What is it going to take?

Even before I stepped out into the activist world, a year ago last week, I was aware of what needed to be done to get our Movement going. I had read books, I had read news stories, I had read the blogs, and I wrote my own. Yet, just weeks into my tenure, I discovered that the complacency in our community was so thick that you could cut it with a knife. So many gay men and lesbians (and even some transgender people) had accepted the status quo and lived their everyday lives without so much as a gasp for freedom.

So what is it going to take?

When the Mormon Church rode into towns all over California with their fat wallets and their insistent and hateful religious philosophies, and more than five million people bought into it and voted away marriage equality in November of 2008, something blew up. Stonewall 2.0 emerged and hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets with an incomparable disgust and passion for change on November 15, 2008. In the weeks and months that followed, though, those same people who nearly rioted in streets all over the nation went back to their regular everyday working worlds. By the time Pride weekend emerged in 2009, four more states had legalized same-sex marriage, but it was the same few people who cared and blogged about it.

So what is it going to take?

The anti-marriage equality campaign that reared its ugly head in the State of Maine in the months after Pride made barely a whisper sound to the majority of the LGBT population. And when Prop 8 cloned itself in the form of Question 1 in Maine on Election Day last year, the rallies that followed were Girl Scout cookies and skim milk compared to the raucous full-fat anger of a year before. It became clear that the National Equality March was little more than an exciting field trip to our Nation’s Capital for many in October of 2009, as the fire and passion from the 2.5-mile march through its streets and the rally that followed failed to burn for long. Suddenly, the marriage equality legislation that seemed sure in New York and New Jersey died quickly, and 2010 started up as the year of indifference for the LGBT population – both outside and inside.

So what is it going to take?

I am watching the meticulous planning and extraordinary actions of Queer Rising and GetEQUAL, and I am training with them, working with them. I am seeing the conferences that Equality Across America has encouraged, as they bring hundreds of people into the same small buildings where they might learn how to create and build this Movement further. I am stepping up in my hometown of Boston to help guide our local group, one of the last of its kind after the passage of Proposition 8, so that we can assist in securing rights and protections for the transgender community here, then work on issues in the national Movement. And I see very few alongside us.

What will it take before we wake up and realize that, without more people to care, without more people to work, without more people to step up to the plate and take risks and take action, we are going to lose? Some of us toss a modest three-figure sum to the HRC every year, thinking that is our contribution. Do we pay attention, though? Do we see that passage of an inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act may not happen this year? Do we see that a repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act may not happen at all? Do we see that people in our own community may be bartering away our rights in between dinner party planning sessions to create a comfortable schedule for our legislators?

We might lose, and it’s going to take a lot more than eating chicken piccata in our evening wear and some spare cash from a coffee jar to win. 

So what is it going to take to get people to wake up? What if we lose a more liberal majority in our Congress in the midterm elections? What if our president, who would sign an inclusive ENDA, who would support a repeal of DOMA or Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, loses a second term to a disturbingly evangelical autocrat who would just as soon see us perish in the fiery pits of his hell than reach full equality?

We might hate the words of older activists like Larry Kramer, as the fires he lights singe every single one of our asses, but sometimes that’s what we need to hear. We might prefer our cocktail parties with friends in Chelsea or West Hollywood or the South End or Boys Town, because they’re safer, more enjoyable, less work. We might prefer that Pride is as simple as getting drunk and laid with our rainbow flags about us. But if we ever want full protections under the law, if we ever want to be truly safe, we need to listen to people like Kramer, put down our cocktail glasses, take our legs out of the air, and put them down on the street, and start marching.

We need to clue ourselves into the networks that are being built around us by Equality Across America, GetEQUAL and Queer Rising, we need to find a role that works to save us even when it disturbs our personal comfort zones, and we need to work until we arrive. As it is, the thousands of same-sex couples who have married in their own states are still filing separate tax returns with the federal government, and missing out on 1,100 other benefits that should be guaranteed them. More than 13,000 military personnel who identify as gay or lesbian have found themselves out of a job. And nearly every transgender person alive is unable to find suitable employment so they can live like normal people, somewhere above the poverty line.

We need to wake up and listen to the voices of our community, to the leadership who have put their lives on the line for our freedoms. Because if every one of us put just a couple of hours each week into that which matters for everyone’s rights and protections, our voices combined will be overwhelming. They will stop traffic and silence our naysayers and create an undeniable strength from one coast to the other. The rallies that followed the passage of Proposition 8 will be a whisper in comparison.

When we do this, we will be heard. And we will win.

Regards,

David Mailloux
Organizer, Join the Impact Massachusetts