How We Got Gay (2013) - full transcript
How We Got Gay tells the incredible story of how gay men and women went from being the ultimate outsiders to occupying the halls of power, with a profound influence on our cultural, political and social lives.
It's hard to imagine now
but not long ago,
homosexuality was something
to be hidden at all costs.
I now pronounce you
spouses for life.
50 years ago, homosexual acts
were illegal in every province in Canada
and every state in America.
To be a homosexual was to live in exile
from mainstream society.
Society looked at homosexuals not just
as a subculture who are
engaging in illicit sex
and possibly prostitution, they were also
a community of people who were sick
and deviant.
I like them in the closet.
We should shoot a few of
these people or hang them.
And for the brave few who declared
their homosexuality, it
was a life in the shadows.
The price for being openly gay was that
you were poor and you had shit jobs
like being a waiter.
And a lot of people
devoted their entire lives
to being gay at a terrible cost.
Most chose to hide.
They sought to move like ghosts through
the straight world, invisible to all.
It was called passing.
It's very difficult to remember
the complete and utter
invisibility of gay people
at that time.
Not only did people not really believe that
there were gay lawyers and professionals,
and middle class people
and people in the suburbs,
it was unfathomable.
People didn't believe
that gay people existed.
When I worked for Time
Magazine in the 60's,
being human I wanted to talk somewhat
about my personal life to my colleagues
and friends but it all had to be straight
so instead of talking about
Bill, a six foot two blonde,
I had to talk about Nancy,
a five foot one blonde.
And then you had to remember your lies.
It was hell to live
through and you felt always
so duplicitous because you couldn't really
be intimate with your straight friends
because you were lying to all them
and you knew if they
discovered the terrible truth,
a, you would be fired from your job,
and b, you would lose all your friends.
When I got out of the Navy, I went
with a couple guys and we used the same
two lesbians as girlfriends
which you think someone
would have picked up on.
I always went with Betty and whoever
I happened to be going
with went with Pauline.
It was always a case of showing up
with someone of the other sex.
I married when I was 19,
right out of high school.
And it was a very rocky
time because deep down
inside, I knew that I was gay
but I had fought it so many years
and hidden it so many years, I just figured
I could go on through life doing that.
The price of marriage
was the cultivation of a secret life.
I can remember being married
and Sunday night after
church, I would go by
this drug store and he
had muscle men magazines
underneath the counter
and you'd have to ask
to see them.
That was the only magazines
or anything we had
to look at.
I was too embarassed to buy them,
so I would make my
girlfriend I was living with
buy them for me.
So she would go and say, "I'll take the
"Grecian Guild, please."
And they all had the alibi of being
about ancient Greece or
about weight lifting.
For most men in the closet,
sex was furtive, anonymous, and often
in public places.
All we could do was go out to the bars,
or else go to the park.
We would go and park our cars
and walk out into the woods and meet
different people and have sex there.
And then you go on with your life.
That's how we lived.
We lived closeted.
It was a dangerous life.
And police harassment
and the risk of arrest
were an ever present threat.
Getting caught meant personal ruin
and humiliation.
For a long, long time, the police
had been involved with a process
of trying to supress, marginalize,
and clean up the subcultures that they saw
as illegitimate and the
police were ruthless.
The major problem with homosexuals
is the places of congregation to commit
their sex acts in public places
where they walk the streets hoping
to make a pickup.
They had vice working the park.
They'd go up there in cut offs,
as sexy as they could be and then
when you put a make on
them, they'd arrest ya.
They'd up come sometime in a bus
and arrest enough people
to almost fill the bus.
People had it hidden deep inside them
and were very guilt ridden about it.
If you were closeted and you were married,
you didn't have any place to go.
Most hotels would not rent to men
and if you did, you might
very well had the police
bang through the door.
People went into public washrooms,
and into parks, and that
would be the first place
they could kiss another man.
The lack of understanding
and acceptance leads to the creation
of a lurid set of myths about homosexuals.
The medical profession and the psychiatric
profession are very
much part of this story.
Homosexuality was not just criminalized,
it was medicalized.
You grew up with a lot
of shame, a lot of denial,
sometimes actually
listening to what you read
in the medical books which was that
being gay was a disability or a condition.
I really would pray that it would just
go away.
I prayed that I would just magically
have a girlfriend and I would wake up
every day and it was still there.
Many of them would undergo
this behavioral reconditioning
which was you would bring pornography
that turned you on and
then they would project it
and then shock you or induce vomiting.
It's hard to underestimate
how dire things were.
Most parents were doing it for the good
of the child, they knew that if the son
became homosexual, he was condemned
to live a very difficult and unhappy life.
The parents would take their son
to a physician who had been educated
in the medical school where homosexuality
was considered a disease.
If he thought it was a serious problem,
then he'd recommend treatment.
You would go through a year or more
of electric shock before
you finally decided
that you really ought to
find women interesting.
I went to a shrink for 20
years trying to get straight.
I was engaged twice.
The ideal was to have the trap door
beside the bed to get rid of the evidence
that you were gay so
that you could start off
with a clean slate.
Maybe today I'll go straight.
But a few pioneers start
to push the idea that
homosexuals have nothing
to be ashamed of.
It's part of the spirit of the times
as one minority group after another demands
to be heard.
In 1965, the first gay protest
in North American history
occurs.
In order to present
homosexuals as respectable
and employable, male participants
are required to wear ties,
preferably with a jacket.
And women are told to wear skirts.
In 1969, Canada moves to the foreground
of the new social revolution
when it decriminalizes
same sex intimacy in the
privacy of one's home.
There's no place for
the state in the bedrooms
of the nation and I think that what's done
in private between adults doesn't concern
a criminal court.
In the US, the battle over homosexual
rights erupts on a June evening in 1969
at a tavern called The Stonewall.
As an angry mob of drag queens,
mixed race, black, and young people
fight back against a police raid.
Those individuals were
largely on the outskirts
of society.
They were gender non-conformist,
There were drag queens there.
There were a number of individuals
that don't necesarrily
fit within the mainstream.
There were lots of what we call A trainers,
that is, people who came on the A train
from Harlem.
People had nothing left to lose.
These guys had been fighting the police
all their lives and now they were doing it
as gays but they had done
it as oppressed minorities
before anyway.
I think it was in the air.
We weren't going to take it any more.
We were going to fight back this time.
With Stonewall, gays experienced
the power that could come from standing up
for themselves.
With the new consciousness,
comes a new idea.
The secret to happiness
was to admit to being
homosexual, to come out.
As the 70's started happening,
you actually for the
first time started having
an actual human being who would get up
and actually say, "I am a homosexual."
A thousand gay liberationists
demonstrate in New York,
urging the city council
to pass a homosexual rights bill.
What do homosexuals do?
We eat, we sleep, we watch television.
That's what we do.
We do what human beings do.
I've never come out on anything
like television and
said, "I am a lesbian."
And it's a very frightening thing to do.
Word of Stonewall drifts back to Canada
where gays are increasingly
feeling inspired
by the battle to the south.
The first gay pride march
in Canada takes place
on a cold, wet August morning in 1971.
It's organized by an American draft dodger
living in Toronto.
All we want to do is love persons
of the same sex and live
our lives as we decide.
Gay power!
A generation gap starts to emerge
between the gays who
came of age in an earlier
time and those growing up in the 1960's.
Fearing the consequences, the vast majority
choose to stay in the closet.
They were going around saying things like,
"Gay is good," which was an
echo, "Black is beautiful."
The idea of having a gay magazine
or a gay organization, we would say,
"Well, we're criminals,
should safe crackers
"have their own magazine?
This is ridiculous."
It wasn't like Stonewall happened and then
the next day everyone came out
and everything was beautiful.
Everybody had their own individual journeys
that they had to struggle with.
There were no role models.
There was no history showing the 10 people
that I know who went
through this and boy did
their lives turn out great.
The word on the street were the people
who had been arrested and lost everything.
The people who had been
thrown out of the military,
the people who had lost their jobs,
and the fears were real.
But for those who were out,
the dream of having a
life like other people
starts to grow.
With this ring
With this ring
I give thee my promise
I give thee my promise
With my heart I will love thee,
With my heart I will love thee,
With my body I will worship thee,
With my body I will worship thee,
You may kiss.
The continuing lack of acceptance
in mainstream society meant gay life
could only flourish in
so called gay ghettos.
It was this definite feeling of freedom
in these little protected ghettos
that we created, that Stonewall allowed.
And instead of living a
life of hookups in a park
or bars where you risked arrest,
you could celebrate en
masse with large numbers
of men and feel a sense of community
and to feel that freedom
was just extraordinary.
But slowly outside the ghetto walls,
a few key allies started to emerge,
including the parents of some gay children.
When you had anybody who was outside
support you, it was really profound.
So when you actually had a parent?
Who actually would say good things
about his or her son or daughter?
Like, oh my God, you know.
I can tell you people just hugged them
and loved them, partly because they knew
their parent didn't react that way.
But the enemies of gay freedom
remain committed to keeping
homosexuals in check.
You started seeing a lot more visibility.
At the same time, there was an uppityness
of the community and the
police really realized
that if we don't actually do something now,
this is going to get
completely out of hand.
In the winter of 1981,
police in Toronto execute
a massive crackdown
on the gay bathhouses.
This was the largest police operation
that had happened against
the lesbian and gay
community and it was, in fact, the largest
mass arrest in Canadian history.
Second only to the war measures act.
He says, "You're all being charged
"for being in a body house."
I was flabbergasted.
I still had no idea what
he was talking about.
The police went whole hog, decided to do it
all on one night, arrest
as many people as possible.
Let's drag them in, let's
really teach them a lesson.
You were in a room and you just started
hearing commotion.
You didn't know what was going on
and then a cop would
come and smash the door
and would drag you in and put you in.
And if you were naked, so be it.
The people in the shower would be grabbed
out of the shower room.
It happened February 5th, on the morning
of February 6th, we decided to actually
have a demonstration that very night.
Two, four, six, eight, police state.
You had all these people
contact their friends,
that contacted their friends so it actually
spread very, very fast.
It really was on an order that
had never been thought of.
The lesbian and gay demonstration which was
far more angry and far more aggressive
than the police ever thought
they had on their hands.
They were completely thrown back
by the reaction.
You could see that they
were not at all prepared
for this angry mob.
They still couldn't believe
it was in front of their eyes.
Somebody said to me, "Police have raided
"the bathhouses," and I said, "What have
"they got against cleanliness?"
The police knew nothing at all
about the gay male community.
They actually thought there were only
three or four hundred gay men
in Toronto and they would all pack up
and move to Vancouver as
a result of the raids.
Really.
The bathhouse raids happened in one night
but the politics of the bathhouse raids
were at least a couple years.
We had 308 men who had to go through
the legal system so we went and tracked
each of those cases.
We had fundraising that had to be done.
Those are political and social skills
that build up a community.
We went through what could have taken us
20 years in 2 years.
But within a year of the raids,
a much bigger crisis has
emerged on the horizon.
It represents not just
a threat to gay freedom
but to gay life itself.
What do you think it is
about the gay lifestyle
that turns off so many straights?
Well, probably that we have so much style
and so much fun, that
we have more interesting
jobs than they do.
That we generally know how to live better.
That's probably what it is.
By the late 1970's, gays
were experiencing unprecendented freedom.
It was actually fabulous
to be gay in New York
at that time.
We weren't thinking of marriage,
getting rid of don't ask, don't tell,
of getting into the Boy Scouts.
Those things weren't even issues.
Between 69 and 81, it was the only period
in human history when everybody,
straight or gay, was free
to do what they wanted to
sexually because there was birth control,
there were antibiotics and
religion was on the wain.
That was the golden age of promiscuity,
both for straights and gays.
But in 1981, an enormous
tragedy hits the gay community as a rare
and deadly form of cancer shows up in 41
homosexual men in New
York and San Francisco.
Word of the outbreak
spreads rapidly through
the gay community.
People didn't know what caused AIDs,
they thought maybe it had something to do
with sex but maybe it had something to do
with hepatitis.
There were all these crazy theories.
And since gay liberation
was sexual liberation
for us, the idea of giving up sex was just
so amazing.
Anyway, we were young men, we weren't
going to stop having sex.
We had the doctors
saying, "You need to stop
"having sex," and the sexual liberationists
which were most gay activists were like,
"You don't know that," and there was
doubting of the science.
It was a whole threat to what we had built
up to that point and what the gay rights
movement had focused on up until that point
which was sexual liberation.
You would see men in their 20's and 30's
walking along with canes.
And the pages of the BAR
would have obituaries
every week.
It was a dark time in
San Francisco history.
Over 10,000 people in this zip code alone
died from AIDs.
I remember finding it easy to find rentals
for an apartment because there were gay men
who had died and didn't have family.
This is a 1980 Christmas party.
Everybody but myself has died of AIDs.
Everybody seemed to have been infected
before they found out and then it was
just a little too late
to do much of anything.
Through the 80's, mostly you were always
taking people to the hospitals
or going to funerals, something.
Sad, sad time.
Lots of gay men got sick and once you were
sick you were probably out because
if you were recognizable as a person
with AIDs, people were going to think
you were gay whether you were gay or not.
We didn't realize until we were forced
out of the closet how hated we were.
We created all these little cocoons
for each other so we didn't
have to feel that hate
or know how that hate could play out.
And so AIDs taught us that.
AIDs taught us how much America hated us.
It's hard to remember now because it was
so insane and barbaric but there were calls
for quarantine, tattooing
people who had HIV.
As a society, we stalled
and stalled and stalled
and enormous amounts of deaths took place
but also the epidemic
became enormously more
rooted.
70% of the country's AIDs victims
are homosexual and in cities throughout
the country gays have
become increasingly alarmed.
But now they are also
concerned about another
kind of epidemic, an
epidemic of fear that is
spreading faster than the disease itself.
As you walk down the street, you can
feel people pointing at you.
Saying, "He's one who has it."
I lost my job.
I lost my housing.
I lost friends.
I lost my own individuality.
As the number of deaths climbs,
the gay community becomes increasingly
angry at a government
that is dragging its feet
and a society that seems
indifferent to the crisis.
As the years go by, people are just getting
more and more fed up and
they just want it to end.
Here we were, six years into the crisis,
thousands of us had been
diagnosed with AIDs,
and thousands have died and our president
hadn't even said the word?
Let's stay together, let's stay united!
Our mayor was ignoring it.
Our government wasn't spending anything
on AIDs research.
In 1986, a new kind of gay rights
organization was born.
It was a very strong movement from day one.
The first meetings had
over 100 people in them.
That's big.
We grew very fast and from the getgo,
we made national press.
We're wearing all black.
Our posters are tombstones.
I started coming here
right after the very first
act of demonstration which happened
right outside where I worked.
I found boyfriends here.
I found friends for life.
And I lost a lot of people here.
I remember it filled with people,
sweaty, fired up and angry, and sexy,
and ready for and loving each other
and loving what we were doing.
You said, "Come back in a year,"
time's up, Mario, we're here!
We were singularly focused on HIV-AIDs
from 87 to 93.
That's all we talked
about and it's all we used
to build the gay rights movement.
Joseph Campbell, Alex Zicarti,
Fred Jones, Lewis Engle.
As the years go by and the death toll
climbs ever higher, the
AIDs crisis utterly consumes
the movement for gay equality.
It took awhile for people to move beyond
the confusion and the questions to reach
a point where there was
this kind of collective
understanding within the movement that this
was a catastrophic situation.
This became what defined us.
It was just a nightmare.
It was just an absolute nightmare.
People didn't know what to do.
Everybody was just trying
to save people's lives.
If you stayed quiet,
if you were complacent,
if you wanted to just
go to cocktail parties
and never discuss it
because it was too painful
to discuss that everybody
was going to end up dead.
No walking out!
And AIDs also transforms
the way the world sees gay men.
America had never seen
an angry gay community,
willing to go in front of the cameras,
laying down in the streets,
demanding to be heard and
in a sympathetic role.
And even if they were
uncomfortable with the idea
of homosexuality, it hurt
the country to know that
some of its citizens were
dying and the country
was doing nothing.
That troubled them.
The rise of Act Up transforms
the way that gay men see themselves.
Act Up really made me nervous.
I'm 20 something years old.
I'm coming out.
I'm in the middle of this AIDs epidemic
and, yes, it's not good but
we're pissing off people?
No more red tape, no more red tape!
Act Up shut down the opera
house on opening night.
It made headlines all over the place.
Oh, you're making people
angry that can help us.
And then as I got older,
and especially now,
I realize that Act Up saved people's lives.
We've never gotten a government official
to start liking homosexuals
but we have shamed them
into doing what we want.
Our friends were dying.
Our family members were dying.
In order to move pharmaceutical companies
and policy makers off
a comfortable position,
they made individual's lives uncomfortable.
You have no right to
interupt this symposium.
You will not learn
anything about combination
anti-retroviral therapy.
There are doctors in
this audience with AIDs
who don't want to be interupted by you.
And that's all there is to it!
No more words, we want action!
What may have looked
a little bit like chaos
on the outside, there
was a strategic center
that was rather brilliant.
People don't see us.
People don't see the
enormity of the disease
and the human cost of the
disease so strategically
what we're doing is we're
making people look at us.
The AIDs epidemic illustrated just how far
we needed to go to right
the injustices that were
a part of the LGBT
experience in this country.
If you thought you knew
what it mean to be brave,
and then you watched a
guy like Peter Staley
and then you say, "Oh, okay,
now I know what it means
"to be brave."
The whole world is watching!
In the crucible of AIDs,
the modern gay right movement is born.
I do not think that we would have same sex
marriage if we hadn't, unfortunately, lost
tens of thousands of people in this country
and millions worldwide to AIDs.
AIDs was the biggest coming out event
in world history.
Over the course of its history,
Act Up evolves from an
activist group to a group
intimately involved in
drug research and testing.
In 1996, its efforts pay off with the first
class of drugs that start to save lives.
It became this modern
patient advocacy movement
where you self-educate
and become the experts.
Can we all, before it's too late, begin
to understand each other?
Will we realize...
We lowered the death rates by 80%.
Going from zero where the government
wasn't doing anything
to having a two billion
dollar NIH research
budget, all pushing towards
those treatments and ultimately brought
those drugs to eight million people.
We just completely
shattered their impression
of who we are as a people,
what we're capable of, how we were
taking care of each other,
how we weren't limp wristed and weak
and quietly going to go off
into the corner and die.
We found our voice.
We found our power and it was because
AIDs forced us out of the closet.
As of December 31st, 2000,
almost half a million people had died
in North America.
Those who have been
fighting on the front lines
are exhausted.
Many of the movement leaders are dead.
And as the crisis ebbs and men who are sick
start to get better,
the leaders of the AIDs
activist movement drift away.
After all that fighting against AIDs,
and all the loss we had gone through
and all the memorials we had attended,
we just all went running for the doors.
And we walked away.
None of the AIDs activists will play
a major role in the battles to come.
In their wake comes a new kind of movement,
with a new set of goals.
History will recall,
Reagan and Bush did nothing at all.
Of all the legacies of the AIDs epidemic,
one of the biggest was that it taught gays
how to fight back.
We were not going to be
ushered back into a closet.
So many of our friends, so
many of our family members
had died that we owed
it to them to live life
out, as proud members of American society.
And the experience of dealing
with unresponsive government
and an indifferent society
convinced the movement
that the next fight had
to be for full equality.
It left us with a sense of how daunting
the work was going to be,
how elected officials in
particular could simply
ignore us when our lives were at stake.
When I think of where we are today
as a strategic, smart, determined movement,
it really formed a lot of the ways in which
we've gone about doing anything that we've
set out to do ever since.
The first part is the generational question
of who lived and who died.
You did have for a long period of time,
10 to 15 years, nobody having hope
that they could survive
once they had the virus.
But that built a political
movement as well.
You had a number of organizations created
during that time who realized that this
was an opportunity, there
was political strength
there and that people were ready to start
using their political voice.
With the dawn of a new millenium,
the movement for marriage equality gains
momentum in both Canada
and the United States.
The goal is fair and equal
treatment under the law
and the right to access tax
benefits and spousal rights
previously available only to heterosexuals.
In 2003, in a landmark decision that makes
headlines around the world, the Canadian
government announces
the right of gay people
to marry is to become the law of the land.
And the world's first legal gay marriage
is a ceremony like no other.
We were picked up that morning
in an unmarked vehicle.
We were driven in a circuitous
route to the church.
There were protesters with devil masks.
They had a coffin with a knife through it,
saying this was the death of marriage
and the death of family.
We had been told by security people
the moment we sign the wedding documents,
that's the time that they're
going to try to prevent
you from signing.
And if we hear a shot, don't
move somebody will move you.
Duly married in the eyes
of God and in accordance
with the laws of our land.
Repent!
As gay marriage galvanizes
the movement, it garners
a great deal of attention
in the straight world.
The religious right,
hellbent on stopping it,
doubles down.
I kept watching the gay marriage debate
saying, "That's going to be a tough one.
"They don't want us to win on that one."
But this time the resources
and the level of sophistication
that the movement
brings to the fight are unprecedented.
Now, across our country,
we are standing together for the right
of gay and lesbian Americans to marry
the person they love.
The process perhaps is no different
than the way that Kellogg's
goes about selling
cereal to consumers.
It's based upon market
research which involves
polling and focus groups and all of that
is massaged into an eventual narrative.
Gay and lesbian couples should have
every right to experience
the joys of marriage
and family that we do.
Marriage is an institution of equality
that pulls an awful lot
of other issues with it.
It is a central institution
to our way of life.
We grew up with parents.
We understand that marriage is about love,
committment and family.
It's an easy way to explain
what equality is like.
With marriage as the standard
bearer, the movement pushes for acceptance
in one bastion of heterosexual
power after another.
Society is going to fight hardest to keep
things that it wants for
itself and that it doesn't
want you to have so I have spent the bulk
of my career trying to get gay people
into the Boy Scouts, the
military, and marriage.
I have never been in the Boy Scouts.
I have never been in the military.
I have never been married
and I have never particularly wanted
to do any of those things.
But, if we don't have the option, then
we're always going to be
second class citizens.
When I first came out, I was disappointed
that I wouldn't have that
sort of wife and kids
family and I think it
took a couple of years.
Probably college, right
about when I met Duncan,
that it clicked for me that I
could have a husband and kids.
If you're willing to accept equality,
for gay people to get married,
you really can't stop short of
what that cultural story is.
That usually evolves
into a deeper comittment.
The schoolyard song, "First comes love,
"then comes marriage," what's next?
"Then comes the baby in
the baby carriage," right?
In some cases it's not a
baby, it's an older kid
and it's foster or adoption but that's
the natural progression.
With the rise of the new messaging
around marriage equality,
mainstream attitudes
toward homosexuality start
to shift dramatically.
We are very much part of your community.
We are people of color, we are men,
we are women, we are trans,
we are tall, we are short, we are doctors,
we are lawyers, we are your neighbors.
What this rise in acceptance
means is that the options for gay people
have never been more plentiful.
Nobody's telling them
how to live their life.
Nobody's telling them who they can be.
Their future is theirs.
They can see themself.
They know they can be who they are.
When I first came out, I always assumed
that if I found somebody
I loved that I would
be able to marry them.
When the day did come that we were able
to get married legally, and
share life with somebody
of the same sex, obviously
I was extremely happy.
Around 2003, I could see
that there was progress
happening and people
who were gay could lead
a life with a partner and have a family
and not sort of have to
give all that up to be gay.
It's the first time where
I've ever really pictured
a life with someone and it's good.
And with the increasing integration
into heterosexual culture, some are asking,
"What does it even mean to be gay?"
My husband's bringing me a drink right now.
So is mine.
In many ways, the world for gay people
has never looked brighter.
They've achieved a level
of freedom unimaginable
even 10 years ago.
From pop culture to
politics to big business,
gays are changing the world.
This is a huge leap forward
in that there are images
of us that are being used
to bring people together.
We are being represented in these ads
in a way that is inclusive,
it is kind, it is smart.
And is an effective
strategy to sell things.
As opposed to the years and years
of our community being
used as a selling tool
to divide people.
The only way that gay people can contribute
to anything is to be out.
Because being gay is not
a part of who we are,
it's all of who we are.
I think what the gay community has to teach
the world is the power of not being afraid
to be yourself.
But can gay people have it both ways?
Can they blend into mainstream society
and still hang onto what makes them unique?
A lot of people say that the fight
for same sex marriage is
all about assimilation.
We are becoming just like straight people.
To me, assimilation is
just a multi-syllable word
for equality.
We don't want to blend in.
We just want to be treated with the same
respect and fairness under
protection of the law.
And that's what I think
this next generation
really have an opportunity to do which is
maintain the specialness of our community
and also expand the area
of rights and opportunities
that the LGBT community has
been fighting so hard for.
But as the boundaries
between straight and gay break down,
some are left wondering what might
have been lost on the
road to full equality.
One of the great things about being gay
was my parents never said,
"Why aren't you married?"
Now I have to hear this every day.
"Why aren't you married?"
Getting married and going
into the armed forces
were the two last things
I'd ever want for myself.
While I appreciate the
importance of those rights
for the community and I
fight tirelessly for them,
there's something a little
banal about just wanting
to be married and wanting
to go kill people overseas.
It's what other people always did.
I hope we're not raising a whole generation
of 22 year olds who are
spending all their time
like reading Bride magazine
and planning their weddings
because I think, "but isn't
that a sign of a certain
"emptiness?"
I don't really think
that gay stepford wives
is a great solution to this movement.
Today the gay rights movement
is defined by how far it has come since
the darkest days of the AIDs crisis.
And the change may reflect something more
than just the passage of time.
It's human nature.
They don't see the death that propelled us
into the streets in the late 80's
and people really long to get past that.
They want their generation to be known
for these glorious victories.
The idea that there is a generation
of men and women who don't have to wonder
whether or not they can marry the person
that they love, who don't
have to worry about being
able to be with the person
they love when they're dying
in a hospital, is really a
tremendous, tremendous feeling.
At some point we will
be far enough away from
the struggle where we have the possibility
of not remembering it and
that's one of the great
responsibilities that we have to share
with the younger generation.
I don't want them to
have to live through that
but I don't want them not to know.
I went to my grandniece's gay wedding.
They'd been going together for 12 years
and her partner's son was a preacher
and he officiated it.
Here I am sitting in Des Moines, Iowa
at a gay wedding and who
would have ever thought.
I was actually quite proud
of it to tell you the truth.
but not long ago,
homosexuality was something
to be hidden at all costs.
I now pronounce you
spouses for life.
50 years ago, homosexual acts
were illegal in every province in Canada
and every state in America.
To be a homosexual was to live in exile
from mainstream society.
Society looked at homosexuals not just
as a subculture who are
engaging in illicit sex
and possibly prostitution, they were also
a community of people who were sick
and deviant.
I like them in the closet.
We should shoot a few of
these people or hang them.
And for the brave few who declared
their homosexuality, it
was a life in the shadows.
The price for being openly gay was that
you were poor and you had shit jobs
like being a waiter.
And a lot of people
devoted their entire lives
to being gay at a terrible cost.
Most chose to hide.
They sought to move like ghosts through
the straight world, invisible to all.
It was called passing.
It's very difficult to remember
the complete and utter
invisibility of gay people
at that time.
Not only did people not really believe that
there were gay lawyers and professionals,
and middle class people
and people in the suburbs,
it was unfathomable.
People didn't believe
that gay people existed.
When I worked for Time
Magazine in the 60's,
being human I wanted to talk somewhat
about my personal life to my colleagues
and friends but it all had to be straight
so instead of talking about
Bill, a six foot two blonde,
I had to talk about Nancy,
a five foot one blonde.
And then you had to remember your lies.
It was hell to live
through and you felt always
so duplicitous because you couldn't really
be intimate with your straight friends
because you were lying to all them
and you knew if they
discovered the terrible truth,
a, you would be fired from your job,
and b, you would lose all your friends.
When I got out of the Navy, I went
with a couple guys and we used the same
two lesbians as girlfriends
which you think someone
would have picked up on.
I always went with Betty and whoever
I happened to be going
with went with Pauline.
It was always a case of showing up
with someone of the other sex.
I married when I was 19,
right out of high school.
And it was a very rocky
time because deep down
inside, I knew that I was gay
but I had fought it so many years
and hidden it so many years, I just figured
I could go on through life doing that.
The price of marriage
was the cultivation of a secret life.
I can remember being married
and Sunday night after
church, I would go by
this drug store and he
had muscle men magazines
underneath the counter
and you'd have to ask
to see them.
That was the only magazines
or anything we had
to look at.
I was too embarassed to buy them,
so I would make my
girlfriend I was living with
buy them for me.
So she would go and say, "I'll take the
"Grecian Guild, please."
And they all had the alibi of being
about ancient Greece or
about weight lifting.
For most men in the closet,
sex was furtive, anonymous, and often
in public places.
All we could do was go out to the bars,
or else go to the park.
We would go and park our cars
and walk out into the woods and meet
different people and have sex there.
And then you go on with your life.
That's how we lived.
We lived closeted.
It was a dangerous life.
And police harassment
and the risk of arrest
were an ever present threat.
Getting caught meant personal ruin
and humiliation.
For a long, long time, the police
had been involved with a process
of trying to supress, marginalize,
and clean up the subcultures that they saw
as illegitimate and the
police were ruthless.
The major problem with homosexuals
is the places of congregation to commit
their sex acts in public places
where they walk the streets hoping
to make a pickup.
They had vice working the park.
They'd go up there in cut offs,
as sexy as they could be and then
when you put a make on
them, they'd arrest ya.
They'd up come sometime in a bus
and arrest enough people
to almost fill the bus.
People had it hidden deep inside them
and were very guilt ridden about it.
If you were closeted and you were married,
you didn't have any place to go.
Most hotels would not rent to men
and if you did, you might
very well had the police
bang through the door.
People went into public washrooms,
and into parks, and that
would be the first place
they could kiss another man.
The lack of understanding
and acceptance leads to the creation
of a lurid set of myths about homosexuals.
The medical profession and the psychiatric
profession are very
much part of this story.
Homosexuality was not just criminalized,
it was medicalized.
You grew up with a lot
of shame, a lot of denial,
sometimes actually
listening to what you read
in the medical books which was that
being gay was a disability or a condition.
I really would pray that it would just
go away.
I prayed that I would just magically
have a girlfriend and I would wake up
every day and it was still there.
Many of them would undergo
this behavioral reconditioning
which was you would bring pornography
that turned you on and
then they would project it
and then shock you or induce vomiting.
It's hard to underestimate
how dire things were.
Most parents were doing it for the good
of the child, they knew that if the son
became homosexual, he was condemned
to live a very difficult and unhappy life.
The parents would take their son
to a physician who had been educated
in the medical school where homosexuality
was considered a disease.
If he thought it was a serious problem,
then he'd recommend treatment.
You would go through a year or more
of electric shock before
you finally decided
that you really ought to
find women interesting.
I went to a shrink for 20
years trying to get straight.
I was engaged twice.
The ideal was to have the trap door
beside the bed to get rid of the evidence
that you were gay so
that you could start off
with a clean slate.
Maybe today I'll go straight.
But a few pioneers start
to push the idea that
homosexuals have nothing
to be ashamed of.
It's part of the spirit of the times
as one minority group after another demands
to be heard.
In 1965, the first gay protest
in North American history
occurs.
In order to present
homosexuals as respectable
and employable, male participants
are required to wear ties,
preferably with a jacket.
And women are told to wear skirts.
In 1969, Canada moves to the foreground
of the new social revolution
when it decriminalizes
same sex intimacy in the
privacy of one's home.
There's no place for
the state in the bedrooms
of the nation and I think that what's done
in private between adults doesn't concern
a criminal court.
In the US, the battle over homosexual
rights erupts on a June evening in 1969
at a tavern called The Stonewall.
As an angry mob of drag queens,
mixed race, black, and young people
fight back against a police raid.
Those individuals were
largely on the outskirts
of society.
They were gender non-conformist,
There were drag queens there.
There were a number of individuals
that don't necesarrily
fit within the mainstream.
There were lots of what we call A trainers,
that is, people who came on the A train
from Harlem.
People had nothing left to lose.
These guys had been fighting the police
all their lives and now they were doing it
as gays but they had done
it as oppressed minorities
before anyway.
I think it was in the air.
We weren't going to take it any more.
We were going to fight back this time.
With Stonewall, gays experienced
the power that could come from standing up
for themselves.
With the new consciousness,
comes a new idea.
The secret to happiness
was to admit to being
homosexual, to come out.
As the 70's started happening,
you actually for the
first time started having
an actual human being who would get up
and actually say, "I am a homosexual."
A thousand gay liberationists
demonstrate in New York,
urging the city council
to pass a homosexual rights bill.
What do homosexuals do?
We eat, we sleep, we watch television.
That's what we do.
We do what human beings do.
I've never come out on anything
like television and
said, "I am a lesbian."
And it's a very frightening thing to do.
Word of Stonewall drifts back to Canada
where gays are increasingly
feeling inspired
by the battle to the south.
The first gay pride march
in Canada takes place
on a cold, wet August morning in 1971.
It's organized by an American draft dodger
living in Toronto.
All we want to do is love persons
of the same sex and live
our lives as we decide.
Gay power!
A generation gap starts to emerge
between the gays who
came of age in an earlier
time and those growing up in the 1960's.
Fearing the consequences, the vast majority
choose to stay in the closet.
They were going around saying things like,
"Gay is good," which was an
echo, "Black is beautiful."
The idea of having a gay magazine
or a gay organization, we would say,
"Well, we're criminals,
should safe crackers
"have their own magazine?
This is ridiculous."
It wasn't like Stonewall happened and then
the next day everyone came out
and everything was beautiful.
Everybody had their own individual journeys
that they had to struggle with.
There were no role models.
There was no history showing the 10 people
that I know who went
through this and boy did
their lives turn out great.
The word on the street were the people
who had been arrested and lost everything.
The people who had been
thrown out of the military,
the people who had lost their jobs,
and the fears were real.
But for those who were out,
the dream of having a
life like other people
starts to grow.
With this ring
With this ring
I give thee my promise
I give thee my promise
With my heart I will love thee,
With my heart I will love thee,
With my body I will worship thee,
With my body I will worship thee,
You may kiss.
The continuing lack of acceptance
in mainstream society meant gay life
could only flourish in
so called gay ghettos.
It was this definite feeling of freedom
in these little protected ghettos
that we created, that Stonewall allowed.
And instead of living a
life of hookups in a park
or bars where you risked arrest,
you could celebrate en
masse with large numbers
of men and feel a sense of community
and to feel that freedom
was just extraordinary.
But slowly outside the ghetto walls,
a few key allies started to emerge,
including the parents of some gay children.
When you had anybody who was outside
support you, it was really profound.
So when you actually had a parent?
Who actually would say good things
about his or her son or daughter?
Like, oh my God, you know.
I can tell you people just hugged them
and loved them, partly because they knew
their parent didn't react that way.
But the enemies of gay freedom
remain committed to keeping
homosexuals in check.
You started seeing a lot more visibility.
At the same time, there was an uppityness
of the community and the
police really realized
that if we don't actually do something now,
this is going to get
completely out of hand.
In the winter of 1981,
police in Toronto execute
a massive crackdown
on the gay bathhouses.
This was the largest police operation
that had happened against
the lesbian and gay
community and it was, in fact, the largest
mass arrest in Canadian history.
Second only to the war measures act.
He says, "You're all being charged
"for being in a body house."
I was flabbergasted.
I still had no idea what
he was talking about.
The police went whole hog, decided to do it
all on one night, arrest
as many people as possible.
Let's drag them in, let's
really teach them a lesson.
You were in a room and you just started
hearing commotion.
You didn't know what was going on
and then a cop would
come and smash the door
and would drag you in and put you in.
And if you were naked, so be it.
The people in the shower would be grabbed
out of the shower room.
It happened February 5th, on the morning
of February 6th, we decided to actually
have a demonstration that very night.
Two, four, six, eight, police state.
You had all these people
contact their friends,
that contacted their friends so it actually
spread very, very fast.
It really was on an order that
had never been thought of.
The lesbian and gay demonstration which was
far more angry and far more aggressive
than the police ever thought
they had on their hands.
They were completely thrown back
by the reaction.
You could see that they
were not at all prepared
for this angry mob.
They still couldn't believe
it was in front of their eyes.
Somebody said to me, "Police have raided
"the bathhouses," and I said, "What have
"they got against cleanliness?"
The police knew nothing at all
about the gay male community.
They actually thought there were only
three or four hundred gay men
in Toronto and they would all pack up
and move to Vancouver as
a result of the raids.
Really.
The bathhouse raids happened in one night
but the politics of the bathhouse raids
were at least a couple years.
We had 308 men who had to go through
the legal system so we went and tracked
each of those cases.
We had fundraising that had to be done.
Those are political and social skills
that build up a community.
We went through what could have taken us
20 years in 2 years.
But within a year of the raids,
a much bigger crisis has
emerged on the horizon.
It represents not just
a threat to gay freedom
but to gay life itself.
What do you think it is
about the gay lifestyle
that turns off so many straights?
Well, probably that we have so much style
and so much fun, that
we have more interesting
jobs than they do.
That we generally know how to live better.
That's probably what it is.
By the late 1970's, gays
were experiencing unprecendented freedom.
It was actually fabulous
to be gay in New York
at that time.
We weren't thinking of marriage,
getting rid of don't ask, don't tell,
of getting into the Boy Scouts.
Those things weren't even issues.
Between 69 and 81, it was the only period
in human history when everybody,
straight or gay, was free
to do what they wanted to
sexually because there was birth control,
there were antibiotics and
religion was on the wain.
That was the golden age of promiscuity,
both for straights and gays.
But in 1981, an enormous
tragedy hits the gay community as a rare
and deadly form of cancer shows up in 41
homosexual men in New
York and San Francisco.
Word of the outbreak
spreads rapidly through
the gay community.
People didn't know what caused AIDs,
they thought maybe it had something to do
with sex but maybe it had something to do
with hepatitis.
There were all these crazy theories.
And since gay liberation
was sexual liberation
for us, the idea of giving up sex was just
so amazing.
Anyway, we were young men, we weren't
going to stop having sex.
We had the doctors
saying, "You need to stop
"having sex," and the sexual liberationists
which were most gay activists were like,
"You don't know that," and there was
doubting of the science.
It was a whole threat to what we had built
up to that point and what the gay rights
movement had focused on up until that point
which was sexual liberation.
You would see men in their 20's and 30's
walking along with canes.
And the pages of the BAR
would have obituaries
every week.
It was a dark time in
San Francisco history.
Over 10,000 people in this zip code alone
died from AIDs.
I remember finding it easy to find rentals
for an apartment because there were gay men
who had died and didn't have family.
This is a 1980 Christmas party.
Everybody but myself has died of AIDs.
Everybody seemed to have been infected
before they found out and then it was
just a little too late
to do much of anything.
Through the 80's, mostly you were always
taking people to the hospitals
or going to funerals, something.
Sad, sad time.
Lots of gay men got sick and once you were
sick you were probably out because
if you were recognizable as a person
with AIDs, people were going to think
you were gay whether you were gay or not.
We didn't realize until we were forced
out of the closet how hated we were.
We created all these little cocoons
for each other so we didn't
have to feel that hate
or know how that hate could play out.
And so AIDs taught us that.
AIDs taught us how much America hated us.
It's hard to remember now because it was
so insane and barbaric but there were calls
for quarantine, tattooing
people who had HIV.
As a society, we stalled
and stalled and stalled
and enormous amounts of deaths took place
but also the epidemic
became enormously more
rooted.
70% of the country's AIDs victims
are homosexual and in cities throughout
the country gays have
become increasingly alarmed.
But now they are also
concerned about another
kind of epidemic, an
epidemic of fear that is
spreading faster than the disease itself.
As you walk down the street, you can
feel people pointing at you.
Saying, "He's one who has it."
I lost my job.
I lost my housing.
I lost friends.
I lost my own individuality.
As the number of deaths climbs,
the gay community becomes increasingly
angry at a government
that is dragging its feet
and a society that seems
indifferent to the crisis.
As the years go by, people are just getting
more and more fed up and
they just want it to end.
Here we were, six years into the crisis,
thousands of us had been
diagnosed with AIDs,
and thousands have died and our president
hadn't even said the word?
Let's stay together, let's stay united!
Our mayor was ignoring it.
Our government wasn't spending anything
on AIDs research.
In 1986, a new kind of gay rights
organization was born.
It was a very strong movement from day one.
The first meetings had
over 100 people in them.
That's big.
We grew very fast and from the getgo,
we made national press.
We're wearing all black.
Our posters are tombstones.
I started coming here
right after the very first
act of demonstration which happened
right outside where I worked.
I found boyfriends here.
I found friends for life.
And I lost a lot of people here.
I remember it filled with people,
sweaty, fired up and angry, and sexy,
and ready for and loving each other
and loving what we were doing.
You said, "Come back in a year,"
time's up, Mario, we're here!
We were singularly focused on HIV-AIDs
from 87 to 93.
That's all we talked
about and it's all we used
to build the gay rights movement.
Joseph Campbell, Alex Zicarti,
Fred Jones, Lewis Engle.
As the years go by and the death toll
climbs ever higher, the
AIDs crisis utterly consumes
the movement for gay equality.
It took awhile for people to move beyond
the confusion and the questions to reach
a point where there was
this kind of collective
understanding within the movement that this
was a catastrophic situation.
This became what defined us.
It was just a nightmare.
It was just an absolute nightmare.
People didn't know what to do.
Everybody was just trying
to save people's lives.
If you stayed quiet,
if you were complacent,
if you wanted to just
go to cocktail parties
and never discuss it
because it was too painful
to discuss that everybody
was going to end up dead.
No walking out!
And AIDs also transforms
the way the world sees gay men.
America had never seen
an angry gay community,
willing to go in front of the cameras,
laying down in the streets,
demanding to be heard and
in a sympathetic role.
And even if they were
uncomfortable with the idea
of homosexuality, it hurt
the country to know that
some of its citizens were
dying and the country
was doing nothing.
That troubled them.
The rise of Act Up transforms
the way that gay men see themselves.
Act Up really made me nervous.
I'm 20 something years old.
I'm coming out.
I'm in the middle of this AIDs epidemic
and, yes, it's not good but
we're pissing off people?
No more red tape, no more red tape!
Act Up shut down the opera
house on opening night.
It made headlines all over the place.
Oh, you're making people
angry that can help us.
And then as I got older,
and especially now,
I realize that Act Up saved people's lives.
We've never gotten a government official
to start liking homosexuals
but we have shamed them
into doing what we want.
Our friends were dying.
Our family members were dying.
In order to move pharmaceutical companies
and policy makers off
a comfortable position,
they made individual's lives uncomfortable.
You have no right to
interupt this symposium.
You will not learn
anything about combination
anti-retroviral therapy.
There are doctors in
this audience with AIDs
who don't want to be interupted by you.
And that's all there is to it!
No more words, we want action!
What may have looked
a little bit like chaos
on the outside, there
was a strategic center
that was rather brilliant.
People don't see us.
People don't see the
enormity of the disease
and the human cost of the
disease so strategically
what we're doing is we're
making people look at us.
The AIDs epidemic illustrated just how far
we needed to go to right
the injustices that were
a part of the LGBT
experience in this country.
If you thought you knew
what it mean to be brave,
and then you watched a
guy like Peter Staley
and then you say, "Oh, okay,
now I know what it means
"to be brave."
The whole world is watching!
In the crucible of AIDs,
the modern gay right movement is born.
I do not think that we would have same sex
marriage if we hadn't, unfortunately, lost
tens of thousands of people in this country
and millions worldwide to AIDs.
AIDs was the biggest coming out event
in world history.
Over the course of its history,
Act Up evolves from an
activist group to a group
intimately involved in
drug research and testing.
In 1996, its efforts pay off with the first
class of drugs that start to save lives.
It became this modern
patient advocacy movement
where you self-educate
and become the experts.
Can we all, before it's too late, begin
to understand each other?
Will we realize...
We lowered the death rates by 80%.
Going from zero where the government
wasn't doing anything
to having a two billion
dollar NIH research
budget, all pushing towards
those treatments and ultimately brought
those drugs to eight million people.
We just completely
shattered their impression
of who we are as a people,
what we're capable of, how we were
taking care of each other,
how we weren't limp wristed and weak
and quietly going to go off
into the corner and die.
We found our voice.
We found our power and it was because
AIDs forced us out of the closet.
As of December 31st, 2000,
almost half a million people had died
in North America.
Those who have been
fighting on the front lines
are exhausted.
Many of the movement leaders are dead.
And as the crisis ebbs and men who are sick
start to get better,
the leaders of the AIDs
activist movement drift away.
After all that fighting against AIDs,
and all the loss we had gone through
and all the memorials we had attended,
we just all went running for the doors.
And we walked away.
None of the AIDs activists will play
a major role in the battles to come.
In their wake comes a new kind of movement,
with a new set of goals.
History will recall,
Reagan and Bush did nothing at all.
Of all the legacies of the AIDs epidemic,
one of the biggest was that it taught gays
how to fight back.
We were not going to be
ushered back into a closet.
So many of our friends, so
many of our family members
had died that we owed
it to them to live life
out, as proud members of American society.
And the experience of dealing
with unresponsive government
and an indifferent society
convinced the movement
that the next fight had
to be for full equality.
It left us with a sense of how daunting
the work was going to be,
how elected officials in
particular could simply
ignore us when our lives were at stake.
When I think of where we are today
as a strategic, smart, determined movement,
it really formed a lot of the ways in which
we've gone about doing anything that we've
set out to do ever since.
The first part is the generational question
of who lived and who died.
You did have for a long period of time,
10 to 15 years, nobody having hope
that they could survive
once they had the virus.
But that built a political
movement as well.
You had a number of organizations created
during that time who realized that this
was an opportunity, there
was political strength
there and that people were ready to start
using their political voice.
With the dawn of a new millenium,
the movement for marriage equality gains
momentum in both Canada
and the United States.
The goal is fair and equal
treatment under the law
and the right to access tax
benefits and spousal rights
previously available only to heterosexuals.
In 2003, in a landmark decision that makes
headlines around the world, the Canadian
government announces
the right of gay people
to marry is to become the law of the land.
And the world's first legal gay marriage
is a ceremony like no other.
We were picked up that morning
in an unmarked vehicle.
We were driven in a circuitous
route to the church.
There were protesters with devil masks.
They had a coffin with a knife through it,
saying this was the death of marriage
and the death of family.
We had been told by security people
the moment we sign the wedding documents,
that's the time that they're
going to try to prevent
you from signing.
And if we hear a shot, don't
move somebody will move you.
Duly married in the eyes
of God and in accordance
with the laws of our land.
Repent!
As gay marriage galvanizes
the movement, it garners
a great deal of attention
in the straight world.
The religious right,
hellbent on stopping it,
doubles down.
I kept watching the gay marriage debate
saying, "That's going to be a tough one.
"They don't want us to win on that one."
But this time the resources
and the level of sophistication
that the movement
brings to the fight are unprecedented.
Now, across our country,
we are standing together for the right
of gay and lesbian Americans to marry
the person they love.
The process perhaps is no different
than the way that Kellogg's
goes about selling
cereal to consumers.
It's based upon market
research which involves
polling and focus groups and all of that
is massaged into an eventual narrative.
Gay and lesbian couples should have
every right to experience
the joys of marriage
and family that we do.
Marriage is an institution of equality
that pulls an awful lot
of other issues with it.
It is a central institution
to our way of life.
We grew up with parents.
We understand that marriage is about love,
committment and family.
It's an easy way to explain
what equality is like.
With marriage as the standard
bearer, the movement pushes for acceptance
in one bastion of heterosexual
power after another.
Society is going to fight hardest to keep
things that it wants for
itself and that it doesn't
want you to have so I have spent the bulk
of my career trying to get gay people
into the Boy Scouts, the
military, and marriage.
I have never been in the Boy Scouts.
I have never been in the military.
I have never been married
and I have never particularly wanted
to do any of those things.
But, if we don't have the option, then
we're always going to be
second class citizens.
When I first came out, I was disappointed
that I wouldn't have that
sort of wife and kids
family and I think it
took a couple of years.
Probably college, right
about when I met Duncan,
that it clicked for me that I
could have a husband and kids.
If you're willing to accept equality,
for gay people to get married,
you really can't stop short of
what that cultural story is.
That usually evolves
into a deeper comittment.
The schoolyard song, "First comes love,
"then comes marriage," what's next?
"Then comes the baby in
the baby carriage," right?
In some cases it's not a
baby, it's an older kid
and it's foster or adoption but that's
the natural progression.
With the rise of the new messaging
around marriage equality,
mainstream attitudes
toward homosexuality start
to shift dramatically.
We are very much part of your community.
We are people of color, we are men,
we are women, we are trans,
we are tall, we are short, we are doctors,
we are lawyers, we are your neighbors.
What this rise in acceptance
means is that the options for gay people
have never been more plentiful.
Nobody's telling them
how to live their life.
Nobody's telling them who they can be.
Their future is theirs.
They can see themself.
They know they can be who they are.
When I first came out, I always assumed
that if I found somebody
I loved that I would
be able to marry them.
When the day did come that we were able
to get married legally, and
share life with somebody
of the same sex, obviously
I was extremely happy.
Around 2003, I could see
that there was progress
happening and people
who were gay could lead
a life with a partner and have a family
and not sort of have to
give all that up to be gay.
It's the first time where
I've ever really pictured
a life with someone and it's good.
And with the increasing integration
into heterosexual culture, some are asking,
"What does it even mean to be gay?"
My husband's bringing me a drink right now.
So is mine.
In many ways, the world for gay people
has never looked brighter.
They've achieved a level
of freedom unimaginable
even 10 years ago.
From pop culture to
politics to big business,
gays are changing the world.
This is a huge leap forward
in that there are images
of us that are being used
to bring people together.
We are being represented in these ads
in a way that is inclusive,
it is kind, it is smart.
And is an effective
strategy to sell things.
As opposed to the years and years
of our community being
used as a selling tool
to divide people.
The only way that gay people can contribute
to anything is to be out.
Because being gay is not
a part of who we are,
it's all of who we are.
I think what the gay community has to teach
the world is the power of not being afraid
to be yourself.
But can gay people have it both ways?
Can they blend into mainstream society
and still hang onto what makes them unique?
A lot of people say that the fight
for same sex marriage is
all about assimilation.
We are becoming just like straight people.
To me, assimilation is
just a multi-syllable word
for equality.
We don't want to blend in.
We just want to be treated with the same
respect and fairness under
protection of the law.
And that's what I think
this next generation
really have an opportunity to do which is
maintain the specialness of our community
and also expand the area
of rights and opportunities
that the LGBT community has
been fighting so hard for.
But as the boundaries
between straight and gay break down,
some are left wondering what might
have been lost on the
road to full equality.
One of the great things about being gay
was my parents never said,
"Why aren't you married?"
Now I have to hear this every day.
"Why aren't you married?"
Getting married and going
into the armed forces
were the two last things
I'd ever want for myself.
While I appreciate the
importance of those rights
for the community and I
fight tirelessly for them,
there's something a little
banal about just wanting
to be married and wanting
to go kill people overseas.
It's what other people always did.
I hope we're not raising a whole generation
of 22 year olds who are
spending all their time
like reading Bride magazine
and planning their weddings
because I think, "but isn't
that a sign of a certain
"emptiness?"
I don't really think
that gay stepford wives
is a great solution to this movement.
Today the gay rights movement
is defined by how far it has come since
the darkest days of the AIDs crisis.
And the change may reflect something more
than just the passage of time.
It's human nature.
They don't see the death that propelled us
into the streets in the late 80's
and people really long to get past that.
They want their generation to be known
for these glorious victories.
The idea that there is a generation
of men and women who don't have to wonder
whether or not they can marry the person
that they love, who don't
have to worry about being
able to be with the person
they love when they're dying
in a hospital, is really a
tremendous, tremendous feeling.
At some point we will
be far enough away from
the struggle where we have the possibility
of not remembering it and
that's one of the great
responsibilities that we have to share
with the younger generation.
I don't want them to
have to live through that
but I don't want them not to know.
I went to my grandniece's gay wedding.
They'd been going together for 12 years
and her partner's son was a preacher
and he officiated it.
Here I am sitting in Des Moines, Iowa
at a gay wedding and who
would have ever thought.
I was actually quite proud
of it to tell you the truth.