The last week has been pretty hard for me.
I am a (married) gay man with a lesbian mother and a gay father. My husband is gay. I have gay relatives in other places along the family tree's branches and roots. I have many, many gay and lesbian (and bisexual, and transgender) friends.
Up until November 4th, 2008, I thought that we were all equal in California, my state. So the passage of Prop 8 was a kick in the teeth. A punch to the gut. It sucked all the joy and hope out of my life for the better part of this week. I think I was probably more depressed and angry and cynical in the week since the passage of Prop 8 than I have been in more than seven years, when I was coming out and going through a divorce and having problems with a relationship that was going down the tubes.
In short: it hurt. A lot. Still does. But it made me irrational and way too prone to blame people.
So, for starters: If I have offended anyone in the past week with my anger, I am sorry.
The only thing I can say in my defense is that I was trying, somehow, to explain to myself the things that added that extra touch that means so much about Prop 8.
- I needed to explain to myself why any member of a minority, anywhere, would vote against the rights of another minority. It was and is incomprehensible to me. But instead of saying that, I started sounding like I was blaming all the poll results on the color of people's skin, instead of cultural and religious backgrounds that just happen to be fairly strongly correlated with ethnicity and race. In my anger and pain, I was not clear about that. And as a result, I offended and hurt a lot of people. For that, I am truly sorry.
- I needed to find something to focus on so I wouldn't completely fall apart, so I masked my anger in intellectual snobbery, picked on other people's analysis of statistics and poll results and debated on an intellectual level (I thought) about issues which were really so personal I should have just stayed someplace safe and private, and vented my anger away from other human beings. For not doing that, I am truly sorry.
- I needed to find something to distract me from how crushed my husband was and is. How crushed I am. How upset my daughters are. (Agent Pokemon, when we had to tell her and Plays Well With Others about the decision, started to shout "It's not FAIR! That's not FAIR! You SHOULD be able to get married!" for about five minutes, drawing the attention of most of the people in the restaurant where we'd gone to dinner with them. PWWO just... looked sad and almost cried. And that made me furious. I started looking for a target, for someone to blame, for someone I could hurt as badly as I had been hurt. As my husband had been hurt. As my daughters were being hurt. And for that anger and vindictiveness on my part, I am truly sorry.
- I had begun to look at everyone around me as a potential enemy. I work and go to school at a university in Southern California, one with a fairly ethnically diverse population. For the first three days after the election, I couldn't look at anyone on campus because I was afraid they would look back with contempt. I felt like I couldn't trust anyone. I kept wondering if this stranger or that unknown person was one of the 53% who voted to take away my rights. If they were a minority, I felt a special kind of anger because how could they take rights away from another minority? I looked at my Mormon in-laws and assumed that, because they were Mormon, they had supported Prop 8 (with no other evidence except their Mormon affiliation). And for feeling and thinking that way, for judging everyone based on their group affiliations instead of as individuals, I am truly sorry.
- One of the major reasons I supported Barack Obama's presidency was that he brought me hope for the first time in more than a decade. And then, after the passage of Prop 8, I really thought that hope was dead. I felt dead inside, and on the outside, I felt like one big open wound. I hurt all the time. I cried buckets. I slept too much and when I was awake it was like walking around in a fog. I almost stopped eating. I would hear about this or that thing that Obama was doing or saying and my only thought was, "Why didn't he speak out against Prop 8 often enough to make a difference?" I resented everyone who was overwhelmed with happiness about Obama's election because I couldn't share in it. The passage of Prop 8 underscored for me that even now, in the end of the first decade of the 21st century, I'm still on the outside, looking in. And I guess I figured that everyone wanted it that way. And for that, for tarring everyone with the same homophobic brush, I am truly sorry.
I'm not going to pretend I'm "over it," or that I ever will be. I'm still hurting. I'm still in pain. I still have far too much brain fog for my comfort (and I'm concerned that my students couldn't follow my lesson today because I was so fogged in). I presented a paper at a conference this past weekend and I don't remember a thing about it. I attended services at my Unitarian Universalist church on Sunday, and all I remember is that I cried a lot, and that a member of the church spoke, in a voice choked with tears, about how she didn't know how to break it to her son that she and her wife were not considered married by the state anymore. I've been getting hate-filled trolling emails from the anti-gay posters on some of the news sites where I so confidently said "Prop 8 will never pass in this state", crowing and snarking and rubbing it in that us sick and damaged queers have been definitively smacked down, and how do you like it, faggot? I've had nasty notes left on my car because of my No On 8 bumper sticker. Another friend from church, whom I love dearly, has had her home broken into and vandalized four times in three weeks, and the official suspicion is that it's because she had a No On 8 sign in her lawn in a Yes On 8 neighborhood. The perpetrators haven't been caught. To make the understatement of the century, it hasn't been easy.
As long as I can bury myself in the work of grading papers, writing papers, reading what I have to read for classes, and avoiding the real world, I can hold myself together, but interacting with other people, both online and off, has become one hell of a lot harder than it used to be. I haven't been responding much on Kos or anywhere else online because I haven't trusted myself to speak. And the people in my department have stopped asking me how I am because everyone knows how I am. I'm crushed flat and not recovering. I still don't feel safe.
So why am I writing this diary now?
Because there's still sources of hope out there, and in my pain, I've been ignoring them. And I'm not going to do that any more.
There's still areas of simple human kindness that I have to hold on to, like the black student who could tell I was in a bad way today and who asked if I was okay and then said she was going to be at the rally I'm going to this week because she absolutely disagreed with what happened on Tuesday.
There's still places where people are speaking truth to hate and power that I can use to remind myself that most people are not hateful asshats, like Keith Olbermann's Special Comment tonight.
There's still brightly lit places of honesty, self-examination, and realization that keep happening in spite of the haters' best efforts, like the diary from Leftside of Christine that's currently on the rec list about Keith's broadcast.
And there's still big floodlit swaths of hope and change and transformation, like the fact that this country elected a black man President a week ago.
Wasn't that amazing? And isn't it still? I mean, America. A black President. What an amazing, wonderful thing.
There's still hope out there. I just need some help remembering that sometimes.
And I'm honestly sorry for any pain I caused anyone. I was wrong. And I will try to do better from now on.