[News] [USA] How It Ends

[Stephanie Stevens]

Metro Weekly, DC, USA


How It Ends

In the pursuit of LGBT equality, not everyone sees the same finish line

By Chris Geidner

Published on May 10, 2012, 4:50am


''We are an ahistorical people,'' Cleveland attorney Leslye Huff says.
''The number of lesbians in this town, who are under 40, who don't
know that we had a monthly newsletter called What She Wants, that was
run purely on volunteer energy and was just as present in our
community as the Gay People's Chronicle,'' she says about the LGBT
newspaper still published in the city. ''It's that kind of thing.

''We don't have our history, so we don't connect the dots in the same way.''

Huff, who recently worked with the city of East Cleveland, Ohio, to
pass an extensive nondiscrimination policy that provides LGBT people
with the right to bring a civil lawsuit if the city fails to enforce
the law, has a long history of combating racial, sexist and LGBT
intolerance — and notices when people lose track of that history.

Connecting the dots is difficult within the LGBT community, but not
the least of all because — as Huff and others say — the LGBT movement
is not an organic movement. Although there are extensive similar
problems faced by lesbians, gay men, bisexual people and transgender
people, the difficulty of connecting the dots only becomes more
difficult once it becomes clear that not everyone is attempting to
create the same drawing.

From defining equality and looking at who's left out, to considering
electoral politics, strong advocates of LGBT equality across the
country are picturing, thinking about and working from very different
ideas of what the LGBT movement is aimed at accomplishing.

Talking with one of the first out lesbian law professors, Rhonda
Rivera, and the first out Episcopal bishop, Gene Robinson, one gets a
glimpse into that history Huff values. Hearing from a 17-year-old
high-school senior in Idaho, Marisol Cervantes, and the director of a
program that works with homeless LGBT youth, Mark Erwin, adds further
insights, as do the voices of trans activist and law professor Dean
Spade and undocumented activist and law student Prerna Lal. Rory
O'Malley performs on Broadway but is working for marriage equality
with Broadway Impact, and Mimi Planas helps the Log Cabin Republicans
in Miami open up the pathway for more conservative voices for
equality. Finally, as his time at the helm of the Human Rights
Campaign comes to an end, Joe Solmonese shares his thoughts on what
has been accomplished — and why.

From Seattle to Miami, from Boise, Idaho, to New York City, these
activists and advocates of all stripes believe that much is happening.
Some like Spade, though, don't necessarily see what's happening as all
good — and see a dramatically different direction that would be best
for the pursuit of social justice.

WHAT IS EQUALITY?

Retired law professor Rhonda Rivera joined The Ohio State University
College of Law faculty in the late 1970s. She joined Douglas Whaley, a
prominent contracts professor who today is openly gay, on the faculty.

Looking back, she says that the attitude at the time was not much
different from the way a church group might treat a gay organist:
''Many people in the school thought, 'These are our queers. Doug and
Rhonda are our queers, and our queers are different. As long as
there's not too many of them.'''

And, though she says she didn't focus much on it at the time, the
overt and subtle discrimination was difficult — from tenure questions
to bathroom-stall scrawls.

''When I left OSU and I walked out of there for the last time, it was
the most relieving and exciting thing. I never realized how oppressed
I felt in that building. You maintain a certain facade.''

Looking to today and the changes made since, she says, ''There are
lots of gay people in lots of important places now. One of the things
we learned about being women in the law was when there was only one or
two women in the law school, they were treated not well. But as soon
as you got enough women that they could stand with each other, five or
six, maybe 10, then they were afraid to treat you badly. So, we used
to talk about getting a critical mass of women in a law school. Until
you achieve the critical mass, you can be shit upon regularly. And,
once you got the critical mass, maybe people still didn't want you
there, maybe they didn't like you, but they were afraid to do anything
about it.''

Applying those lessons to Congress, she says, ''When you look at the
people like [out gay Rep.] Barney Frank (D-Mass.), [out lesbian Rep.]
Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), I'm sure these people went through very, very
lonely times. Barney Frank, being the only open person in the 535
people in Congress, I'm sure that he has kept up a facade and that he
has battle wounds all over him — of just taking it. He knows what
people called him, he knows how people treated him.''

When HRC's Joe Solmonese leaves the nation's largest LGBT political
organization in June, he will have been there for more than seven
years. Looking at the changes over the course of the LGBT movement's
past 20 years, he says, ''The thing we don't appreciate enough is the
organizing mechanism that, in many ways, has empowered people to be
out and open about who they are.''

Specifying, he says, ''We went into the American workplace and said,
'Until we can change the laws so that LGBT people can be married and
have federal workplace protections, we'd like to engage you in a
business-based conversation about creating a safe and welcoming and
equitable experience for LGBT people.'''

He's upbeat: ''I think it's the great story of our movement that we
did that. Support for marriage equality going from 33 percent to 53
percent. Who are those people, those 20 percent? They're those people
in those settings, who work side by side with LGBT people whose views
are changed because they have now been in the company of an LGBT
person.''

But, as Solmonese knows all too well, the success to which he points
also is the success that has bred frustration in younger activists who
are demanding equality from the White House fence — to Broadway, where
Rory O'Malley performs in Book of Mormon. In his off time, though,
O'Malley was a co-founder of Broadway Impact, a group that formed to
push its support among Broadway performers and others for marriage
equality and other LGBT issues.

''I want all of this tomorrow, I'm in that camp. I don't think we
should be waiting for President Obama to evolve. I think it should
happen now,'' O'Malley says in between shows at a coffee shop in New
York City. ''But, at the same time, you have to be excited about what
has happened — and be empowered by it. I think we need to be empowered
that so much has happened in such a short period of time — and much
more remains to be done.''

WHO IS LEFT OUT?

''I think everyone has a different concept of movement,'' Prerna Lal
says. ''I think for some it may relate to a list of issues that are
pertaining to, say, the mainstream LGBT movement. I'm not sure if that
list is what I share in common or not. For me, winning the movement
means also winning rights for everyone, and that includes health care
for everyone and immigration rights for everyone who's not seen as
American or not seen as 'part of.' I think we have a long way to go.''

Lal, who describes herself as ''a queer Fiji-Indian (Pacific Islander
of South Asian descent), currently a law student at The George
Washington University,'' serves on the board of Immigration Equality
and is an intern at the National Center for Transgender Equality. She
also is ''out'' about her status as an undocumented immigrant, which
she says was ''scary at first'' — but, she adds, ''There's a growing
acceptance of me being out there.''

It also gives her insights, in small ways and big, about how being the
''other,'' even within the LGBT community, can be a problem.

''If you're dressed in a traditional Indian [dress] at a gay bar, and
you're told, 'Sorry, it's Ladies Night,' by the bouncer there who
assumes that because you're in ethnic wear, you're not gay or lesbian
or bisexual or transgender,'' she says, ''that's an issue that has to
do with our perception of 'gayness,' and how it's so white, I think,
generally. It bothers me, because I live that life.''

Huff acknowledges those issues, but puts them and similar issues — for
all oppressed groups — in the context of her early life.

''My first memory of the larger world was of the picture of Emmett
Till's face on Jet magazine,'' she says of the 14-year-old Chicago
teenager who was brutally murdered after some claimed he had flirted
with a married white woman while visiting family in Mississippi. The
September 15, 1955, issue of Jet contained graphic pictures of Till's
body after it had been pulled out of the Tallahatchie River.

''I felt the energy of my entire little town, all of the adults in my
town, whether it was at church or at school or on my street, that's
all that people talked about. It was as if they wanted to be able to
say they could keep their children safe from that ever happening
again. But they couldn't. They couldn't make the promise. So, there
was this almost tacit agreement that if they couldn't promise the
children it would never happen again, they would just promise to worry
about it happening,'' she says.

''So that is what informed my early life — and the countermanding
stories from my own personal family that were essentially tales of how
we transcended all that. Those two things happening simultaneously in
my head created an activism in me: The ideal was possible, and if we
just worked hard enough and did enough and sacrificed enough, things
would change.''

That has been the work of Huff's life. Today, talking about her work
on racial issues, on women's issues and on LGBT issues, she says,
''It's all one thing for me. Whenever I'm sitting in one particular
group, I'm always thinking about the group that's been left out of
that group. That's just the part of what's going on in the back of my
head as I speak.''

But, she says, not everyone has always done so. Talking about the
late-1980s, she says the groups that now make up the ''LGBT movement''
were still very segmented.

''There were gay men over here, bisexuals and transgender people
virtually didn't exist … in the scheme of things, and then there were
lesbians,'' she says. Then, somewhat a function of the AIDS crisis she
says, ''What happened is, we looked around, and the lesbian
organizations dissolved, and we were left with this scenario of
'LGBT.'

''But none of the work had been done, really, to address the misogyny
among men, or the racism among whites, or the tendency to cluster and
be almost ghetto-like among minorities, or the tendency to let white
people lead whenever there was a choice, or the invisibility of
bisexuals. None of that work had been done. But there we were, talking
'LGBT.'''

Bishop Gene Robinson adds that, within the LGBT community, work also
is needed to address religious issues.

''It's really interesting having a foot in both communities — the
religious community and the LGBT community. The fact of the matter is,
95 percent — and that's my figure, not based on anything but me and my
own perceptions — 95 percent of the discrimination that we experience
is the result of religion. Even nonreligious people use what they have
soaked up in the culture of these religious views,'' he says.

As with education and work being done on race issues and sexism,
Robinson says that, within the religious communities, change is
happening. ''I often say the church that you left may not be the
church that's there now. If you're out of a denomination that is just
hopelessly backwards on this issue, there are other places. There are
places where you'll be welcome and where you can be who you are and be
affirmed.''

For some, though, the work to be done is far more fundamental than
just a matter of education or being more inclusive of the ''others.''

''I should be straightforward that I don't usually use the term 'LGBT
equality' because that term has come to really centrally indicate
legal equality as a focus and goal of a certain strain of LGBT
activism,'' Seattle University law professor Dean Spade, a trans
activist, says. ''And a lot of my work is about critiquing the
centering of just trying to get antidiscrimination laws, hate-crimes
laws, marriage and military inclusion.''

He looks at the path forward very differently from, for example, HRC's
Solmonese.

''My work has been focused on centering racial and economic justice,
and asking less what the law says about lesbian and gay and bi and
trans people and more how legal systems are impacting us and how we
can confront that,'' Spade says. ''So, a lot of my work has been about
shifting the focus from marriage, military, hate crimes,
antidiscrimination laws to looking at how criminal systems,
immigration systems, social service and social welfare systems impact
queer and trans people who are highly vulnerable to different forms of
violence, poverty, homelessness, immigration enforcement and
criminalization.''

Robinson, perhaps unsurprisingly, echoes a similar social justice
frame in talking about his work with the church and throughout the
country. In his work with St. Thomas's Parish Episcopal Church in
D.C., he and the church plan to begin a ''center for nonviolent
conversation,'' aimed at ''changing the nature and tone of the debate
in Washington'' — ''not just tolerant, but respectful, and profoundly
serious about loving your neighbor as yourself.''

Robinson, like Spade, is not averse to calling out the shortcomings of
those involved in advancing LGBT equality, and he squarely puts
forward his views on the failure of the gay and lesbian world to
engage fully on gender-identity issues.

''I also think the gay and lesbian community has a huge learning curve
ahead for it,'' Robinson says. ''In my experience, though we let the
'LGBT' roll of our tongues pretty easily, for the most part the gay
and lesbian community is really ignorant about this incredible
diversity of conditions that exist under the umbrella called
transgender. What the transgender issue does is to say: This is way
more fluid than anyone has thought before.''

Of LGBT organizations' efforts to advance trans issues, he says
bluntly, ''It's like learning to not sound racist without changing
your views. I think we have gotten a lot smarter about our language
and so on to include trans people, but I don't see a lot of hard work
going on that is beyond lip service.''

Lal agrees — and points outside the LGBT community as well.

''We're definitely more behind on the trans issues in society than we
are on the LGB issues,'' she says. ''We still don't see gender as
something that's a continuum, or we don't see it as something that's
not fixed. It may have to do with our acceptance of women in general
or femininity. We disparage women, we disparage trans people in some
of the same ways because we are disparaging someone's right to be
masculine or feminine.

''We're at a place when I think we can focus our efforts more on 'T'
issues, which I'm trying to do personally myself.''

At the Ruth Ellis Center, Detroit's program for LGBTQ homeless youth,
program director Mark Erwin points to national attention on marriage
equality as ''incredibly important,'' but says that ''there are other
things, too, that we need to recognize as happening on a national
level.''

Of the population that he works with, he notes, ''We know, of the 1.7
million homeless and runaway youth in the United States, up to 40
percent identify as LGBTQ. That is a hugely disproportionate number.''

States away, 17-year-old Marisol Cervantes is still in high school,
but is likewise working on youth issues.

''I started coming to the planning meetings,'' she says of the youth
nights held by the Idaho Safe Schools Coalition that began her
involvement in LGBT issues. ''I started volunteering all the time, and
then eventually I started writing workshops and going to conferences
and presenting the workshops I wrote. Now, I'm investing my time and
energy in creating new leaders for the organization.''

Erwin celebrates that impact — the differences that he says can happen
to advance equality once LGBTQ youth have an affirming environment.

''When you have an environment, really great things can happen for
young people,'' he says. ''And we see that all the time at the Ruth
Ellis Center. People tell us, 'We can't believe the impact that your
young people have.' They literally wrote the anti-bullying policy for
the Detroit Public School System. And we get questions: 'How are
homeless youth able to write this policy?' And our answer is: 'Because
they're the ones directly affected by it.'''

O'Malley, the Broadway Impact co-founder, is strident in his activism
— but sees a distinction between work for marriage equality or trans
issues or LGBTQ homelessness and partisan political issues.

''There's a difference between knocking on doors for Barack Obama and
getting arrested for the people of Sudan,'' referencing George
Clooney, who participated in both a protest against Sudanese President
Omar al-Bashir that led to Clooney's arrest and the Los Angeles
premiere of 8, Dustin Lance Black's play about the Proposition 8
trial. ''If you keep the candidates out of it, I don't think that
people have a problem with it. Obviously, I have my own political
views, in terms of candidates that I would support, but I think
there's a way to separate that. And I think it's important to separate
it because it is — it should be — a bipartisan issue because this is
civil rights.''

WHAT ABOUT POLITICS?

And yet, the attention in 2012, inevitably, turns to partisan politics.

HRC's Solmonese, who serves as a co-chair of President Obama's
re-election campaign, says, ''I think we're in a place that none of us
imagined that we would be a decade ago, but I think we're at a
significant crossroads now. I think we have the potential to continue
on this trajectory or to come to a grinding halt — depending on what
happens in November.

''I hope that Barack Obama gets re-elected, but I think it's going to
be more difficult than people think.''

O'Malley sees the tension between pushing Obama to do more and pushing
for his re-election, a constant issue throughout Obama's presidency,
as a good thing — and necessary: ''With Obama, it is a healthy thing
that the gay community has been dissatisfied with him for his three
years — even though he's the most pro-LGBT president we've ever had.
However, it is absolutely vital that no one is satisfied, and I am
very proud that we have a community that is not satisfied with just
what we're getting. We need to fight for every single inch of it.''

Gay Republicans are familiar with needing to fight for every single
inch, both within the LGBT world and the GOP world.

''If you're visibly gay among the Republicans and visibly Republican
among the gays, you start to change minds,'' Miami Log Cabin
Republican co-chair Mimi Planas says from Florida. ''What we've also
been able to accomplish is go ahead and bring out the LGBT community
that do have Republican principles but were afraid to show them out of
fear of being judged among the Democrats. Because, if you're gay, you
better be Democrat. That's the myth.''

But for others, like her, who she says care more about economic issues
or foreign policy, Log Cabin Republicans are there. ''They just don't
believe in the Democratic party.'' And now, with HRC's early
endorsement of Obama — which came in 2010 before a single Republican
primary — Planas is incredulous.

''There are many groups out there that claim to be nonpartisan in the
LGBT community, but they're not,'' she says. ''When I heard that HRC
declared their support for President Obama without us even having the
first debate in the primary, it was very disappointing because they
didn't even care to try to fool us anymore. They just blatantly said,
'Fuck it, we're going to support the Democratic candidate. Period.'
Because they're one-issue organizations. What about the rest of
everybody else's lives? You have gays and lesbians that own their own
business, you have gays and lesbians that serve in the military, you
have gays and lesbians the current economy is impacting right now. And
what they don't understand is that gays and lesbians care about that,
too.''

But it's not just the Republicans criticizing this approach. Spade,
the law professor and trans activist, makes a similar criticism from
the opposite direction. ''That's what's wrong with a political
strategy that centers legislative wins, wins in courtrooms and wins in
the corporate media, because there's only certain kinds of people who
can be portrayed as 'deserving' justice in those frames,'' he says.
''And so you end up creating a very narrow set of demands that only
will provide relief, if to anybody, to the people who are not the
least vulnerable.

''And, I think even more than that, most of the wins are just pure
window dressing.''

A DIFFERENT WAY?

As the media focused early this week on Vice President Joseph Biden's
comments about marriage equality, and attention turned to Obama's own
now-''evolved'' position on the question and the marriage amendment
vote in North Carolina, it again became clear how quickly marriage
equality can suck up all the oxygen in the room.

Rivera, the retired professor, says, ''I'm surprised that so many
people think marriage is so important. I would have thought – and I
still do think – that [the Employment Non-Discrimination Act] would
be, in my estimation, a lot more important than almost anything I can
think of.

''Being a lawyer, I want people to be able have jobs without getting
fired because they're queer. And so the fact that ENDA hasn't passed,
and yet, here we are, we already have states having marriage, I think
is very surprising,'' she says. ''Evan Wolfson, from Lambda [Legal],
really was the first person that I knew who pushed for marriage. I can
remember him talking and thinking, 'Oh yeah, that'll be the day.'''

But, as Rivera says, ''Here we are.''

Lal questions the priority that marriage has been given as well.

''I support marriage equality. I think you should have the right to
arrange your family relations however you want to arrange them. But I
also think focusing on it so much does [push] us away from other
options,'' she says over coffee in D.C. ''I think marriage — maybe
it's my age, but I don't think it affects me in the same manner as
other things, like housing, health care, employment discrimination
would affect me. That's why I'm a little — 'upset' is probably not the
right word — disappointed, I think, by the focus on it.''

It is not only marriage that is front and center in critiques of the
modern LGBT movement. There also is the question of race.

Huff questions whether the theme, oft repeated, that the black
community has a problem with gay people, is at all fair. Looking at
history, she points to support at LGBT marches in D.C. in the late
'80s and early '90s, saying that the diversity on the stage was
constant and that black leaders, from Jesse Jackson to District
officials, were present to support the march. Today, even, she notes,
''You can't find another cluster in Congress that's more supportive of
LGBT rights than the Congressional Black Caucus. The progressives,
yeah, but many of the black folks belong to that.''

Of the questions about how to move forward to address the perception
that blacks and gays don't get along, Huff posits a theory of why it
hasn't changed.

''This is my theory, and I'm old, so I can have all the theories I
want. I think it allows black people the excuse of staying in the
closet … and it allows white people to keep the status quo of leading
the pack and making all the decisions. It leaves us in that same
spinning circle, not addressing racism, not addressing the leadership
issues, and it gives both sides tacit approval to do that.''

For Spade, change must go much further to make a real impact on the
most vulnerable people.

''When I look at the history of the United States and I look more
broadly around the world, significant social change that really gets
at the root causes of harms and maldistributions occurs when the
strategy is mass-mobilization and when huge numbers of people who are
affected by something are standing up against it and will not stop
until it changes. And it becomes impossible for the condition to be
the same,'' he says. ''Significant social change does not happen
through asking elites to change things. That hasn't tended to work out
for the people who are the most vulnerable.''

As an example, he takes aim at an early accomplishment for LGBT rights
claimed by the Obama administration and people like HRC's Solmonese.

''The obvious example that has been heavily critiqued in queer and
trans communities is the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd [Jr. Hate
Crimes Prevention] Act. A lot of people-of-color-centered queer and
trans organizations stood up and said, 'We don't want this. This
actually does nothing for our communities. This does nothing to
prevent our deaths. It just adds more resources to law enforcement,
which is one of the main perpetrators if not the central perpetrator
of violence against our communities,'' he explains. ''If we wanted to
prevent the death of trans women who are being killed every month
around the U.S., we would make sure they had housing or we would make
sure they had a safe way to work or we would decriminalize
prostitution so it wouldn't be as dangerous for them to do that work
if that's what they're doing.''

HOW DOES IT END?

In finding those frames, making those adjustments and reaching those
goals, the question at some point turns to a look past the struggle.
Gene Robinson, hopeful about the future, asks a question that came up
a few times in discussions about the LGBT movement: ''Will we still be
a tribe after equality?''

He answers his own question: ''I would like to think yes, but I think
that's still to be determined. I think it will matter about how we see
ourselves. The greatest gift that comes from being gay, for me, is
that it gives me the tiniest window into what it's like to be black or
in a wheelchair or to be a woman and so on. Because, other than that
one trait about me, I fall into the oppressor status on all of the
other 'isms.' So, how will it effect the gay community if we're no
longer discriminated against?''

Rivera echoes Robinson, talking about her conversion to Judaism as an adult.

''Being a Jew is being in a community. There are people who are just
like you, who have certain holidays and things the same. One could
argue that Judaism without community is not Judaism. Well, the gay and
lesbian community has a distinction, and we have part of it because we
are, quote, oppressed,'' she says. ''Will it be that when we're,
quote, no longer legally oppressed, that we really have no community?
I think that would be sad — and I think the country would be less
because of it.''

Robinson goes further down that path: ''I would like to see a world in
which people of color understood their connection to women and women
understood their connection to LGBT people, and so on. If we can see
our own liberation connected to the liberation of everyone,'' he says
of LGBT people, ''then we will have really done something.''

Cervantes has both optimism and hope at 17 and deep in the heart of
what politicians like to call ''real'' America.

''I think Idaho has found a resource, and that resource is the coming
generation,'' she says with a smile on her face. ''Take 10 years,
we'll have activists all over the place. It's a force to be reckoned
with. … [R]egardless of who wants it or not, change is going to
happen. It's going to be huge.''

Planas, the Log Cabin co-chair, sees her circumstances as remarkably
similar: ''I know I'm going against the grain, and I know that it's
difficult what we're doing. I'm no fool. But to see the look in
people's eyes when they're relieved that they're not the only ones who
really don't want to be Democrats because they're gay – that is a big
deal for me. Awareness is educating.''

Critics from the left see progress, too.

''We've come a long way in 10 years,'' Lal says, pointing to her own
experience. ''Visibility … has led to this idea that the time has
come. And that's really helping the legal victories along. If you
read, 20 years ago, Bowers v. Hardwick [the 1986 Supreme Court case
upholding sodomy laws as constitutional], you're like, 'Really? Are
you really trying to say that?' And, today, it's not acceptable.''

For Spade, even as he criticizes groups like HRC and other mainstream
LGBT organizations as focused on ''a white-centered,
upper-middle-class-centered gay and lesbian rights politics,'' he
says, ''[S]ometimes we can find ways to collaborate. … [A] lot of us
are consistently trying to collaborate with people there and have
deeper relationships with people inside those organizations and
respect them as fellow travelers.

''It's not about setting up enemy camps. It's just about really trying
to discern and evaluate what works and what doesn't work, and,
whenever we can, trying to mobilize the larger gay and lesbian rights
organizations to stand up and speak out about things like CeCe
[McDonald]'s trial [in which the trans woman was accused of murder
after defending herself with a pair of scissors, leading to the death
of her presumed attacker] or to use their muscle if they're willing
to, which is uneven, on various issues.

''At the same time, having a realistic recognition that the way
they're structured, and who they're accountable to in terms of
wealthy, white donors and foundations, it's unlikely that they're
going to have an about face.''

Solmonese defends the formal, legal equality that he sees coming in
the near future as being important and based upon a public education
that he sees as having been made in recent decades.

''When we do get about changing the laws in a way that brings us full
equality — whether that is in terms of our protection and being free
from discrimination or whether that is our families under the guise of
marriage equality — when those changes come about, I think we will be
a long way towards being finished … because we've laid such an
incredibly strong foundation that manifests itself in the public
opinion of the American people.''

''Over a five-year period,'' Solmonese says, there will be a series of
successes on the legislative and judicial front to ensure marriage
equality and employment and housing nondiscrimination. ''I think we're
close to that window where all of a sudden things fall into place. And
I think we're a lot closer to finished at the end of that period than
most of the other movements for social change in this country have
been.''

O'Malley looks at the future and imagines what that end would look like.

''I see it as being a quiet thing. There's a Kander and Ebb song
called 'A Quiet Thing,' saying that love is quiet,'' he says. ''It's
not the big, crazy fireworks; it's a quiet thing when you're really in
love with somebody.''

''It's not going to be the parades,'' he says of reaching a point
where LGBT people are treated equally. ''There will be a day of that,
but real equality is just going to be when we're able to take down the
signs and just be who we are and it's not going to be an issue.''

Rivera returns to the importance, in her mind, of community: ''I'm not
sure that we'll ever be totally — even in spite of what the law may
say — totally, in many people's minds, equal. And I have mixed
feelings about that. Maybe it would be good to keep some sense of
community.''

Huff sums up the path forward by reference to an African word:
Sankofa. ''The image of 'Sankofa' is of a bird flying forward but
looking backward,'' she says. ''The idea of 'Sankofa' is that we look
back with humility and honesty so that we can go forward with
integrity.

''There's something really wonderful about looking back for the sheer
intellectual, honest rediscovery of our past so that we can move
forward with integrity.''

Moving forward, as these voices show, is more complex in many people's
minds than the legal and legislative equality that often attracts
newspaper headlines and makes the nightly news.

From making lives safer for young people to increasing the acceptance
of LGBT people across the political spectrum, there is much that
remains in changing attitudes and actions of non-LGBT people. At the
same time, efforts to educate gays and lesbians about transgender
issues and to address racial and religious issues within the LGBT
community show that internal work remains as well.

It could be that the right questions aren't even being asked – let
alone answered – in order to ensure that those most vulnerable people
in the LGBT community will be helped by changes being advanced.

Or, it could be that equality is almost here.


Copyright ©2012 · Jansi, LLC.

http://www.metroweekly.com/feature/?ak=7335&pagenumber=all