and pre-war apartment houses; a well-maintained park on the corner still rang with the shrieks of kids enjoying the last moments of daylight on the playground.
"That's disgusting," he repeated. "Don't you know that there are children in this neighborhood? Do you want them to see that? Do you want them to see that and grow up to become faggots?"
By this point, we were perhaps 10 feet past him, and maybe 50 feet from the door of our apartment building. Flushed with surprise and adrenaline, I grasped my boyfriend's hand even harder, and made my pace more deliberate than before. Without a doubt, I was shocked by what this stranger said to us, and I didn't know if his comments would be followed by still more aggressive words, threats, or perhaps a leap toward violence. But for whatever reason, I wanted to stand up for myself, situational uncertainties be damned. I turned to him, and said, echoing his words,
"Do you want your children to grow up and become bigots?"
Two solid seconds of silence followed. Then the incident's coda arrived, in the form of the stranger's shouting "Fucking faggots!" in our direction a few times. My boyfriend and I walked to the door of our building and entered before we allowed ourselves to feel how shaken up we were. In this most progressive of cities, on one of its more diverse and socio-economically stable blocks, we were made an example of by some man with a sad and increasingly obsolete view of what constitutes societally dangerous behavior.
My boyfriend, luckily a stranger to these attacks until this night, told me he felt scared: he no longer felt like he was safe merely coming and going in our neighborhood. I told him I understood, and that as the victim of a few of these outbursts over the years, I had always felt that it was my job to stand tall and proud in the face of such bigotry, even if I felt terror and sadness inside. Holding back tears, I looked at my beautiful, handsome love, my partner of more than two and a half years, the man whose engagement ring I'm at this moment staring at on my left hand. "This is why we have to fight," I said, feeling more directly the tug of the struggle for equality than I had before.
The overturning of Proposition 8, momentous though it is, fleeting though its effects might be before appeals and higher courts dive into the battle and suspend the march toward marriage equality, is about a larger issue. Judge Walker stated in his opnion,
Well-known stereotypes about gay men and lesbians include a belief that gays and lesbians are affluent, self-absorbed and incapable of forming long-term intimate relationships. Other stereotypes imagine gay men and lesbians as disease vectors or as child molesters who recruit young children into homosexuality. No evidence supports these stereotypes.
The "disgust factor" that played into the stranger's attack on me and my boyfriend is what Judge Walker is addressing directly. The LGBT community is itself the evidence he cites as the basis for this finding: our very existence, our determination to walk down the street holding hands, to cohabitate and co-parent and, yes, be codependent are the signals of our utter convention. That is what is so threatening to those who don't believe in equality: in the absence of clear signs of our depravity, without the sight of me and my boyfriend preying on little children on the playground, meth pipes in hand and stacks of pornography by our sides, our very normal life is damning evidence enough. Should our hand-holding be tolerated, what will stop the world from accepting our sharing employee benefits, or hospital visitation rights, or any other right granted to the appropriately married?
The insistence on the idea that the LGBT community is somehow classified as an "other", wholly separate from what is conventional in our society, is all that the forces of inequality can hang their hat on anymore. Judge Walker wrote further,
Plaintiffs do not seek recognition of a new right. To characterize plaintiffs' objective as "the right to same-sex marriage" would suggest that plaintiffs seek something different from what opposite-sex couples across the state enjoy -- namely, marriage. Rather, plaintiffs ask California to recognize their relationships for what they are: marriages.
This quote, re-read a dozen times, still brings me to the verge of tears. How very simple are our demands, and how protracted will our struggle be. For every moment where some other LGBT couple, in some other place, clasps their hands together a bit harder in the face of loud, intimidating, and bigoted attacks on our lives, we creep ever closer to the goal of being blessedly, boringly, irretrievably normal.