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: California broke my heart today
We come from small towns in the fly-over states of the Midwest and the Great Plains. We come to California. We come here to get away from the bigotry that we grow up with in the hopes of finding a safe place to live out our lives with dignity. We come here because we don’t want to live with the constant fear that someone, perhaps even in our own families, will target us for harassment and violence. We come to California.
I’ve been dreaming of California for as long as I can remember. At the age of 16, I was a model student, an OK athlete, president of my high school class and a pretty good farmhand. But on the inside, I was a mess. Damn, I was a good actor though. No one knew what lay beneath my surface. No one knew, for instance, that I once secretly packed a suitcase and slipped it into the trunk of my car and, after telling my parents I was just going out for the night, headed my car West – to California. I drove for a couple of hours across the state of Illinois, but thankfully I had a flash of sanity and turned back. I pulled into the driveway just in time for curfew. My parents never knew a thing.
When I did finally come to California on a scholarship to USC, I felt my life had been saved. I made it. It was going to be OK. It took a couple of more years for me to be confident enough to be honest and open with people about my sexual orientation. But it was fine. None of my friends quit me after I told them. California became my home.
Last night, I began the night celebrating. At 8pm, after the media outlets began to call the election for Barack Obama, I headed down to one of the gay bars in Midtown where an election night party was packed and overflowing with cheering, happy people. Giant television screens showed the election returns. The crowd hushed as Obama took the stage to speak in Chicago. Several cheers erupted in the bar during the speech, but the biggest cheer came when Obama did something that no president-elect has ever done in a victory speech – he mentioned gay people:
"It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and always will be, the United States of America."
You have no idea what it means to a marginalized population to be explicitly included like that. Obama’s been mentioning gays and lesbians all along in his campaign speeches, but this was his victory speech not a campaign speech. He could’ve easily left us out, but he didn’t. Unfortunately, in the end, California left us out.
After the speech, the election results continued to roll in. People around me in the bar began to notice that Proposition 8, a proposition that explicitly stated that it *eliminates* the right of same-sex couples to marry, looked like it was going to pass. I was no longer in the mood to celebrate. I stepped out of the bar and headed home.
Several times throughout the night last night, I woke up and checked the election results. The margin narrowed, but the Yes on 8 votes continued to outnumber the No on 8 votes. At 6am this morning, with 94% of the votes counted, even a political theorist like me could see that 6% of the votes were not going to change the trend. And I sobbed. I sobbed like that messy 16-year-old me used to do when no one was looking. In 1992, I came to California. It was a dream come true. Today, so many years later, California broke my heart.
We come from small towns in the fly-over states of the Midwest and the Great Plains. We come to California. We come here to get away from the bigotry that we grow up with in the hopes of finding a safe place to live out our lives with dignity. We come here because we don’t want to live with the constant fear that someone, perhaps even in our own families, will target us for harassment and violence. We come to California.
I’ve been dreaming of California for as long as I can remember. At the age of 16, I was a model student, an OK athlete, president of my high school class and a pretty good farmhand. But on the inside, I was a mess. Damn, I was a good actor though. No one knew what lay beneath my surface. No one knew, for instance, that I once secretly packed a suitcase and slipped it into the trunk of my car and, after telling my parents I was just going out for the night, headed my car West – to California. I drove for a couple of hours across the state of Illinois, but thankfully I had a flash of sanity and turned back. I pulled into the driveway just in time for curfew. My parents never knew a thing.
When I did finally come to California on a scholarship to USC, I felt my life had been saved. I made it. It was going to be OK. It took a couple of more years for me to be confident enough to be honest and open with people about my sexual orientation. But it was fine. None of my friends quit me after I told them. California became my home.
Last night, I began the night celebrating. At 8pm, after the media outlets began to call the election for Barack Obama, I headed down to one of the gay bars in Midtown where an election night party was packed and overflowing with cheering, happy people. Giant television screens showed the election returns. The crowd hushed as Obama took the stage to speak in Chicago. Several cheers erupted in the bar during the speech, but the biggest cheer came when Obama did something that no president-elect has ever done in a victory speech – he mentioned gay people:
"It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and always will be, the United States of America."
You have no idea what it means to a marginalized population to be explicitly included like that. Obama’s been mentioning gays and lesbians all along in his campaign speeches, but this was his victory speech not a campaign speech. He could’ve easily left us out, but he didn’t. Unfortunately, in the end, California left us out.
After the speech, the election results continued to roll in. People around me in the bar began to notice that Proposition 8, a proposition that explicitly stated that it *eliminates* the right of same-sex couples to marry, looked like it was going to pass. I was no longer in the mood to celebrate. I stepped out of the bar and headed home.
Several times throughout the night last night, I woke up and checked the election results. The margin narrowed, but the Yes on 8 votes continued to outnumber the No on 8 votes. At 6am this morning, with 94% of the votes counted, even a political theorist like me could see that 6% of the votes were not going to change the trend. And I sobbed. I sobbed like that messy 16-year-old me used to do when no one was looking. In 1992, I came to California. It was a dream come true. Today, so many years later, California broke my heart.
Current Mood: inconsolable
optimistic
pissed off
tired