It's St. Valentine's Day, which, despite our culture's sometimes-overbearing commercialism and the vast ocean of cliche to which this holiday has fallen victim, today is really about the simplest and most complex, the sweetest and most bitter, facet of our humanity. Love makes us more alive, and it kills us. It is so contradictory, and yet so simple and straightforward.
In our culture, many of us spend great portions of our lives, along with a great deal of time, energy, and money, trying to find someone to call in the middle of a difficult day who knows exactly how to lift our spirits - someone to share in our triumphs and to mourn our failures with us, and when those failures occur, to anchor us in a life that isn't predicated on success or failure and help us pick up the pieces and move forward.
I'm only about 30% into County Music, and find much of it pretty contrived, where some very talented people follow the same cheesy formula time after time to produce nothing but mediocrity (note: this is far from universal). But there is one thing about a lot of it that I find very telling about humanity, especially our own society, and that is the plethora of America-loving, beer-drinking, good-old-boy Southern men who sing about crying. They reveal to us the simple truth that, inside this gruff, small-town, self-reliant working-man, there abides a pain that brings him to tears, all because of a woman he loves, and he is nothing without her.
I've been thinking a lot about love recently, and about what it, and its pursuit, is supposed to mean to us, and to me in particular. I've been at a point in my life for a while in which there seem to be too many choices to make, and yet the ones that really matter just up and make themselves. What law schools should you apply to, and what factors are important in that choice? In the midst of a significant relationship, how do you balance something that has often sustained you and given you an excuse to get up in the morning - your career - with the need to go home and just be there with him? When things start to deteriorate, and you've made mistakes, and he's made mistakes, and the hurt and weight of those mistakes seem heavier than you can admit, when do you quit trying, and compromising, and sacrificing, and fighting?
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The Gay Rights Movement is unique in the history of human rights struggles in a number of ways, but the biggest of these, and the one that I find most compelling, is that the entire "issue" is love itself. It isn't about religion or politics or morality - indeed, the Movement's entire existence is predicated on the understanding that, be it cultural programming or biological urge, we all want to find that person or persons with whom we can share our lives.
We all want to have to be in that position where at least some of those difficult questions of which I spoke require answers.
Some of us, built a little bit differently, are looking for that someone in a little bit different place. Some of us have no desire to pursue that picket fence, or to enter into any kind of legal or religious union with one person to the exclusion of all others. Some of want a partner and children and a Golden Retriever sleeping next to the fireplace.
But the point is that we're still looking. And though our relationships may not look the same to some people on the outside, and though no one outside of the relationship can ever truly be aware of the secret world that exists inside, I am here to assure you that the inside is so much more similar to the inside of yours than you have previously imagined. We love. We make love. We fight. We lift each other up, and we sometimes tear each other down. We try to do "little things" for each other like clean the bathroom unexpectedly or leave little love notes for our still-sleeping partners on days when we have to go into work early. We experience jealousy and regret and sometimes thank God for one another and sometimes resent one another.
Just like everyone else, we're spending our lives trying to find that person to whom we can give every good part of ourselves, and who will take the bad too and love it as much as we despise it, because they love us and the bad is a part of who we are.
The entire "issue" of gay rights revolves around that fact, and the conclusion that follows - deep-down, we're all looking for the same thing, and our society has no place intervening in that quest.
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My generation is truly unaware of how far we've come in such a short period of time.
In just 1998 (I was in Middle School), police in Harris County (Houston metro), Texas, in response to an unrelated, false accusation, invaded John Geddes Lawrence's home to find him engaged in sexual conduct with another man, Tyron Garner. Both men were arrested, tried, and convicted under a Texas law that prohibited "deviate sexual intercourse" between members of the same sex.
In 2002, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, which would require them to reconsider their 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld a similar same-sex "sodomy" prohibition law in Georgia. And in 2003 (the year I graduated High School), the Court delivered its opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, overturning Bowers and invalidating laws all over the country that prohibited private sexual contact between members of the same sex.
When my generation watched Milk, we were shocked at those heartbreaking opening scenes depicting gay people being rounded up by the dozens and hauled off to jail. What we don't really comprehend is that everyone born before 1984 graduated high school in a country where it was still okay for states to arrest homosexuals because of the details of their private lives.
I have had the privilege of living my entire adult-life in a post-Lawrence world. The Lawrence decision, several years after Harvey Milk had to fight just for our right not to be fired based solely upon sexual orientation, was allowed to go significantly deeper. It established, without a doubt, that being alive and being homosexual at the same time could no longer be considered a crime.
It blows my mind that this only happened in 2003. It blows my mind that Iowa now recognizes same-sex marriages. My own state, Illinois, almost does the same, recognizing the right of two people of the same sex to enter into civil unions only last year.
So here's to you, St. Valentine, and to the Gay Rights Movement! In the words of James Taylor: "Never give up. Never slow down. Never grow old, and never ever die young!"
- crossposted at my wordpress blog: JustLeft.wordpress.com
Updated by flowrider at Mon Feb 14, 2011, 11:40:55 PM
Thanks for the comments, everyone, and a deep deep thank you to the RR for the Community Spotlight - that was quite an honor :-) Sorry I've been away from the computer so long today - will respond to comments now.
This was a deeply personal diary for me, and your response is very touching.