When I Realized Gay Rights Was a Major Civil Rights Issue

I was recently interviewed for an article in Options, a local BGLT oriented magazine. I was holding forth about how we at the First Unitarian Church were not only welcoming but were aggressively involved in the work for marriage equality in our state.

The interviewer asked how it was that I’d become an BGLTQQI ally.

I was flummoxed.  Didn’t have an answer.

I guess it was like a frog in water gradually boiled. I was raised in a homophobic household. Who wasn’t may be the more interesting question. At first the social issues within the milieu in which I lived were the Vietnam war and race. I think it would have been very hard to not be concerned about racial equality in that time. And war gave everything some urgency. And right on all these things it was equally hard to ignore women’s issues. Noticing how women were mistreated by custom, and, well, by me and most everyone I knew was so close to home, too close to home. I was vulnerable to challenge. And, so, well primed by thinking about war and peace, about race and about women, when issues of gay rights began to be raised, it made simple sense to me.

However, if there had to be a moment where I moved from being gay positive to a more activist stance, it would have to be on this day in 1978, when San Francisco’s mayor George Moscone and the city’s first openly gay city supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated by former supervisor Dan White.

I was from that night radicalized.

I’m sorry, so sorry, it had to be a murder to show me how important this was.

And sometimes that’s what it takes.

Thank you, Harvey, for your life.

We remember you and your work.

And the day is near…