Bay Windows - December 30, 2004
Susan Ryan-Vollmar

A lesbian was elected sheriff of Dallas County, Texas. The city council of Topeka, Kansas enacted an employment nondiscrimination ordinance protecting lesbian and gay municipal workers. Five cities and counties, including Austin, Texas, passed nondiscrimination ordinances based on gender identity. Massachusetts voters returned every lawmaker who voted in favor of gay marriage rights to office and replaced one who didn't with an openly gay man. The third circuit court of appeals struck down the Solomon Amendment, which let Congress withhold federal funds from universities that prohibit the military from recruiting on campus because the ban on openly lesbian or gay personnel conflicts with school antidiscrimination policies.

In May, same-sex couples in Massachusetts began marrying. Beginning in February, just after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that only full marriage rights would meet the requirements of its historic November 2003 ruling, mayors and town clerks around the country took part in massive acts of civil disobedience by marrying thousands of same-sex couples. State supreme courts in California and Oregon are now debating whether or not to let those marriages stand. Meanwhile, governors in two other states, New Jersey and Maine, signed domestic partnership legislation into law giving lesbian and gay couples some of the rights of marriage. Even the president was forced to concede, just weeks before the November election, that "states ought to be able to have the right to pass laws that enable people [gay couples] to you know, be able to have rights, like others."

Something interesting is happening. Essentially, the entire country is engaged in a complex, emotional, and deeply personal debate about our lives. Just four years ago, it would have been unthinkable for the Democratic presidential nominee to bring up the example of Mary Cheney in answer to a question about whether or not homosexuality is innate. Indeed, the very question would have seemed shockingly out of place in a presidential debate. Yet both events occurred this year. And last month, when Cheryl Jacques was forced to resign as executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, the New York Times reported on the political fallout on page one.

This is so unlike anything that's happened in the 35-year history of the gay civil rights movement, that it's hard to understand what it all means. The last time the GLBT community was gripped by something as all consuming as the battle over marriage equality was during the 1980s. That was when AIDS systematically decimated a generation of gay men. If you didn't live through that time, it's almost impossible to conjure now. Everyone knew someone who was dying. Or someone who had died. And yet you really would not have known this was happening to listen the president, who waited until 1986, by which time 24,669 people had died of AIDS before he thought it important enough to mention. You would not have known it to read mainstream newspapers, whose coverage of the plague was scandalously incomplete. And you would not have known it to turn on the television or the radio because we didn't exist in the larger fabric of American life.

Today, thanks in no small part to the events of 2004, GLBT people are in a place never seen before. We aren't just part of the national conversation - we are the conversation.

041230
BY041205

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