Shame Redux

So sundry official gay organizations have their knickers in a knot because the Olson/Boies legal challenge to anti-gay marriage laws appears, in their august considerations, premature and incautious. Allow me to be blunt ... screw 'em. You guys blew it; you are the ones who put on the ridiculously weak campaign that lost us an election that we should have won. So your moral high dudgeon is pitiful. You pissed away the initiative, and everything that is going on is ahead of you.

I like the Olson/Boies challenge because it blasts the issue into a new zone. He who does not compete always loses. These guys stepped up and decided to compete. They represent two gay couples who have the right to sue in federal court for their rights. Did our fattened bureaucrats .... I mean the ones who lost the Prop 8 campaign ... did they take into account that Americans have the right to sue for their rights? Are they telling two couples that they should shut up?

Disgusting.

Whenever I hear people tell gay people that we should be cautious, that we should wait, that the time is not opportune, that gay people should shut up, it turns my stomach. The time was not opportune when I came out of the closet publicly and joined gay liberation as a 19-year-old in 1972. Everybody told me that. The time was not opportune when we won civil rights victories in the 70s, and then had to fight the vicious bigotry of Anita Bryant, who is the moral precursor of the pretend-to-be-nice fulminating, pustulant, hate-filled bigots who bankrolled the campaign against our rights last fall. The time was not opportune when Gavin Newsom supported us and raised the gay marriage issue to another level.

The time is never opportune for gay rights. But we have marched forward by ignoring the wagging fingers and knocking knees. Now the cowards are "our leaders". I say screw 'em. And I don't mean in that "nice, spanky way".

That major gay organizations discourage this bold step only proves how much they belong in the trash can of history.

Bravo to boldness. Bravo to the courageous couples who engaged Olson/Boies. Bravo to anyone who fights for our rights. Bravo to being open and out and forward and uncompromising.

Photo by Arod, recently, of the window of a muscle supplement store on Market a block and a half from Castro.