_________________
It was a
message I found a little screwy, until I went onto a Facebook page entitled “Boicot
contra Pedro Julio Serrano por sus comentarios de odio hacia cristianos;” the film-equivalent of the page would
be that scene in The Shining when Jack Nicholson….
…you
remember it, right?
The message
we were receiving, last night, was that we were being brave, incredibly brave,
for standing up and demanding our rights and refusing to be second-class
citizens. What I was thinking, however, was what an incredibly boring group of
people we were.
Confession—I
have so often wished I had the life that some fundamentalist Christians think I
have. Because, wow—what fun that could be: going from the orgy to the
ecstasy-fueled rave to the drug-frenzied satanic rituals with the inverted crosses
and the squealing newborn about to be sacrificed on the altar! Whee!
Instead
it’s:
Marc: Hey,
have you seen the garlic press?
Raf: Many
times!
Marc: Very
funny—now where the hell is that press?
Raf: How
should I know? You washed it.
Marc:
Dammit, do you want to eat or not?
All
right—this is a rather low example of domestic life, but that’s the point. And
so I found myself looking, last night, at the six gay and lesbian couples who
had assembled in the law offices of LGBT activist Ada
Conde and thinking how ordinary we all were: nobody was in drag, the whips
and chains had decently been left at home, and there wasn’t a strand of purple
hair. It was as lurid as a Tupperware party.
Not that
there weren’t some serious people: two lawyers from Lambda Legal had flown in from New York,
and Lambda Legal, about whom I’ve read for years, is major. Here’s what their
website says:
With the
generous support of thousands of friends around the country, what began in 1973
as a couple of volunteers working out of a spare room in a supporter’s
apartment has now grown to an expert staff of more than 80 in five offices
around the country—New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles.
What didn’t
I know? Well, the organization’s bylaws were borrowed from the Puerto Rico Legal
Defense and Education Fund. Nor did I know—though I may have forgotten
it—that the organization had to fight for its very existence. Here’s the site
again:
A panel of
New York judges turned down our application to be a nonprofit organization
because, in their view, our mission was "neither benevolent nor
charitable." With pro bono help, Thom appealed to New York’s highest court,
which finally allowed Lambda Legal to exist as a nonprofit organization.
Since then,
it’s easier to list what they haven’t done than what they have, since short of
bringing down DOMA
and Proposition
8, they’ve done it all.
In addition
to the two lawyers from Lambda, we were joined by a constitutional lawyer from
the University
of Puerto Rico School of Law. Then, two more lawyers came in, from the
staff of the president of the senate, Eduardo Bhatia. ‘It’s
come at last,’ I thought, ‘I finally have a legal team….’
We were
there to join the lawsuit brought by Conde to force the Commonwealth of Puerto
Rico to recognize her marriage to her wife. And by doing so, we would become
the first state / territory in the United
States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Why? Because for reasons
I’ve never understood, Puerto Rico belongs to the First Circuit, which lives in
Boston and comprises the New England states, all of which have sensibly adopted
same-sex marriage. So it’s up to Puerto Rico to carry the torch.
And Puerto
Rico, as Pedro Julio
reminded us, has every reason to be proud: we are by no means backward in
legislation regarding employment and hate crimes, and most of the work has been
done by volunteers who have gotten out there and shouted.
And Pedro
Julio should know, since he’s the founder, in Puerto Rico, of Puerto Rico para tod@s and the
communications manager for the National
Gay and Lesbian Task Force, in New York City. So Pedro Julio has a foot in
both places; this weekend, he’s on the island.
“What was
that thing about the death threat,” I asked Raf after the meeting. I remembered
vaguely that somebody had tweeted a death threat to Pedro Julio, and that they
had found the guy. But whatever happened to the guy?
Thanks to
Google, I
can tell you: Pedro Julio had intended to go to the march celebrating the Día
Internacional contra la Homofobia y Transfobia, when some guy—whose name I know, but why
give it?—tweeted that Pedro Julio could end up like some guys had in the Boston
Marathon. The FBI found the guy, he was tried in federal court and sentenced to
three years in prison, three years probation, and three years of being
Twitterless.
In fact,
Pedro Julio had warned
the public, in January of last year, that he had been receiving more death
threats:
“Durante
mis más de 15 años de activismo, he recibido innumerables amenazas de muerte,
pero nunca en la cantidad y la hostilidad de los últimos días".
(“In
over 15 years of activism, I have received innumerable death threats, but never
in the quantity and level of hostility as in recent days.”)
‘There
are levels of “out,”’ I thought, ‘which is funny, since I thought I was
pretty—sorry about this—far out. But I’m a piker next to Pedro Julio or Ada….’
And
one of the things about being out is that it gets normal after a while. A man I
know was once asked by his new boss, “and what’s your wife’s name?” The boss
was trying to prep for the Christmas party.
“John,”
said my friend, who is also named John.
“That
makes it easy,” said the boss.
This
is the stuff we do every day, until it becomes no big deal. So it’s easy to
forget how very, very important, as well as difficult, being out can be.
“I
think I was put on this earth to fight this fight,” said Yolanda, meaning the
fight of the night: getting Puerto Rico to recognize same-sex marriage. The
whole room inhaled.
“She’s
been in tears four times this evening,” remarked Ada, “and now, it’s five.”
The
night had started being somewhat routine: a meeting to go to, some people to
meet, then bus back home and hit the sack. But it changed with Yolanda’s
remark.
‘It is
a big deal,’ I thought. ‘And there’s a reason why we drive the fundamentalists
nuts, why Pedro Julio has two pages boycotting him on Facebook: we are a threat.
What we’re proposing is fundamental, too. There is nothing more fundamental
than the right to declare who your husband or wife will be, and have that
decision respected by the state.’
I looked
around the room and began to wonder—how much extra struggle had it taken each
of us, and each couple, to realize that she or he was gay, to embrace it, to
announce it to family and friends, to bosses and—now—to the public at large?
In the week
of my mother’s death, I was sitting on a miraculously beautiful spring twilight
talking with my brother John.
“You’ve had
it so much harder than either Eric or I did,” he said. He meant coming out,
struggling with the inner-demon of the cello, facing down my father over my
being gay, moving to a foreign-in-a-domestic-sense land, learning a new
language, being jobless, losing my mind, and providing the way out for my
mother, when she wanted to die. So I thought about all that.
“You may be
right,” I told him.
But it was
also worth it….
