I just recently watched the film, “Lee Daniels’ The Butler”
which was a fascinating chronicle of the Civil Rights Movement in a very
personal manner. It delved into the
complexities of racial issues and intimately examined the ways in which
different generations of both blacks and whites perceived and reacted to their
circumstances.
I was very touched by the film and thought about it extensively
after seeing it. It reminded me of my
own journey as a gay woman and how things have so changed and evolved for the
gay community.
I figured out that I was gay in the late 1980’s. I remember that the realization was very
liberating for me. Things suddenly made
sense where they didn’t before. I
finally had an identity. Very different
from being black, I suppose. When you
are black you know it very early on.
Your skin and the world tells you so.
You have an identity before you are even ready for one.
Not that I was ready for my new found identity. As a high school and college student, I knew
no one else who was gay. I had to go to
the library to find out what this meant and to find out what my life would be
like. What I read was not exactly encouraging. AIDS had now become synonymous with the gay
community and people equated homosexuality with death. Much of what I read said that my family would
likely abandon me for my perversity. I
would not have children, that I could not have children. I might want to kill myself and should that
happen, there was an 800 number for me to call.
In retrospect, I see the miracle in that. I was willing to take on all that challenge
and difficulty for one simple thing.
Love. Not that I would find
it. Not that I deserved it. Not that it even existed. But that its possibility belonged to me. That love was something real and not just one
of society’s constructs.
Times soon changed and people began to relax. People became
educated and being gay didn’t mean you would die of AIDS. In the mid 90’s during the Clinton years, the
new attitude was Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
It was okay to be gay, so long as you didn’t talk about it. This mirrored my own experience with my
family. I was now out to them and they
loved me anyway, as in the deepest place in my heart, I knew they would. But God forbid we talk about it. And everyone was so easy going about my
gayness, in part, because I never mentioned it.
And it helped that my partner was a normal woman, a nice, pretty girl
who wore make-up and skirts…not a “bull dyke” who looked like a man and wore
freedom rings.
So what does my life have anything to do with the movie, “The
Butler?” I guess I feel like I was The
Butler in some way. I was not aggressive
about myself. I didn’t get in peoples’
faces. I just worked hard and loved hard
and tried to set a good example of who I was.
Could I or should I have been
more aggressive…maybe. Every time I
tried, I got pushed back.
Society has moved much faster on the issue of gay marriage
and gay rights than they ever did on Civil Rights. That is shameful. But I do understand the way things evolve…from
the improbable to the probable. From the
insane to the sane. From the outside to
the inside.
And in so many ways the Gay Rights Movement mirrors the
Civil Rights Movement in the way that the people involved were both passive and
aggressive, apprehensive and relentless, so sure and unsure…just wanting to do
the best for their community but just not knowing how. But ultimately, both movements spoke up and spoke
out and in both quiet and loud ways…created change.
I put so much of my thoughts on every community of people…blacks,
whites, gays, straights, Christians, Catholics, Muslims and Athleists. Native Americans and European Americans and
Mexican Americans. The poor and the rich
and the middle class. We all have a
story and a history and an evolution.
And each of our stories and each of our histories make it all more wonderfully
brilliant. We all have a quiet voice that speaks loud.
