One Quiet Voice

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.