If you are gay, you are my brother.

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

If you are lesbian, you are my sister.  If you are transgendered, then you are my brother or sister depending on what X or Y you prefer to identify with, or my sibling human.

It really is just that simple.  This is above and beyond your partisanship.  If you are a Log Cabin Republican, I embrace you.  If you are an A List gay, and the HRC is your bread and butter, I might disagree with you and your tactics, I might even call you craven, but I embrace you nonetheless.

And, please, forget whatever else I have maybe said in the distant (or not so distant, I evolve quickly in blog-time) past.  Because, to find something different in anything I have said, you would have to reach back, years in time.  Or maybe just A year.  Hah.  Like I said, we evolve quickly in blog time.  And this is not just during gay pride month.

I have heard pride talk and yearnings, and intellectualizations about oppression.

It is to be said, if you are my republican gay brother, some among us would not want to piss on you if your hair was on fire.

I might have been one of those who said this.

I take it back.

Because of this.  If we are to evolve in the gay community, beyond our mutual oppression, then we have to form a mutual solidarity.

Gay pride is more than about just pride.  It is more than about seeing, in a metaphorical sense, in the gay community, whose sexually stimulative parts are bigger.

It is also about power.  The power, as a small minority of people, to get some control of our lives and push back against the forces arrayed against us.

And, there has been some rumbling about whether the fights we are having are worth having, or are instead oppressing other people within the broad spectrum that is the LGBT community.

But, here’s the thing.

I wish for you to have all the options open to you that heterosexual society offers.  This is not surrender, or mainstreaming, or assimilation.

It is options, and working toward the day when the broader society sees us as nothing but people.  That is all.

And to have options, we as a community have to get over our bitchiness, our self important sense of alienation from one another, and to, with great consternation and difficulty, learn to accept EACH OF US as we are.

I dislike, as a general rule, bootlickers.  I don’t want, or like, people who lick the boots of people who wish to hold us back or oppress us.

This is why (again, as a general rule), I find it very difficult to accommodate gay people who, for whatever reason, find it preferable to foment irrelevant argumentation, or spurious support of people who might not always have our best interests at heart.  

I might disagree with certain LGBT people that people like Barack Obama have our best interests at heart.  I might disagree with the Log Cabin Republicans that the Republican Party can be changed.

These disagreements, though, have to be placed in context.

The context is, without numbers, there is no strength, with division, there is no political power, without political power, there is no change of any kind.

Solidarity, therefore, is number one.  However, there are numbers two, three and four.

I do not look, act, talk, or walk like what the heterosexist and heterosexual society would recognize as a gay man.  I walk through society, invisible.  This is part of my angst, as a gay man, that sense of “invisibility”.  I am not an attractive human being that you might like to go to bed with, if you are perfect-body oriented.  This makes me no less gay than you.

And for this reason, I’m used to being treated like shit by the people who ARE instantly recognized as gay, or who ARE much more attractive than me, or who HAVE, and DO spend much more time in the physical gay community than I have.

NUMBER TWO: This is not about either separation and attack of, or assimilation into, the heterosexual community.

If you are straight, this is not about you at all.  I do not care, nor will entertain even for an instant, your sense of insult, alienation from, or demand to be included in, this.

You are, or can be, friends.  Allies.  Your alliance with our just cause for human rights is welcomed.  When you are friends, we will treat you as friends.

Your straight perspective, that you have, is as a straight person.  Not as a gay person.  Or a transgendered person.

You are straight, and we are LGBT.  Do not forget that.  However deeply you have been involved, even if it is from birth, do not mistake your support for the fact that this is our struggle, our fight, and that the spoils are ours if we win, just as the suffering is ours, not yours, when we lose.

Because you have been so reticent in your help, you get none of the credit.  When we win, THE VICTORY IS OURS ALONE.  Your help is welcomed, your alliance celebrated, but we are now interested in who cares and who wants something and who doesn’t.  This is why, in addition to your lack of interest, victory, when (not if) it comes, is ours, not yours.  We now are interested in whether you actually want justice for us, or you want some other thing.  Some of us suspect you don’t care, and you are only in it to jawbone, make points, cause division, claim to be gay, or be a quisling.

This we are having none of, anymore.

You may even be brothers and sisters, and loved dearly by us.  But you are not us.  Please don’t try to insinuate yourselves into our viewpoint.  You can’t.  You may have seen or even experienced second hand, our oppression.  And we may feel no less strongly for your welfare than we feel about gay rights in general.  But you are not us.  And your viewpoint about gay issues has to be taken into that ineffable context.  This is not to say your viewpoint is unimportant.  What you have to understand, as a straight person, is that you are born into the viewpoint of the group of people who have oppressed us, for generations, and to put that into the context of your opinion.

And if you are not friends, if you stand in our way of basic human rights, we will oppose you.  This is not to say we will destroy you.  Or even want to.  Or even have delusions that we could, even if we wanted to, which we most certainly do not.

The LGBT community has no delusions, and no desire, to undermine you, change your way of life, obtain special rights in the here and now, or any of the rest.

And, when you change, what you will find is that the LGBT community is endlessly forgiving.  Sometimes, in the opinion of this gay man, too much so.  We will forgive you a lifetime of bigotry and hug you like a big ole teddy bear, the second you change.  

What you have to understand, if you oppose basic human rights, including all the rights otherwise afforded to straight individuals in this society, is that you have been listening to propaganda and projection your entire life.

The special rights that have been sought, which are attributed to us wanting, already exist.

These special rights are called heterosexual male privilege.  And you already have heterosexual male privilege.  What the argument is about is not about us gaining these “special rights” but of the aforementioned people losing them.

If you are a heterosexual male, this is what the women have been screaming about your entire life.  In case you didn’t notice.

So, too, is the argument about child molestation.  The people who hate gay rights the most are the ones most under suspicion for abusing children.  The Catholic Church.  The Boy Scouts.  Both of which organizations treat the existence of the gay as akin to being Satan himself.  Does this not strike you, the ordinary heterosexual to whom I’m addressing this comment, as strange?

Is it not possible for you to consider that perhaps child molesters want you to be more concerned about homosexuals than they are about child molesters so that child molesters can escape undetected?  So, I am forced to ask, why are you asked to consider the open and aboveboard gay individual as a threat to your children, to your existence, to your very way of life?  Is not it preferable, even to a bigot, to know who the gay people are among you?  And that takes an elimination of fear.  Because, your fear is what destroys you, in the end.

NUMBER 3: GROW UP, BROTHERS AND SISTERS

Throwing down your rattle and your pacifier because the current fights are not enough for you, that you want something different, would demand that you articulate the fights we should have instead, and the reasons for same.  In clear, easy to articulate and understand, no-nonsense language.  I am not saying that you should not be allowed to do just that.  I am saying, if you think you can do it, and this is a fight the gay community should be having, then do it.  Don’t whine that you can’t and ask people to understand your mute self.

Because, if you can’t, you have to consider the possibility that you have no point, at all.  Points that deserve consideration, cannot be that difficult to enunciate, beyond, “we are oppressed that you consider the option of gay marriage an important goal!”

GROW THE FUCK UP.  Quit making oppression that doesn’t exist, or that exists only in your mind, or that might exist after these battles are won, and thus, a continuation, and understand who your friends are, or at least, would like to be.  No one is trying to get you to marry, or to live like Joe Bob and Mary Jane across the street.  We are (or at least, I am) trying to get you to understand that there are certain features of American Life that homophobes use to turn you into something dirty, something shameful, and these things are predicated on the basic legal rights you are denied.  And, no, I’m not talking about you wearing a feather boa and a thong to gay pride parades.  Because, all you who do that, I celebrate you — you are GLORIOUS!

To me, you are not shameful, and there is nothing about how you live, as an LGBT person, to be ashamed of.

If you cannot join with the gay and lesbian and transgendered people you have, because you want different and better LGBT people than exist right here, right now, then you are a child.  And, no I’m not sorry for saying that, and you are still my brother or sister.

But, if you want something different, in this lifetime, then the imperative is, that we should treat every gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered person as brothers and sisters in arms.  And if you can’t get on board with that, I’m done with you asking US who do think that way what is wrong with US.  It is time for you to ask yourself what is wrong with YOU.  Because I have an idea, that at least I am able to articulate, about what to do to make things better.  

If my ideas and thoughts are simplistic, I challenge you to come up with a better.  It could be, I’m a simple sort, and very much a male (such a boy!) at that, but my simple thoughts have gone unsaid for too long.

NUMBER FOUR: If the heterosexuals can do it, so can we.  And it may seem simple, but sometimes the most intelligent people can avoid and refuse to see the simplest things.

We have to unite.

And that is, queer boys, bitches, dykes on bikes, leather dudes, straight acting, republican erstwhile bootlickers (masochists!), plaid wearing lesbians, whip toting sadists . I don’t care WHO YOU ARE.

The only thing I care about, the ONLY THING is, can you embrace solidarity?

Because, without solidarity, WE ARE ALL DEAD.  Maybe not now, maybe not tomorrow, or next year — but, without us fighting tooth and nail, sooner or later.  There will be mass executions in parts of the world.  And, eventually, this extreme, visceral homophobia will come home.  Count on it.  Because whatever you think, the politicians who exist, are not there to save you.  They are there to save their political asses, and if putting your head in an oven is politically popular, they will consider it — yes, even if they are Democrats.  Yes, even if they are Barack Obama.

And I say this with the utmost justification — a person who can pass as straight, invisibly, in this society.  I can get away.  So, that I say this, should have at least some weight, because I recognize that this is the inevitable outcome of our refusing to unite, what about those who can’t be mistaken and who can’t get away?

And, truly, are we that different?  Are we different from people throughout the millenia, who recognized a common threat, and resolved to fight?

I think that the gay community is colorful.  But I don’t think, compared historically to other people with vast differences who decided to band together and fight, we are that much different from each other.