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Acting Up and Fighting Back in 2023
June 22, 2023

Imagine: A politically conservative Christian television station applies to the City of San Francisco for a permit to use Civic Center Plaza for a Christian youth concert on the last of weekend in June, which just so happens, of course, to be the date of San Francisco Pride. And imagine further that despite Pride being held for years on those dates, San Francisco grants the permit to the television station.

Fortunately, that scenario seems very far-fetched, but sadly it’s exactly what happened in Seoul, South Korea. There, the city government granted the South Korean Christian Television System the right to use the plaza in front of Seoul City Hall for a Christian youth concert, instead of this year’s Seoul Pride, which had taken place there since 2014. The Seoul government’s actions are emblematic of the many challenges LGBTIQ activists face in their struggle for equality in South Korea. But, make no mistake, the Korean LGBTIQ community did not give up for a moment, and Seoul Pride will go on at a different location in the city.

Imagine: The San Francisco LGBT Center is forced to shut down under pressure from the U.S. government because it serves the queer community. Fortunately, that would be unthinkable today. Yet, that’s exactly what happened last month when the Beijing LGBT Center, which had provided vital services to LGBTIQ people all across China for 15 years, was forced to close its doors as part of the Chinese government’s anti-LGBTIQ crackdown. But Chinese LGBTIQ activists have far from given up.

This year, at San Francisco Pride, we think of the countless LGBTIQ activists, whose courage and perseverance inspire us. Of course, they include fearless South Korean and Chinese activists as well as those in Uganda, who are waging a fight for their survival against incalculable odds.

We also salute the conviction and tenacity of Nebraska State Senators Megan Hunt and Machaela Cavanaugh, who together engaged in a months-long filibuster to prevent passage of legislation banning gender-affirming medical care for trans youth in the state. Sadly, the bill eventually passed, but Hunt, who herself has a transgender son, revealed on the Senate floor that another trans youth had told her that they had attempted suicide during the legislative session. Hunt reported to her fellow state legislators what she told the trans youth: “’Do not let one of these trash people who I work with be the reason that you’re not here. They don’t matter. The potential you have for the rest of your life is so much bigger than the damage any of these trash people can do in their little four-year or eight-year term.’”

And we draw inspiration from transgender Montana state legislator Zooey Zephyr, who during floor debate on a bill to ban gender-affirming medical care in her state told her fellow legislators that if they voted in favor of the legislation: “I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.”
The bill passed and was enacted into law, the Montana House of Representatives censured Zephyr for her words, and the Speaker of the Montana House of Representatives asked her to apologize. But Zephyr did not back down for a second. She told Democracy Now that the Speaker “is asking me to be complicit in this Legislature’s eradication of our community. And I refuse to do so, and I will always refuse to do so.”

Today these bold leaders continue to fulfill that call of AIDS activists nearly forty years ago: “Act Up. Fight Back.” And this year in San Francisco, the LGBITQ community will march and gather together just as we’ve done for each of the last 53 years:  “Looking Back and Moving Forward.”

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Unstoppable: The March for LGBTIQ Equality in Japan
May 18, 2023

Unstoppable. That’s the word that summed up our feelings about the Japanese LGBTIQ movement after participating with over 200,000 other people in the recent 2-day Tokyo Rainbow Pride celebrations. A large rainbow festival took place on both Saturday, April 22, and Sunday, April 23, in Yoyogi Park, near the very popular and trendy Shibuya and Harajuku districts in Tokyo. Marches through these busy neighborhoods took place on both days.

Saturday was the Tokyo Liberation March, an intersectional march whose message was the need for society to embrace all minority groups on their own terms as different from the dominant majority culture. The march included diverse Japanese minority groups, such as Ainu, the indigenous people of northern Japan, and emphasized how minority groups should not have to prove their resemblance to the majority in order to be respected and be free from discrimination. This message of liberation is especially meaningful and powerful in Japanese culture, where pressure to adhere to perceived public norms is immense and constrains not only LGBTIQ people, women, and other visible minority groups, but indeed also any Japanese person who does not want to conform to apparent societal expectations.

Sunday was the Pride Parade, featuring numerous contingents and floats. Marriage For All Japan, was one of the largest contingents, composed not only of queer couples and LGBTIQ activists, but also of members of the Japanese parliament, known as the Diet. Numerous community groups participated in the march along with multiple domestic and international companies, who also had booths at the festival. Corporate support for LGBTIQ equality is crucial in this nation, in which business plays an outsized role in political life. But we were very pleased to see that community groups marched first in the parade with business groups following later.

Perhaps most politically significant about this year’s pride events was the outspoken presence of numerous ambassadors from G7 countries and other pro-LGBTIQ countries who spoke forcefully about the need for equality in Japan as well as elsewhere in the world. The eyes of the world are on Japan this week as the annual G7 conference opens on May 19 in Hiroshima. As readers of this column may know, Japan is the only G7 country without either marriage equality or civil unions, with five of the seven nations having full marriage equality. A 2020 OECD report found that Japan was next to last, just above Turkey, of the 35 OECD counties when it came to LGBTIQ legal rights.

British Ambassador Julia Longbottom, whose daughter recently married her wife in the U.K., gave a powerful and personal appeal for equality. Dutch Ambassador Peter van der Vliet took a not-so-subtle jab at the ruling Jimintō (LDP) party, which is now scrambling before the G7 conference begins to try to pass an LGBT “understanding” bill that still provides no substantive legal protections for queer people. The ambassador proclaimed that “better understanding is the starting point not the goal. Discrimination in any form is not part of free society.” Argentinian Ambassador Guillermo Hunt gave inspirational remarks about his nation’s leadership on marriage equality, recognition of gender identity, and non-binary people’s rights. Many ambassadors invited festival attendees to visit their nations’ booths at the festival.

U.S. Ambassador Rahm Emanuel’s turn to speak came last, and he took full advantage of it. He thanked the crowd for their patience in staying attentive for all the speeches, a virtue for which Japanese people are famous. But he immediately entreated queer people not to be patient when it comes to equality. Emanuel explained that the U.S. also had a booth at the festival, but he boldly implored the crowd not to stop at the booth, but instead to march right on by and into the streets to make their voices demanding equality heard. Two days later he followed up with a tweet: “The equality countdown begins now. As I said at Tokyo Rainbow Pride and will say again: no one should have patience when it comes to equal rights for all. This is the time; this is the moment to have your voices heard and our values adhered to … .”

In addition to his impassioned rhetoric, Emanuel also sounded a softer tone both at Pride and on Twitter. At Pride, he praised Japan as a beautiful home with people with beautiful hearts, urging the government to open that welcoming home to all people. And on Twitter he echoed: “It’s time for a new era where members of the LGBTQI+ community feel at home in” both countries, recognizing that the full equality had not yet been achieved on either side of the Pacific.

Emanuel’s reminder about the beauty that lies in the heart of Japanese culture and people resonates greatly with us and is the reason we are very hopeful when it comes to the future for LGBTIQ rights in Japan. Those feelings were palpable when the two final honorees took the stage at the end of the Pride festival.

They were renowned 74-year-old singer and television personality Kenichi Mikawa, who is openly gay and is known not only for his music but also his outspoken opinions; and long-time LGBTIQ activist Teishiro Minami, who is now over 90 years old. Minami has been a tireless queer activist for decades, serving as chief editor for gay magazines, a leader in the fight against HIV/AIDS—and an organizer of the very first Tokyo Pride parade in 1994. That parade began with only 50 marchers but grew to over 300 strong as onlookers joined in as the parade progressed. Today, many thousands of people march. Seeing Minami and Mikawa on stage brought one word to our minds in thinking about the future of the Japanese LGBTIQ rights movement:  unstoppable.

‘Let the Good Times Roll’: The Kawasaki Penis Festival!
April 20, 2023

When most Americans hear the word “Kawasaki,” they likely think of the renowned motorcycle company, with its famous advertising slogan: “Let the Good Times Roll.” But every year on the first Sunday in April in the Japanese city of Kawasaki, tens of thousands of people from Japan and around the world give new meaning to the phrase when they come together to celebrate the Shinto festival Kanamara Matsuri, also known as the “Festival of the Steel Phallus”—or simply the Penis Festival!

I was lucky to be able to attend this unabashed and uninhibited celebration of sexuality (in particular the male sex organ) a couple of weeks ago. It was delightful. Absolutely everyone was welcome, and people of all ages and from all walks of life came. Indeed, an announcer at the beginning of the event explicitly proclaimed over the loudspeaker that all genders were welcome at the festival.

Steeped in tradition, yet thoroughly modern; both solemn and irreverent; and powerfully primal, while uproariously funny—the festival is devoted to celebrating and protecting all that is good and sacred in sexuality and to promoting health, safety, and well-being, all in an atmosphere of pure joy, free of shame.

The festival has ancient roots, which purportedly lie in the legend of a demon spirit who possessed a woman, hid inside her vagina, and then bit off her husband’s penis when he attempted to have sex with her. A clever blacksmith created an iron phallus to trick the demon. When the demon chomped down on it, its teeth cracked to pieces and it quickly fled, never to be seen again.

The ancient Kanayama Shinto Shrine, where the festival is based, enshrines a large iron phallus and multiple smaller ones, and is dedicated to fertility, ease in childbirth, harmonious marital relationships, and protection from sexually transmitted diseases. Sex workers have traditionally sought support and protection at the shrine. Today, proceeds from the festival are reported to go to HIV/AIDS research.

The main attraction of the festival is the parade, which began this year, as always, when an old Shinto priest, dressed in beautiful and colorful traditional regalia, reverentially stepped out from the shrine gate, followed by a few selected honorees apparently dressed as the demon and other characters from the legend. The crowd then roared with excitement when three large mikoshi, or portable shrines containing phalluses, emerged one after the other from the shrine, carried on the shoulders of numerous devotees, who then paraded them through the streets of the surrounding neighborhoods.

Two of the mikoshi are traditional: the first is an erect iron phallus attached to a long, heavy wood board, and the second is an iron phallus standing in front of a thick portion of a pine tree trunk, housed in a traditionally decorated miniature Shinto shrine. The third and most flashy is known as “Elizabeth Mikoshi” and sports an enormous pink phallus. It is carried throughout the parade by dynamic drag queens.

The indefatigable parade marchers enthusiastically wound through the streets for hours. They often chanted exuberantly, sometimes did dances with the phallic shrines, and at other times played teeter-totter with them. On some occasions, certain members of a shrine contingent would push down hard on the wood frame supporting the phallus, while their comrades below were tasked with ensuring it didn’t touch the ground. The act appeared to harness energy from within them as they then continued along the parade route in ecstatic exuberance. Their exhilaration was infectious.

A well-attended penis festival took place on the shrine grounds after the parade, with colorful phallic candles, bright pink penis headdresses, and other phallic-shaped paraphernalia for sale. Many devotees obtained ritual stamps with original calligraphy and phallic artwork in their goshuincho or stamp/seal books in which they record their pilgrimages to various shrines and temples across the country. Other attendees hung traditional ema or small wood plaques on which they wrote their prayers and wishes for smooth childbirth and healthy babies. The Japanese feminist artist Vert created a colorfully expressionist painting of a climaxing phallus. One of her works is part of the permanent collection of the shrine.

A striking element of the festival was its liberating matter-of-factness. Parents posed for selfies with their small children licking phallic lollipops in front of large phallic statutes. No one batted an eye. Nor were there any protests or controversy surrounding the festival in refreshing contrast to what is going on in the U.S. in states like Florida and Tennessee, among others. It was all good clean fun. I left feeling renewed, refreshed, and full of joy. Indeed, Kawasaki let the good times roll!

Ethereal and Ephemeral
April 6, 2023

It’s sakura or cherry blossom season in Japan!  I’d never been in Japan at this celebratory time of the year, so for weeks I eagerly anticipated seeing splashy displays of bright pink blossoms everywhere. Although there are multiple varieties of cherry trees that boast such showy flowers, I was surprised by something different when the vast majority of the trees started to bloom in my neighborhood—and at temples and shrines, or along paths in public parks and on riverbanks, sometimes by the hundreds and even thousands.

The famous flowers of the dominant species of trees (somei-yoshino) were, in fact, an elegant white in color and sometimes a subtle pink, depending on the light and time of day. And I soon came to learn that the flowers are far more than mere objects of beauty in Japanese culture; they represent something deeper and more nuanced: the ethereal and ephemeral nature of life itself.

To be sure, Japanese and foreigners alike consider the cherry blossoms to be magnificently beautiful. I’ve noticed that Japanese people who often appear reserved in public seem much more outgoing when viewing the flowers. Smiles of delight naturally appear. Taking selfies in front of the flowers goes on everywhere. At first, I thought this a particularly modern phenomenon, which could be considered somewhat superficial (even as I did it myself). However, after I visited an historical exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum and viewed countless paintings of Japanese people admiring the blossoms through the centuries, I realized that selfies were simply the modern manifestation of a storied practice.

But as I experienced the blossoms—especially when seeing them en masse in a blur of color or as a single tree placed “just so” in a traditional Japanese garden—they seemed to possess an other-worldly, transcendent quality beyond selfie-beauty. Planting and placement of cherry blossom trees is very intentional in Japan. I’ve come to see the trees as an indulgence in the sublime that can clear and transform mind and spirit, whether it be through sensory stimulation or quiet calm.

And equally important about cherry blossoms and their meaning in Japanese culture is the fact that they bloom for a relatively short period of time. Traditional Japanese waka poets through the centuries have reflected on the transient quality of the sakura’s beauty. One asked: “O, cherry blossom? The moment that I see you bloom—have you already scattered[?]”

Indeed, when the wind blows, cherry blossom petals descend from tree branches, creating a spring snow shower with drifts of petals scattered on the surrounding ground. Another poet contemplated: “What breeze is it—that is not a cause of regret?”

Beyond these expressions of sorrow at the fleeting nature of the flowers, I believe these ancient poets are actually inviting us not just to see beauty at the moment when the cherry tree is in its full glory but to experience a type of beauty inherent in the omnipresent process of change in life itself that the sakura symbolizes. As the revered Japanese haiku master Bashō, who was also queer, wrote:

“Cherry blossom whirl, leaves fall, and the wind flits them both along the ground. We cannot arrest with our eyes or ears what lies in such things. Were we to gain mastery over them, we would find that the life of each thing had vanished without a trace.”

English translation of waka poetry from http://www.wakapoetry.net/

English translation of Bashō from Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa.

The Queerness of Camphor Trees
March 23, 2023

Two magnificent 103-year-old camphor trees stand together aside the majestic gate to the Meiji Shrine in the heart of Tokyo. A plaque underneath their broad and leafy branches proclaims that the trees “have grown under the protection of the deities to become huge and vivid and are considered to be sacred.”

The Meiji shrine is dedicated to the deified spirits of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken. The Meiji period from 1868–1912 is of enormous importance to modern Japan. It marked the end of the Tokugawa period, famous for the rule of the shoguns and Japan’s isolation from most of the rest of the world. Faced with pressure from the United States and European countries, Japan during the Meiji period turned to the West. The country rapidly adopted many Western ideas, modernized, and grew to become a major world power.

Sadly one of the ideas Japan adopted from the West was homophobia. For centuries, Japan had been open to many forms of what today we might call queerness, perhaps most notably male homosexuality as part of samurai and Buddhist monastic culture. But during the Meiji period, Japan criminalized male same-sex sexual activity for the only time in its history—thankfully for only eight years. (Japan has never criminalized female homosexuality.) During the Meiji period, “there was a widespread belief that homosexuality was a perverted sexual desire which ought to be treated” as the Tokyo District Court explained very recently in its decision in the ongoing marriage equality litigation. Clearly, such ideas were linked to Japan’s embrace of the West.

Knowing this history, we felt a bit ill at ease visiting a shrine devoted to celebrating the Emperor Meiji. We were even more disturbed when we read the next bit of information on the plaque next to the camphor trees: the trees are renowned as the “husband and wife” trees. And these “coupled trees” are “a symbol of happy marriage and harmonious life within the family.”

Huh? These lovely trees are not simply trees for all to enjoy; they are married, heterosexual trees? If so, they clearly do not symbolize happy and harmonious married life for us or for other LGBTIQ couples in Japan who are denied the right to marry in Japan based on laws that grew out of Western influences cultivated during the Meiji period, the very era the shrine commemorates. The plaque further offers the wish to all visitors: “May happiness be brought to you through the divine power of these trees.” We knew that this blessing did not extend to us and other LGBTIQ people in Japan.

The shrine’s particular anthropomorphizing of the camphor trees became especially absurd to us after we did a bit of research regarding the biology of camphor trees. The University of Redlands website explains that the flowers of camphor trees are, in fact, “hermaphroditic, meaning that every flower contains a male and female part.” Thus, if one is going to anthropomorphize camphor trees, they are clearly not cisgendered and straight as the plaque proclaims, but instead intersexed and queer.

A few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to visit the ancient Miyajima Island shrine near Hiroshima, with its famous vermilion torii gate that appears to float on the water of the surrounding bay. Although a gate has existed on the spot for nearly 900 years, the current torii dates back to 1875. And it’s made of camphor wood because of wood’s strong resilience and its ability to resist decay from the salt water and other challenging elements of the environment in which it stands. Indeed, as we stopped to reflect, we realized that on the morning of August 6, 1945, these camphor trees that composed the torii not only stood witness to the mushroom cloud that rose in the sky just ten miles away in Hiroshima, but also withstood the radiation from the atomic blast.

Given all of this, we are tempted to lay claim to the camphor trees as a symbol of queerness and resilience in the face of adversity. But in the true spirit of the LGBTIQ movement, we prefer something else: let the camphor trees be themselves—strong and beautiful just as they are and always will be.

Queer Rights Firestorm Ignited in Japan
February 23, 2023

His words were searing. “I would hate it if [an LGBTQ couple] lived next to me. I would hate to even see [them].” So remarked Masayoshi Arai, Executive Secretary and close aide to Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, to reporters on February 3. And that was not all. He further opined that if Japan were to have marriage equality, “some people will abandon the country.”

Kishida fired Arai the next day, claiming that his ruling conservative Jimintō party (also known as the LDP) sought to create “a sustainable and inclusive society in which diversity is recognized.” But Arai’s words ignited a firestorm here in Japan. They tore something open. The underlying queerphobia at the top of Jimintō that for years has blocked passage of LGBTIQ rights in the country was laid bare for all to see.

The prime minister’s remarks after firing Arai also seemed to ring hollow to many. Just two days before Arai made his comments, Kishida himself prevaricated when an opposition member of the Diet (Japanese Parliament) confronted him about the government’s inaction on marriage equality. The prime minister replied that it was a topic to be considered “very carefully,” claiming that permitting loving, committed LGBTQ couples to marry would “change people’s perception of family, values, and society.” It was typical verbiage that Kishida and prior Jimintō leaders have repeated for years now, even as public opinion polling indicates that substantial majorities of the Japanese population support marriage equality.

And it comes on the heels of Kishida last year delivering a slap in the face to the Japanese queer community when, in a cabinet reshuffle in the wake of the Unification Church scandal, Kishida elevated two Jimintō members who were notorious for scurrilous anti-gay remarks that they had made. One was Mio Sugita, who was appointed Parliamentary Vice-Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications. In 2018, she accused LGBTIQ people of not being “productive,” based on her ignorant belief that queer people could not have children. Sugita had also taken numerous anti-LGBTIQ positions and made very public remarks against ethnic minorities in Japan as well as women. Sugita herself was forced to resign late last year because she refused to retract or apologize for a number of her remarks.

The other was Kazuo Yana, who was appointed State Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science & Technology. In 2021, Yana declared that LGBTIQ people are against “preservation of the species in terms of biology.” Yana remains in office.

In an attempt to quell the firestorm over Arai’s remarks, Jimintō agreed reluctantly to reopen discussions for submission of a stalled bill that would merely “promote understanding” of LGBTIQ people among the public, but contained no substantive anti-discrimination provisions. At a February 14th rally and press conference, LGBTIQ activists and opposition Diet members fired back: “We don’t need understanding. We need an anti-discrimination law.” One activist pointed out incisively that Aria’s comments revealed that it was the Jimintō leadership, not the general public, that needed to learn understanding.

Indeed, many diverse LGBTIQ and allied advocates spoke passionately at the event. Addressing another Jimintō claim that passing LGBTIQ rights legislation could polarize society, a Diet member explained that anti-discrimination laws did not divide society, but that discrimination itself does. A queer activist, whose entire face was masked to disguise her personal identity out of fear of discrimination, explained that Jimintō’s inaction had normalized the notion that LGBTIQ people would have no legal rights in Japan.

An LGBTIQ professor elucidated that for far too long the majority population and their needs and attitudes had been the subject of the legislative process, relegating queer people and other minorities to the position of mere objects. It was now time for LGBTIQ people and other minorities themselves to be the subject of legislation that would value and protect their lives. Another activist pleaded “how much harder” do we have to work to try to get legal rights—what more do we need to do?—“isn’t it the government’s responsibility to protect our rights as citizens?”

A Japanese LGBTIQ advocate of Korean descent linked hate speech against Japanese of Korean ancestry to Arai’s remarks, which the activist characterized as hate-speech against LGBTIQ people from the top of the Japanese government. Others spoke about the impact of the remarks on the emotional health of LGBTIQ youth, many of whom experience depression and suicidal ideation, and in the words of one speaker were “suffocating” and in need of clean air to breathe.

One of the last speakers, a queer sex-worker activist, brought it back to Arai’s words themselves in a very personal way. Speaking to Aria rhetorically, they said: “Would you feel disgust if you saw me? … I wouldn’t look with disgust at you.”

The Associated Press reported that the day after the press conference, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel weighed in, expressing “’full confidence’” that the Japanese government will take the necessary steps to ban discrimination against LGBTQ people.”

The pressure is on. The eyes of the world will turn to Japan when the nation hosts the annual G7 Summit in Hiroshima in May. There’s no time to waste for equality.

Sumo Dancers
February 9, 2023

The powerful Japanese giants, weighing as much as 350 pounds and clad only in their mawashi (loin cloths), dig their heals into the compressed clay surface of the dohyo (the sumo wrestling ring). These rishiki (literally strong warriors) crouch in fearless and commanding postures, synchronize their breaths as one, and when they both have touched their hands to the ground, lunge forward to engage each other with all the physical strength, as well as mental acumen, they possess. The sumo match has begun.

The titanic rishiki push, tug, slap, and grab at each other’s flesh. Sometimes they find their bodies locked together, faces cheek to cheek, in a forceful and concentrated embrace, as they mightily struggle to gain an advantage. Other times, one wrestler may try to wrap their arm around the other’s lower back to grab the other’s mawashi (sumo waist belt holding up the loin cloth) and flip them to the ground.

The clash of these powerful warriorsis a spectacular display of primal energy incarnate. They seek to call forth the strength of a tsunami to overwhelm their opponent.

But the actual match itself is often very short. It ends as soon as one wrestler forces the other out of the dohyo or when any part of one wrestler’s body other than the soles of their feet touches the ground. That can occur in less than a minute, even mere seconds, depending on how successful one of the wrestlers is at outsmarting their opponent or physically dominating them.

One reason the match itself is designed to be short is that it does not, in fact, stand on its own by itself. It exists only as one component of a much greater ritual, whose meaning dates back millennia. The match is the highlight of an elaborate Shinto-based ceremony that entails many forms and practices and in which all participants play indispensable roles. It’s also one of many matches held on a given day of sumo wrestling. Indeed, on the day of matches that I attended at the Tokyo Nihon Sumo Kyokai (Tokyo Grand Sumo Tournament) recently, almost 70 matches were held.

Each series of upper division matches begins with the pageantry of the dohyo-iri in which all the rishiki enter the stage and form a ceremonial circle around the outside of the ring. They are clad in their keshō-mawashi (embroidered full-length aprons extending from their waists), and they raise their arms in an ancient purification act. They then exit the stage as a group to reenter when it’s time for their match.

Yobidashi (attendants) carefully prepare and maintain the dohyo before, during, and after the match. They meticulously sweep the thin layer of sand spread on top of the clay surface of the ring to ensure an even surface. They create beautiful patterns through the graceful movements of their brooms, bringing the same care and attention to their work that Zen monks might give to sweeping the paths in a temple garden. The yobidashi, who is the ring announcer, and is always dressed in colorful traditional clothing, sings the wrestler’s names to call them to the ring in a uniquely stylized manner akin to that of a Kabuki performer. His powerful voice needs no microphone to be heard.

The rishiki themselves engage in elaborate rituals such as raising a leg and then stomping it to the ground to scare off evil spirits. They throw salt into the ring for cleansing every time they enter the ring, and they raise their arms ceremonially when they initially face their opponent to show that they have no hidden weapons.  As soon as the match ends, the rishiki assume positions on either side of the dohyo and bow to each other, just before the referee acknowledges the match’s winner. And even as they are still exiting the ring, the yobidashi is calling the next competitors to come forward.

Everything is in perpetual motion. Sumo is believed to have begun in prehistoric times as a devotional dance of hope for a good harvest. It has evolved through numerous eras of Japanese history to its present form that remains vital today.

I like that sumo appears to have begun not as a fight, but as a dance, and that despite the brutality and competitiveness of the match itself, it is part of a ceremonial practice in which all the participants, including the rishiki, exist only as part of a greater whole. Our world needs more dancing together in all the different forms it may take.

Harnessing “Double Gender” Power in the New Year
January 13, 2023

Happy New Year 2023! In Japan, that means marking the beginning of the Year of the Rabbit with celebrations, gatherings of family and friends, and traditions lasting for days. On New Year’s Eve, the temple bell is rung a symbolic 108 times based on Buddhist custom, with the final stroke occurring at the moment of midnight to usher in the new year. Hatsumode or first temple visits ensue on the initial days of January in the hope of well-being and good fortune for the year to come. These traditions have been observed for over a thousand years and remain relevant for many people today.

Indeed, Japan has a long history dating back many centuries, and queerness has been part of Japanese culture from the first time Japan’s myths, legends, and history were recorded in writing in the year 712 in the Kojiki or “Records of Ancient Matters.” The Kojiki recounts the story of a Prince Ousu, who later became known as Yamato Takeru, donning female clothing in order to infiltrate the mansion of two brothers who were his enemies, thus enabling him to slay them both. Junko Mitsuhashi, the modern transgender writer and researcher on the social history of sexuality, describes the power that Prince Ousu acquired by defying gender norms and wearing female clothing to defeat his enemy as “sublime” and “extraordinary.”  Mitsuhashi proclaims it “Double-Gender power.”

Over 1,300 years later as we celebrate the new year, we see young queer Japanese demonstrating their own fearless versions and visions of sublime queer power in the name of love. Mitsuhashi explains that the name Takeru, which Prince Ousu later became known as, means “the brave.” For young queer Japanese, courage does not mean murdering one’s enemies by sword but prevailing through authenticity and joy.

At a recent LGBTIQ event in Tokyo called “Colorful Blankets,” I had the opportunity to meet young activists who are making change. One of them was a delightful trio of transmen, Asahi, O-Chan, and Masa, known as Mutant Wave. All three are former players in the Nadeshiko Japanese women’s national soccer league, and together as Mutant Wave are educators on LGBTIQ diversity at schools and corporations and in the Japanese media, as well as YouTube personalities. Their message is bright, positive, and full of hope, and their mode of communication imaginative and creative. Mutant Wave’s message is also not confined to LGBTIQ understanding but a broader message embracing everyone’s inherent self-worth no matter how they may be perceived as different.

Another pair of young activists are Kane and Kotfe, a dynamic gay couple together for 11 years, who speak with authenticity and candor about the struggles they have faced as gay people and whose love for each other and care for others is palpable when you are in their presence. Kane was an Osaka firefighter for 11 years, and Kotfe was a Kyoto police officer for 16 years. They both quit their jobs because of how difficult and exhausting it was for them to be who they were as gay men in their professions.

They now devote their lives to educating people about the lives of LGBTIQ people by intimately sharing their personal lives through YouTube and social media and in the Japanese national media. They are prominent advocates for marriage equality. Last year, Kane told the Huffington Post, “I want a society where people don’t have to suffer because they are gay, forcibly hide it, or quit their jobs.” He explained further that through their revealing the truth of their lives, he and Kotfe “want to try to see what would happen if we lived freely as we are.” He hoped others would be able to do the same.

At Japanese new year, many of the traditional osechi-ryori or new year foods hold symbolic meaning of hope for the future: black beans for good health, kelp for happiness, prawns for long life, and herring roe for healthy offspring. A favorite of ours is the lotus root with its many tubular holes through which one can see, symbolizing moving forward gracefully in the new year unhampered by obstacles. The lotus indeed is a central image in Buddhism because from the muddy waters in which its roots lie, a beautiful and radiant flower emerges above the water.

This year, our new year’s wishes are for the health and happiness of LGBTIQ people around the world — for the long life of the life of the LGBTIQ community itself and the well-being of queer youth and the children of LGBTIQ people. When we peer through the lotus root, we know that obstacles to equality, dignity, and freedom remain, but with young vibrant activists like Mutant Wave and Kane & Kotfe, we know that the future will be filled with radiance.

Junko Mitsuhashi quotation from “Mystique and Might: Why We Love Cross-Dressing,” in The Power of Clothing:  History of Cross-Dressing in Japan (Shito Museum of Art, 2022)

Fighting for Equality from Washington, D.C., to Tokyo
December 15, 2022

A few weeks ago, I was with hundreds of other LGBTIQ people and supporters outside the Tokyo District Court building awaiting the court’s decision in an historic Japanese marriage equality lawsuit when I received astonishing marriage equality news from nearly 7,000 miles away. The U.S. Senate cleared the way for passage of the Respect for Marriage Act with a super-majority that included an astounding twelve Republican senators.

Passage of the Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA) is an extraordinary achievement for the American marriage equality movement after years of struggle and continual hard work. We remember how incensed we were 26 years ago in September 1996 when Congress overwhelmingly passed the notorious Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and President Bill Clinton signed it into law in an act of political cowardice.

Republicans sponsored DOMA as a cynical political ploy in a Presidential election year to put President Clinton and other Democrats in the hot seat. All Republicans save one and a majority of Democrats, including liberal stalwarts such as Senators Paul Wellstone, Patrick Leahy, and Carl Levin, as well as then-Senator Joe Biden, voted in favor. It felt as if virtually no one was truly on our side.

Eight years later, it got worse. President George W. Bush and many of his fellow Republicans proposed a federal constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage nationwide, again as part of political tactics to stoke homophobic fears and gain Republican votes in a Presidential election year. Over time, Republicans introduced various versions of the anti-equality amendment. A 2005 Senate version had 33 sponsors, and a 2006 House one had 135 sponsors.

From 2004–2008, 31 states voted against marriage equality in statewide referenda, sponsored by conversative political forces to raise money and gain power on the backs of queer couples. The Proposition 8 campaign to take away the freedom to marry in California alone raised $22 million dollars, nearly 40% of it from members of the Mormon Church.

In light of this history, passage of RFMA, although not perfect legislation, marks an enormous milestone. RFMA represents bipartisan Congressional affirmation of the principles of LGBTIQ equality and freedom at the heart of the Supreme Court’s landmark Windsor and Obergefell marriage equality decisions. RFMA wipes DOMA off the books once and for all, and it stipulates that the federal government and states must recognize marriages of LGBTIQ couples that were valid wherever they were performed even if the Supreme Court were to reverse its marriage equality landmarks—something extreme conservatives on the Court currently lack the votes to do. And in a dramatic reversal, the Mormon Church even supported the bill, claiming it did so because RFMA contains religious exemptions that, in fact, are already generally established in law.

Across the Pacific Ocean in Tokyo, the court issued a decidedly timid and ambiguous decision in the historic marriage equality lawsuit brought by Japanese queer couples. It ruled that the lack of a legal system in Japan that recognized same sex couples as family violated the Japanese Constitution’s guarantees of “individual dignity and the right to equality.” But it also held that the nation’s constitution excluded same-sex couples from marriage. The Court made no comment on how a future court should rule if the Japanese Parliament (known as the Diet) continues to sit on its hands and do nothing, leaving same-sex couples with no rights or protections under Japanese law.

The Tokyo decision was just a lower court decision with additional decisions from other district and appellate courts and the Japanese Supreme Court yet to come. A lot of political organizing and lobbying in the very conservative Diet remains to be done as well.

The concurrent passage of RFMA and the recent Tokyo marriage equality decision left us pondering many things. RFMA is a great victory, but it came over a quarter century since passage of DOMA and 18 years after San Francisco’s glorious Winter of Love. Was that a short or very long time, or both?

Why did the Mormon Church put us through the nightmare of Prop. 8, just to turn around and support nationwide marriage equality 14 years later? Sadly, the Mormon Church’s official statement supporting RFMA took no responsibility for the harm they caused millions of LGBTIQ people, their children, family, and friends.

The Japanese courts and legislators often speak of gradual change taking place in Japanese society and the need for careful consideration going forward. But public support for marriage equality in Japan is already strong, and time ran out for one of the plaintiffs in the Tokyo case who died last year. Another plaintiff, who gave extremely forthcoming testimony in the case—something requiring exceptional courage in Japan—was dismayed with the court’s recent decision, wondering aloud why he and his fiancé went through it all if this was the result. The entrenched conservative politicians, who lead the governing Jiminto party and are likely still influenced by the Unification Church and other right-wing interest groups, appear to be the real roadblocks to equality in Japan.

What sustains us most going forward in the global movement for LGBTIQ equality are the many times we feel genuine connection and mutual support with others in the movement. Those moments give us profound conviction about and confidence in the inherent worth and goodness of the LGBTIQ movement and the queer community at its best. Happy holidays, everyone, and onward together in 2023!

Pride and Prejudice in Japan
December 1, 2022

“Regressive,” “outdated,” and “abusive.” These are three of the words that Human Rights Watch has used to describe Japan’s requirements for transgender people to be able to change their legal gender. For transgender Japanese to legally be their true gender, they must not only be sterilized, have alternative genital construction surgery, and receive a psychiatric diagnosis, but also they must not be married nor have children under age 18. These draconian requirements violate transgender Japanese basic rights to physical and personal dignity, autonomy, and privacy, as well as reinforce social prejudice and foster personal self-repression.

Thus, thousands of transgender and other LGBTIQ people along with many allies made a bold statement when they took to the streets for the second annual Tokyo Transgender March, which began at a central location in Tokyo and proceeded to Shinjuku Station, the world’s busiest railway station with over 3.5 million people using the station daily. The marchers carried signs such as “I am who I say I am,” “I, not the state nor religion, decide,” “smash the binary ‘cistem,’” and “refugee + trans solidarity,” and held a rally with speakers at Shinjuku station.

During the event, marchers displayed determination and forcefulness more than anger, and above all a sense of joy, pride, and community. At a large festival held before the march, numerous organizations offered resources and information for community members and the general public. Together, participants created an atmosphere of welcome, safety, and belonging for each other.

The same sort of power in self-expression and community was on full display at avant-garde photographer Nagi Yoshida’s stunning exhibition Hero & Queen, which just closed in Tokyo. The provocative show juxtaposed photos of indigenous peoples from around the globe in traditional makeup and clothing with those of drag queens from New York to Hong Kong to Osaka decked out in their latest creations. The exhibition invited the viewer to ponder what commonality two seemingly divergent types of people—indigenous peoples living in geographically remote locales and drag queens living in the heart of some of the world’s largest cities—may have.

One drag queen who was interviewed for a video component of the exhibition opined that “life sucks, but there’s a lot that’s really good in it, if you know where to look for it.” As the industrialized world encroaches upon indigenous people’s lands and the climate crisis threatens their survival, many drag queens face or have faced societal or familial rejection, as well as discrimination or violence, just for being themselves.  For both, their striking personal presentations through their hair, makeup, attire, and personalities exude vibrancy, strength, creativity, and celebration of life to all who see them through Yoshida’s brilliant photography.

The need to protect both the world’s indigenous people’s lives and to defend the human rights of transgender and other queer people in Japan and elsewhere is urgent. Indeed, a recent survey conducted by the Japanese educational non-profit Rebit found that nearly half—48.1 percent—of LGBTIQ respondents aged 12 to 20 had thought of killing themselves over the past year, with approximately 14% actually attempting to do so. The beautiful human images in Yoshida’s photography exhibition and the courageous joy of all those who participated in the Tokyo Transgender March provide reason and inspiration to continue forward in the global movement to make the world a better place for all.

A Queer Kaleidoscope of Japan
November 17, 2022

“Taking what is there just as it is and presenting it ‘just as it is.’” That’s how the masterful modern artist Lee Ufan describes the purpose of his sculpture and painting in a stunning recent exhibition of his work at Tokyo’s National Art Center. Ufan pursues his goals through austere works composed of natural elements that embody both profound stillness and dynamic movement simultaneously. We perceive LGBTIQ people as attempting to realize Ufan’s mission in our own way: to be free to be who we are just as we are, to love as we love, and to participate in a movement to achieve legal and social equality by presenting ourselves to the world as we truly are.

Being “just as you are” and presenting it to the world is complicated for many Japanese LGBTIQ people today because of immense social pressure to conform to perceived norms and a shared social ethic that prizes privacy in one’s personal life. But over the past few weeks, we’ve witnessed a beautiful queer kaleidoscope of Japan.

Most prominently, Tokyo, the world’s most populous metropolis, made international news when it began legally recognizing LGBTIQ couples by instituting a same-sex partnership system on November 1. Although these certificates are a far cry from the freedom to marry, the victory in Tokyo represents a vital step forward in the march to marriage equality in Japan. Now, over 62% of Japan’s population live in places that offer partnership certificates that provide some form of recognition and very limited rights to same-sex couples.

We were honored on the first day of partnerships to join in events with pioneering Japanese queer activists who had worked for years to achieve this goal. One of those activists, Soyoka Yamamoto, who along with her partner of many years Yoriko received a certificate, explained that creation of the partnerships sends a powerful message to young LGBTIQ Japanese that you can “be yourself” and “love whomever you want” and that Tokyo “has your back” in doing so.

Also seeking to make LGBTIQ history in Tokyo is the amazing Karen Yoda, who is running to become Mayor of Shinjuku City within metropolitan Tokyo. If successful, Yoda would make history as the first transgender mayor in Japan. We met Yoda three years ago when she was a city council member and will never forget her energetic presence and infectious smile. It was a joy to reconnect with Yoda and her longtime partner the evening the towering Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building was illuminated in rainbow colors to celebrate the beginning of Tokyo partnerships. We hope Yoda soon becomes Shinjuku’s mayor.

In the mountains 250 miles of Tokyo, the LGBTIQ community in Yamagata Prefecture was making history of its own when it held its first ever Pride march and celebration just days before Tokyo partnerships began. Interestingly, the event, named the “Yamagata Colorful Parade,” was organized primarily by allies and people who did not identify openly as LGBTIQ because of the social pressure and risk of discrimination that LGBTIQ people face in this conservative mountainous region.

However, many LGBTIQ people attended and marched. One was Mai Kato, a lesbian city council member in her 20s from Morioka, the capital city of nearby Iwate Prefecture. Attending Stonewall 50 in New York three years ago inspired Kato to run for office herself, and she along with her partner Ai (which means love in Japanese) are a compelling new presence in Japanese politics, representing the future of the queer movement.

Also present was the self-described “Wafuku Anarchist” (wafuku refers to traditional Japanese clothing), an extraordinary fashion designer who sports a mohawk, beard, red nail polish, and kimono styling. Meeting the Wafuku Anarchist was the perfect complement to our visit the week before to the pathbreaking art exhibition at the Shoto Museum of Art in Tokyo, entitled The Power of Clothing: History of Cross-Dressing in Japan. https://tinyurl.com/9msy43zz

The exhibition documents the 1,300-year-old tradition of cross-dressing in Japan that continues today. It invites viewers to “consider ‘the power of clothing’’ and “its ability to transcend the sexes” in the context of the recent movement to “dismantle the binary stipulation of male/female” and “recognize that human beings do not have any fixed gender.” The museum can “envision the very term ‘cross-dressing’ falling out of use” because “the term ‘cross-dressing’ itself is based on the premise” of illusory notions of “gender dichotomy” and “incontrovertible gender differences.”

In the final installation of the Ufan exhibition, a large “stone sits facing a blank white canvas on the wall.” In the words of Ufan, “the way the two face each other gives a sense of something organic and dynamic occurring. We envisioned a tabula rasa, a blank slate, something that existed before painting and before words or will exist after them.”

Can we as LGBTIQ people be an organic and dynamic blank slate as well? Can we simply be ourselves and love as we love without external interference of any form?

After the Ufan exhibition, John stopped by the 138-year-old Kanda Matsuya soba shop to slurp noodles. As he did, he watched the soba master meticulously hand cut each noodle from the carefully rolled dough. Can we as LGBTIQ people demonstrate that same quality of care for ourselves and each other? Our experiences in Japan over the past few weeks give us hope for the future.

OMG Osaka! Rainbow Festa 2022
November 3, 2022

“Oh My God Osaka!” Those were the words I heard belted out joyously from the stage at the recent annual Rainbow Festa (or Osaka Pride) on October 8 and 9 by the famous Obachaan, an irrepressible troupe of singing and dancing Japanese grandmothers. Obachaan gained world renown when they released a rap-style video to welcome world leaders to the 2019 G20 Summit in Osaka. They are huge supporters of the LGBTIQ community. Their joy is contagious; it’s impossible not to smile, laugh, and start moving to their music.

Even though the members of Obachaan themselves are not gay, they embody the soul and spirit of the diverse Osaka queer community. They shared the stage with many talented LGBTIQ entertainers, such as the sensational singer Michiru Sasano, traditional Okinawan drummers, and famed drag queen Baby Vagi.

This year’s Osaka Pride was the largest on record, with 20,000 people in attendance, according to Kansai Television. Although that number may seem small compared to events in the U.S. and some other parts of the world, it’s a significant turnout demonstrating substantial progress in Japan, where publicly coming out as LGBTIQ remains difficult for many people.

The Rainbow Festa provides an opportunity for many different parts of the queer community and its allies, both in the Kansai region of Japan where Osaka is located and other parts of central Japan, to come together. One of the most prominent organizations present was Marriage for All Japan, the umbrella group coordinating marriage equality lawsuits across the country. In June, the Osaka trial level court in a clearly illogical opinion ruled against LGBTIQ couples, but plaintiff couples like Akiyoshi Tanaka and Yuki Kawata remain steadfast in their determination as the case moves forward on appeal.

Many groups at the event were devoted to providing opportunities for diverse types of queer people to come together for support and community. They came from many different parts of central Japan, such as the delightful group MixRainbow from Amagasaki, an industrial city near Osaka that is not a tourist destination. The fact that many groups from diverse parts of Japan are forming—and many locales are now organizing their own local Pride celebrations—marks a significant increase in the visibility of LGBTIQ Japanese and demonstrates the desire of Japanese queer people to come together to form community.

Transgender Japanese were also very prominent at the event, with support groups, service providers, and advocacy groups all participating. The Queer & Women’s Resource Center, one of Osaka’s oldest LGBTIQ organizations, promoted next month’s Tokyo TransMarch 2022.

Especially encouraging were the number of student groups present. A group of junior and senior high school students were dedicated to gender freedom in school uniforms, still required apparel in many Japanese schools.

I was particularly struck when I saw the Kobe University booth, featuring a photo of a student holding a “Silence=Death” sign with the pink triangle. Stuart and I, along with many others, had held that same sign over 35 years ago during the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. These Kobe University students employed that message today as part of their successful activist campaign to support transgender students’ right to use their chosen names and otherwise be fully respected at the university. Calling themselves the Project for Kobe University for Everyone, the group advocates for diversity and inclusion and not only pressured the university to change its transgender student policies but also make outing a queer person a violation of school policy. If employed more broadly, this type of assertive activism has the potential to advance LGBTIQ rights in Japan like never before.

From students to grannies and everyone in between, I came away from the Rainbow Festa with a heart full of joy and energy and found myself falling in love with the spirit of the city. “OMG Osaka!”

‘Love Is Now the Law’ in Cuba!
October 6, 2022

“Love is now the law” was the jubilant declaration of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel on September 25 when Cuban voters overwhelmingly approved marriage equality as part of a larger revision of the country’s family law in a national referendum. The island nation is now the 34th in the world with the freedom to marry.

It’s difficult to overstate the significance of this LGBTIQ rights victory. Years ago, in the first decades of the Fidel Castro regime, LGBTIQ Cubans faced widespread persecution and were forced into work camps for supposed “re-education.” The massive 1980 Mariel Boatlift, in which thousands of gay people fled as the Castro regime sought to rid Cuba of gay people, brought international attention to the repression. The personal experience of the boatlift was documented in famed gay Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas’ acclaimed 1992 autobiography Before Night Falls, which was also adapted into an opera and feature film.

Following the recent vote, President Díaz-Canel proclaimed that “justice has been done,” and that passage of the new law helped “pay a debt to various generations of Cubans whose domestic plans had been waiting years for this law.” Díaz-Canel first supported marriage equality publicly four years ago in 2018 as “part of eliminating any type of discrimination in society,” noting that Cuban society had undergone a “massive evolution of thought.” He led the charge to pass the referendum, which in addition to marriage equality authorizes LGBTIQ couples’ adoption of children, provides for surrogacy, strengthens rights of women and elders, and calls for household gender equality.

Fidel Castro’s niece Mariela Castro, a prominent queer rights supporter and director of the National Center for Sex Education, was also instrumental in marriage equality and LGBTIQ adoption rights becoming a reality in Cuba. On election night, Castro echoed Díaz-Canel in a tweet: “Now love is law on the island of freedom … . Long live the Cuban Revolution! Ratification of the most emancipatory, fair, and beautiful law in the world, which regulates family law.”

Indeed, the victory makes Cuba the first communist country in the world with marriage equality, evincing that the freedom to marry and LGBTIQ rights do not depend on any particular political or economic system. They are a universal human right. Amendments to the Cuban Constitution in 2019 outlawed discrimination of any kind on the basis of gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation. Cuba is now one of the leading countries in the world when it comes to formal LGBTIQ legal rights.

We are cognizant that Cubans, including LGBTIQ Cubans, do not enjoy freedom in all aspects of their lives, and recently crackdowns on political dissent have intensified in the face of widespread anti-government protests. Some activists accuse the government of using the referendum in a cynical ploy to burnish Cuba’s international image on human rights at a time of increased political repression.

We deplore political persecution in any form, but the notion that Cuba would use enactment of marriage equality and LGBTIQ adoption rights in a major breakthrough for queer rights to improve its international reputation illuminates how far we have come as a movement. We wish more nations would do the same.

Some news outlets have also noted that government referenda in Cuba usually pass with 90 percent of the vote, indicating that 33 percent opposition was unusually high. Analysts attribute the opposition vote to evangelical Christians, Catholics, and some Cubans who simply wanted to register discontent with the government overall. But the fact that 33 percent of voters opposed the referendum suggests that the citizens felt free to vote their conscience and that a resounding two-thirds of Cubans truly embraced the historic change in favor of queer rights.

Today, we salute all LGBTIQ Cubans and their supporters, some of whom gave their lives for freedom. We honor their strength and perseverance. There are few sweeter words to a marriage equality activist than “love is now the law.”

Japanese Lawmaker Making History in the Footsteps of Harvey Milk and José Sarria
September 8, 2022

When Taiga Ishikawa, the first openly gay man to serve in the Diet (Japanese Parliament), visited the exquisite GLBT Historical Society Museum in the Castro last week, queer history came alive for him as it has done for countless other museum visitors.

Ishikawa, currently the only openly LGBTIQ Diet member, is leading the charge for advancement of LGBTIQ rights in Japan’s national legislature. Harvey Milk has long been a hero to Ishikawa. When Ishikawa viewed the solemn display of the suit that Milk was wearing when he was assassinated, the Japanese leader reflected through a translator:

“Years ago I saw the Harvey Milk movie and it really inspired me. I wanted to be like him. And so, I’ve been working hard since then. And he was killed when he was 48 years old. I am 48 this year—so it really gives me a lot to think about. Everything he left behind. His legacy. Everything that you are treasuring here. I really want to walk in those footsteps in Japan. Carry on that legacy.”

Ishikawa, clearly a student of LGBTIQ history, also already knew about another San Francisco legend, José Sarria, who is also featured prominently in the museum.  Sarria was a San Francisco drag community pioneer and dynamic local performer, who was the first known openly gay person to run for elective office back in 1961. Ishikawa seemed clearly inspired to see the museum’s display of Sarria’s military photo, coupled with the lavish costume kimono Sarria wore on stage in Madama Butterfly, along with Sarria’s political campaign poster.

Ishikawa explained he believed that Sarria was politically “very empowering” because, even though he didn’t win, “he got a lot of votes,” thereby making “the community stronger.” Ishikawa drew a parallel to the emerging visibility of LGBTIQ Japanese politicians today, where in the latest Diet election four openly LGBTIQ candidates ran. Although all unfortunately lost, including Otsuji Kanako, the first elected openly LGBTIQ Diet member, Ishikawa emphasized “just the fact that they were running for office in itself is very important.”

Just like Milk and Sarria before him in San Francisco, Ishikawa spoke boldly about the political change needed in Japan today to achieve marriage equality and other critical legal protections against LGBTIQ discrimination.

Since the tragic July 8 assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan has been engulfed in political upheaval with revelations of close ties between the conservative South Korean based Unification Church, founded by the controversial Reverend Sun Myung Moon, and conservative leaders in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), including Abe. Abe and his political allies for years stymied progress on marriage equality and other anti-discrimination laws in the Diet.

Ishikawa, a member of the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), explained: “We have known actually for quite a long time that the Unification Church is behind blocking gay marriage, and that they have been influencing the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. The general public did not know that. It was also taboo to talk about that in political circles. But now that is changing.”

The Unification Church is known for its exploitative fundraising tactics. Ishikawa described it as “more of a cult than a religion,” explaining how they have “tricked and brainwashed a lot of (Japanese) people into giving them a lot of money.” According to an August Kyodo News survey, at least 82 LDP Diet members had some connection with the church.
Ishikawa emphasized: “I think it’s extremely important right now to expose those crimes so that the politicians will sever their ties with the Unification Church. I really want to spread the word to people that the fact this criminal organization had strong ties to the Japanese government was a big problem.”

Ishikawa explained that, according to Japanese polling, “more than 70% of the populace supports marriage equality” and that when he talks directly with LDP leaders, “there are actually many people who are very supportive of marriage equality.” He believes that, if the LDP severs its ties with the Unification Church, “it’s going to mean a huge change to attitudes in regard to marriage equality” in the Diet, and “it might be surprisingly easy to establish gay marriage.” He added that he hoped his own CDP party comes to power to do that as well as to enact many other laws supporting LGBTIQ people and other disadvantaged minorities in Japan.

After giving Ishikawa an intimate and in-depth tour of the multi-faceted museum, Direct of Development & Communications Andrew Shaffer, who hosted Ishikawa along with the Historical Society’s Mark Sawchuk and Leigh Pfeffer, explained, “We don’t like history to just live on a shelf and be a lesson from the past. We want it to be something people can learn from and actively use in their daily life.”

Ishikawa responded: “I really want to bring back that empowered way of thinking to Japan when I go home … . I really feel that, in this museum, there are a lot of things that give that message of hope, and I really appreciate that … I really received energy and power from you.”

Ishikawa is now back in Japan making new history along with many other inspiring Japanese LGBTIQ activists. Indeed, we all continue to walk in each other’s footsteps.

Making a Difference for Queer Youth: Marriage Equality, Lil Nas X, and a First Binder
August 25, 2022

A few years ago, a remarkable study conducted by researchers from the prestigious Johns Hopkins and Harvard schools of public health revealed the profoundly positive impact that marriage equality appears to have on the mental health and well-being of LGBTQ youth. The study found that over 134,000 fewer adolescents attempted suicide annually in states that adopted marriage equality from 2004 to the beginning of 2015, while states that rejected equality saw no similar decrease.

In marriage equality states, the rate of attempted suicide of lesbian, gay, and bisexual students dropped a stunning 14%. The study also found that reductions in suicide attempts were sustained over time with lower rates remaining two years after legalization. Significantly, the reduction in suicide attempts did not occur in the years leading up to the legal victory, but only after marriage equality actually passed.

The implication of the data seems clear: Marriage equality saves lives. Equality and dignity under the law matter not just to the legal rights of same-sex couples and their children, but to the core sense of safety, happiness, and satisfaction with life of LGBTQ youth. The study’s lead author, Julia Raifman, observed, “These are high school students so they aren’t getting married any time soon, for the most part”; however, “[t]here may be something about having equal rights—even if they have no immediate plans to take advantage of them—that makes students feel less stigmatized and more hopeful for the future.”

Data released by The Trevor Project in 2021 and 2022 further underscores the importance of legal equality, respect, and acceptance to the well-being of queer youth. Tragically, however, this is because the data lay bare the devastating effect of the recent wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation. Persistent right-wing political attacks on LGBTQ youth, particularly transgender and nonbinary adolescents, have not only undermined students’ access to inclusive education and affirming medical care, but also have had a deleterious impact on their emotional health and sense of self-worth.

Overall, 45% of LGBTQ youth aged 13–24 considered suicide and 14% attempted it, according to data The Trevor Project collected from September to December 2021. Rates appeared highest for transgender, non-binary, queer, questioning, and pansexual youth. Further, 36% of queer youth reported that they had been physically threatened or harmed based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. Those who had were nearly three times more likely to attempt suicide that those who had not.

The impact of recent political attacks and legislation was unmistakable. A staggering 94% of queer youth stated “that recent politics negatively impacted their mental health,” according to data collected in September–December 2020 and released in 2021. Data from both 2020 and 2021 showed that well over 70% of LGBTQ young people had experienced discrimination, and those who had were also significantly more likely to attempt suicide than those who had not.

The 2021 data revealed that 93% of trans and nonbinary youth feared being denied access to gender-affirming medical care, 91% feared access to appropriate bathrooms, and 83% worried about being prohibited from playing sports. Trans and nonbinary youth who were not legally able to change legal documents were over twice as likely to attempt suicide than those who had actually done so, as well as being higher than those who were planning to change documents but had not yet, according to the 2020 data.

The importance of supportive schools, which multiple legislative efforts seek to undermine, was also evident. In 2021, 55% of LGBTQ youth reported school as an affirming place, while only 37% reported the same of their families, with transgender youth reporting slightly lower numbers on each. Clearly, schools can provide a refuge to at risk queer students. Suicide attempts were higher for students who lacked affirming spaces, especially affirming families.

Vicious anti-trans social media campaigns, such as the recent outrageous attack on a Boston children’s hospital, may also have a detrimental effect of LGBTQ young people. While the 2020 data showed that queer youth found LGBTIQ online spaces to be significantly more affirming than either school or home and 96% said that social media had a positive impact on their well-being, 88% also reported that social media had a negative impact on their lives.

However, causes for hope may be found amidst all this disturbing data. Queer youth reported that “protective laws” and “victories for LGBTIQ rights,” along with everything from Lil Nas X and BTS to wearing a first binder to falling in love, were sources of joy for them. And 62% of LGBTIQ young people reported that they found their overall communities to be either very or somewhat accepting in 2021 data. “Seeing so much pride in others from being LGBTQ,” “connection to others who are LGBTQ,” and merely “seeing rainbow flags and stickers in public” make a difference, according to the youth.

We know what to do to support queer youth, and we must keep on doing it. Their lives depend on it.

Will the U.S. Keep Up with Slovenia and Andorra on Marriage Equality?
August 11, 2022

On July 8, the Central European nation of Slovenia made history when it became the first former Soviet-bloc country and the 32nd country in the world with marriage equality. In a sweeping 6–3 ruling, the Slovenian Constitutional Court ruled in favor of equality and also invalidated laws prohibiting same-sex couples from adopting children. The decision took effect immediately with the Court giving the legislature six months to conform federal law to its decision. The groundbreaking decision could build momentum for marriage equality elsewhere such as the Czech Republic, another former Soviet-bloc country, and neighboring Italy.

Two weeks later, the tiny European nation of Andorra, perched in the Pyrenees between France and Spain, became the 33rd nation with marriage equality when its parliament unanimously enacted equality legislation as well as provisions enabling transgender people to update their names and genders on legal documents.

We ask: Will the U.S. be able to keep up? The federal Respect for Marriage Act that would legislatively affirm marriage equality protections for LGBTIQ couples was introduced in Congress nine years ago, but it has still not passed. There’s new urgency to pass the law now.

As background, the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2013 Windsor decision struck down the notoriously mis-named 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that prohibited federal recognition of same-sex marriages. In 2015, the Court established nationwide marriage equality as a fundamental constitutional right in the landmark Obergefell ruling.

But DOMA remains on the books today despite its being rendered unenforceable nine years ago by Windsor. And the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court has changed dramatically since the Windsor and Obergefell decisions. In his concurring opinion to this June’s anti-abortion Dobbs decision, Justice Thomas proclaimed his belief that the Court should reconsider Obergefell as well as decisions protecting the right to contraception and LGBTIQ people’s right to sexual intimacy, declaring all decisions based on substantive due process to be “demonstratively erroneous.”

Although no other Justice joined Thomas’ concurrence, it alarmed the LGBTIQ community and all those who value fundamental human rights and freedoms. The majority decision in Dobbs assured multiple times that its anti-abortion decision “unequivocally” would not “imperil” marriage and other rights and that such fears were “unfounded,” but the Court’s three dissenting Justices along with many Court observers remain skeptical. Although decisions protecting these rights do not appear to be at immediate risk, the LGBTIQ community is left feeling vulnerable to future attack.

In response, LGBTIQ rights supporters in Congress renewed efforts to pass the Respect for Marriage Act. The legislation would wipe DOMA off the books, meaning that married LGBTIQ couples would no longer have to rely solely on the Supreme Court’s Windsor decision to ensure federal recognition of their marriages.

However, it is important to understand that there is widespread consensus that Congress lacks the power through a federal statute to require states to permit LGBTIQ couples to marry. Obergefell held that the highest law of the land, the U.S. Constitution, prohibits states from denying same-sex couples the right to marry. But if the Supreme Court someday took the egregious step of overruling Obergefell, either a federal Constitutional amendment would be needed to re-establish marriage equality as a constitutional right, or a future Court in a future case would have to reverse the overruling of Obergefell.

The Respect for Marriage Act would do everything in Congress’ power to protect the marriage rights of LGBTIQ people if the Court stooped so low as to overrule Obergefell. The Act declares that the federal government recognizes all marriages between LGBTIQ couples that are legal in the state where they are performed, regardless of whether the couples’ home states recognize their marriages.

It also mandates that any state that does not permit LGBTIQ couples to marry must still recognize marriages of its residents who go to other states to marry. Unfortunately, if this provision were someday needed, it would require some couples to travel out-of-state to marry, and would likely face a legal challenge, which we hope would ultimately prove unsuccessful. But all of this dizzying legal analysis underscores not only the critical importance of both constitutional and statutory rights but also the truth of the dictum: Equality is simple; discrimination is complicated.

The Respect for Marriage Act breezed through the House of Representatives on a 267 to 157 vote, with 47 Republican members voting in favor. Now all eyes turn to the Senate, where openly LGBTIQ Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin is spearheading efforts to gain the 60 votes needed for passage. All 50 Democrat Senators and some Republicans have signaled their support, and LGBTIQ grassroots activists are pressing additional Republican Senators for their votes. President Biden, who as a Senator voted in favor of DOMA along with 84 of his Senate colleagues back in 1996, stands ready to sign the bill. However, the ultimate outcome remains uncertain.

When the Slovenian Constitutional Court last month ordered the nation’s Parliament to enact marriage equality legislation, Labor, Family, and Social Affairs Minister Luka Mesec exclaimed, “We will do it with the greatest pleasure in the shortest possible time.”

It’s been over a quarter century since DOMA passed. The profound change that has taken place over the last 26 years is inspiring, but the LGBTIQ community has gone far beyond merely being impressed that more people are supporting us now than ever before. It’s time for concrete action and passage of the Respect for Marriage Act now.

The Future of LGBTIQ Constitutional Rights Post-Dobbs
July 14, 2022

Today, we address the critical issue of whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s already notorious anti-abortion decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization also threatens LGBTIQ people’s freedom to marry and our other core constitutional rights. Even having to write about this subject—much less our community’s having to wonder whether our basic constitutional rights are now in jeopardy—undermines our dignity as Americans that the Supreme Court just seven years ago assured us was protected under the fundamental principles of constitutional democracy set forth in the Constitution.

Before addressing the implications of Dobbs on LGBTIQ rights, we want to underscore that the decision as it pertains to eliminating the constitutional right of women (and some nonbinary, intersex, and transgender people) to abortion is deeply misguided and wrong. Whereas Roe v. Wade was a bipartisan 7–2 decision with a Republican nominee writing the majority opinion and three other Republican nominees joining the decision, Dobbs was a strictly partisan decision with five very conservative Republican Justices constituting the majority and one Republican Justice concurring in the result, with all three Democratic Justices dissenting.

The Court’s historical analysis upon which the decision depends grossly distorts significant parts of the record. The majority apparently wants to take elements of our society, in particular women’s rights to freedom and autonomy, back to the 18th century. Indeed, the constitutional provisions at issue in the case were written before women even had the right to vote, much less the ability to participate meaningfully in the political process. Particularly appalling to us was the majority’s citing with approval a 1732 magazine article, reporting on a criminal case in which a woman was sentenced to “two days in the pillory and three years’ imprisonment” for helping a woman terminate a pregnancy.

When the Supreme Court upheld Roe thirty years ago in 1992, it recognized that all Americans have the freedom under the Constitution to make “intimate and personal choices” that are “central to personal dignity and autonomy.” It described how “[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Other Justices have described this freedom as ‘’the most comprehensive of rights … namely ‘’the right to be let alone.’’

The majority itself apprehends that the “fundamental moral question” posed by abortion “is ageless.” That recognition alone should mean that women who become pregnant should have the essential freedom of conscience to determine for themselves what is appropriate and not be compelled to carry a pregnancy to term against their will.

The Republican majority in Dobbs jettisons this deeply rooted and cherished constitutional right to personal freedom and self-determination in favor of an exceedingly narrow view of constitutional rights confined to their selective interpretation of historical conditions at the time of a particular provision’s enactment. Their doing so raises concern that the Court could apply the same type of analysis to take away marriage equality and other LGBTIQ constitutional rights. Indeed, Justice Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion in Dobbs that he would like to do essentially just that in future cases.

However, it is very important to recognize that the majority opinion combined with Justice Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion together emphasize multiple times that the Dobbs decision regarding abortion in no way undermines marriage equality or LGBTIQ people’s right to sexual intimacy. The majority claims a critical difference between abortion and contraception, sexual intimacy, and marriage equality; it asserts that abortion “destroys” a “potential life.”

The majority expressly states: “to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”

In response to the dissent’s well-founded suspicion as to the sincerity of the majority’s assurances, the majority repeats their promises verbatim, asserting their guarantees are “unequivocal” and explaining explicitly that “rights regarding contraception and same-sex relationships are inherently different from the right to abortion because the latter (as we have stressed) uniquely involves … ‘potential life.’” The majority declares that the dissenters’ “fear” that the Dobbs decision “will imperil those other rights” is “unfounded.” It even exclaims: “It is hard to see how we could be clearer.”

The majority further states that without decisions such as the Obergefell marriage equality decision that reversed prior rulings, “American constitutional law as we know it would be unrec­ognizable, and this would be a different country.” And Justice Kavanaugh wrote a separate concurrence mentioning, “I emphasize what the Court today states: Overruling Roe does not mean the over­ruling of those precedents, and does not threaten or cast doubt on those precedents.”

The majority’s multiple avowals that the precedents protecting marriage equality, sexual intimacy, and contraception are safe strongly suggest that currently there are not five Justices who want to overturn these decisions. We know the 3 Dobbs dissenters do not, as well as Kavanaugh and presumably Roberts who did not vote to overturn Roe at this time.

But we also know that it is exceedingly likely that Justice Alito, who authored the Dobbs decision, does not agree with the assurances he himself offers in the opinion. Just two years ago, Alito and Thomas wrote an opinion all but inviting potential litigants to challenge Obergefell. We hope that Kavanaugh was not the only Justice who insisted that the assurances be part of the majority decision, but we have insufficient information to know where Gorsuch and Barrett stand.

One thing we know for sure, though, is that the degree to which marriage equality and other LGBTIQ constitutional rights appear not to be in immediate peril is the result of countless queer people, along with our friends and family, coming out, standing up, and raising our voices loud and clear. The urgency to continue doing so has never been greater.

Pride 2022: ‘We Are Panda Dulce’
June 23, 2022

Six years to the day that 49 mostly Latinx members of the LGBTIQ community were senselessly shot and killed, and 53 others wounded at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, another very public hate crime against our community took place right here in the Bay Area.

As the beautiful and talented drag queen Panda Dulce sang her welcome song to the little children gathered for Drag Queen Story Hour at the San Lorenzo Public Library, a threatening and intimidating group of men thought to be members of the far-right extremist Proud Boys barged into the library to disrupt the event, shouting transphobic and other anti-LGBTIQ slurs. One man’s shirt had an image of an assault weapon emblazoned upon it with the menacing phrase: “Kill Your Local Pedophile.” Dulce, the children, their parents, and the library staff feared that the men were armed and might open fire on them. Thankfully, they did not. But only after the sheriff’s department was called and all of the men had gone, could the then-terrorized participants continue with the story hour.

Six years ago, we marched in the San Francisco Pride Parade with hundreds of other people wearing matching t-shirts that read: “We Are Orlando.” This year, we say: “We Are Panda Dulce.” Dulce’s actions and words that day and in subsequent days, as reported by various news sources identified here, truly inspire us.

As the incident unfolded and the men ignored the librarian’s request that they leave, Dulce immediately had an instinctive wisdom and clarity of mind to deescalate the situation in order to help protect the safety of the children and everyone else there. In a social media post, Dulce described how the men “totally freaked out the kids. They got right in our faces. They jeered. They attempted to escalate to violence.” Instead of engaging the men in a shouting match, Dulce “realized that I wasn’t helping the situation by still being present, so I was taken to a safe room and the sheriff was called.”

Dulce has been completely honest and revealing about how frightening the men’s actions were. “No words can appropriately capture the immediacy and terror [you] feel when [you] realize there is no buffer between [you] and these men. That they are likely armed and you are utterly defenseless,” she explained. And her trauma was ongoing. Over two days after the event, she said, “I still feel like I’m in that room. I’ve had trouble sleeping. Everyone’s asking if I’m okay and the answer is I’m not.”

Dulce’s authenticity and not putting on false bravado offers validation and hope to all of us who have been subject to bullying or acts of hate or violence, and feel shame or embarrassment about the fear and trauma we experienced at the hands of our abusers. Dulce assures us: “Queer people are resilient and creative and resourceful, and we’re going to be fine.”

Most importantly, Dulce did not let her fear stop her from returning and resuming the story hour. “I refuse to be intimidated by people who have myopic worldviews,” she said.

Dulce shared that a central purpose of Drag Queen Story Hour is to provide “kids access to diverse role models,” something that “is universally beneficial whether you’re queer, trans, or cis, because our world is diverse.” She especially wants to be there for LGBTIQ kids: “I did not have queer icons to look up to and I didn’t have representation to model myself after. And when you do story hour, sometimes there are queer kids, and you can really tell because they light up in a way where you just know, and you have that immediate connection.” On that terrifying Saturday afternoon, “I continued the reading even though it was so scary because I want kids to know even though they might get flack for being who they are, that they need to persist and that they are doing the absolute right thing showing up as their selves.”

Doing drag is about many things, among them self-worth, empowerment, and joy. As a librarian featured on Panda Dulce’s website says, “Kids just love drag queens. Because they’re fabulous. They’re magical creatures.”

We love how Panda Dulce embodies the vibrancy and courage of drag queens and the LGBTIQ community more generally. Initially referring to the men who tried to disrupt the San Lorenzo story hour, she proclaimed: “These people have clearly never met a drag queen before, because drag queens do not do obscurity. Queer people do not do quiet. We know that silence equals death, and we are not going to back down. We are not going to shrink back into the closet.”

That’s what Pride is all about. Happy Pride 2022, everyone!  We are Panda Dulce.

(We gratefully acknowledge the reporting of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Teen Vogue, Yahoo News, NBC Bay Area, and KQED.)

An Attack on One Is an Attack on All
June 9, 2022

“An attack on one is an attack on all.” That’s the core commitment that NATO countries make to each other to ensure their mutual security. When Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine without provocation in February, NATO reminded Putin of its members’ solemn dedication to each other’s defense and warned him not to encroach upon their collective territory.

Later this month, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, along with four of his arch conservative Republican colleagues, will in all likelihood strip women (and nonbinary, intersex, and transgender people who can become pregnant) of their fundamental human right to exercise control over their own bodies when it comes to reproduction. An estimated 26 states stand ready to completely ban or severely restrict access to abortion as soon as the decision becomes effective. Some states will even force women who have been raped and thereby become pregnant to carry the pregnancy to term and give birth against their will.

Like Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Alito and his Republican allies on the Court, in Congress, and in many state legislatures and governor’s offices are launching a broadside on all of us who care about women’s autonomy and equality—as well as LGBTIQ rights and dignity and other core human rights issues, such as racial justice, and ending horrific gun violence against our society’s most vulnerable people. We remain hopeful that the Supreme Court will not overturn marriage equality, but these powerful conservative forces are engaging in a wide ranging and calculated offensive to undermine our collective freedom, equality, and dignity—all for their political gain and personal motives. We must stand together and embrace for ourselves NATO’s credo: “An attack on one is an attack on all.”

We are inspired by the late Magda Hellinger, a Slovakian Jew who not only survived for three years as a prisoner at Auschwitz, but also was able to save the lives of countless other Jewish prisoners by taking advantage of a prisoner leadership role the Nazis gave her. In her recent memoir, The Nazis Knew My Name, published by her daughter last year, Hellinger recounts how faced with unimaginably horrific circumstances, she vowed “to stay as positive as [she] could” in order to be undistracted in her ability to help herself and others. She succeeded through her extraordinary savvy, compassion, and in her own words downright “chutzpah” in standing up to the SS. Through it all, her constant refrain to her fellow prisoners was: “We have to stick together and help each other.”

Today, we too have to stick together and help each other through our own mix of compassion and chutzpah, and strategic thinking. We must immediately help those currently under direct attack, such as people who need abortions in states where it will soon be outlawed, trans youth, and LGBTIQ students. We need to form a broad and ethical coalition that truly stands up for each other, respects the needs of its least powerful members, listens to their voices, and heeds their wisdom. We have to let go of internecine conflicts that distract us and impede us from achieving our ultimate goals.

Our opponents all too often have been remarkably successful in putting aside differences to achieve tangible results, such as the elections of Donald Trump and George W. Bush. They plotted and executed long-term strategies to install a very conservative Republican Supreme Court, overturn Roe v. Wade, and invent an interpretation of the Second Amendment that prevents common sense gun control—such as a ban on assault weapons that is supported by sizeable majorities of Americans. They have been methodical, patient, and relentless in many of their efforts. We need an even greater level and intensity of commitment in voting, mobilization, and organizing going forward as well as intelligent, creative, and effective long-term strategies.

Ultimately, to attain lasting gains in human rights, we must enable our opponents to be able to see our common humanity so that they no longer seek to exploit us for political and financial gain. We would love to live in a world without “us and them.” Then we all could embrace Hellinger’s imperative to the fullest: “We have to stick together and help each other.”

#WeAreSacred: Equality Through Hózhó in the Navajo Nation and Beyond
May 19, 2022

Many readers may be unaware that when the Supreme Court established marriage equality across the U.S. in its landmark 2015 Obergefell decision, the ruling did not automatically apply to the over 500 sovereign Native American nations. Today, many tribes have marriage equality, but the largest Native American nation, the Navajo Nation, does not.

The Navajo LGBTIQ civil rights organization Diné Equality (Diné is the native term for Navajo) and its allies have launched a groundbreaking initiative this spring to change that. They face considerable challenges, but if they are successful, the breakthrough will not only benefit Two-Spirit and other LGBTIQ Diné but also inspire other tribes without equality to follow suit. And it goes beyond that. Diné Equality’s campaign gives all Americans the opportunity to awaken to the important historical context from which the current Navajo marriage equality ban derives and to learn from the distinctively Diné approach Diné Equality is taking to lift it.

The name of Diné Equality’s campaign to pass the legislation is “Equality Through Hózhó.” Hózhó is a Diné word meaning “balance and beauty.” The organization’s hashtag is #WeAreSacred.

Hózhó is central to Diné life and culture and refers to an “all-encompassing beauty” that is “a product of striving for harmony in how one lives one’s life,” according to an Indiana University Online Exhibition of Navajo weavings. Hózhó values “health and goodness” and harmony with other people, the natural world, and the spiritual realm. Living in Hózhó and “walking in beauty” entails being “an active, ongoing force for good.” Every person “must determine how to realize it personally.”

For centuries before contact with Europeans, the Diné embodied Hózhó, as the Diné Equality website describes they “revered & honored our gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer & two-spirit family members” and assigned them “sacred roles many of us continue to hold today.” Navajo language and culture have traditionally recognized at least four genders, with Nádleehi (often described as feminine males and intersex people) even playing a pivotal role in the Diné creation story.

European American colonization shattered that Hózhó and destroyed the Diné’s nuanced, nonbinary understanding of gender grounded in real life experience. As the author Trista Wilson describes, Europeans through conquest “imposed their own religion and social norms upon the tribes, resulting in … the demise of two-spirit aspects of traditional Native American culture.”

Sadly, many Navajo internalized conservative American Christianity and its attendant homophobia, resulting in far too many Navajo people today being unaware of centuries-long Diné embrace of diversity in gender and sexuality. As the Two-Spirit Diné activist Oriah Lee put it to NPR in 2019, the longstanding “tradition has disappeared because it is so Christianized here.”

This internalization of Christian and other homophobic Western ideas into the modern Navajo mainstream and erasure of the understanding and memory of a very different inclusive tradition exacts a huge human cost on LGBTIQ Diné. A staggering 70 percent of LGBTIQ Navajo youth have attempted suicide, according to NPR, compared to the also unacceptably high rate of 23% otherwise in the U.S. As one Diné leader put it, the discriminatory legal framework and attitudes cause LGBTIQ to “feel like they are disposable.”

And in 2005 amid a flurry of anti-marriage equality measures sweeping across much of the U.S., the Navajo Nation banned LGBTIQ people from marriage and prohibited Navajo recognition of marriages of LGBTIQ people performed in American states.

Diné Equality describes how the discriminatory 2005 legislation disturbed Hózhó because it “divided our people & created deep community disharmony.” They now seek to restore the lost harmony by repealing the ban. In late March, Navajo Council Delegate Eugene Tso, an LGBTIQ ally, introduced legislation that would establish marriage equality in the Navajo Nation as well as strengthen women’s rights in marriage.

But anti-equality Christian forces within the Navajo Nation mobilized against the legislation, invoking the same type of rhetoric as their non-Native conservative Christian counterparts. Public comments on the marriage equality bill submitted before its first committee hearing favored marriage equality by a 58% to 42% margin. However, the first Council committee to hold hearings on the legislation voted against it 3–2, with the deciding vote cast by a Christian conservative. Tso recently withdrew the bill, promising to reintroduce it this summer after more research, refinements, and public education about its purpose.

The struggle will be difficult, but we love that Diné Equality’s self-affirming campaign is based on beauty and the fact that LGBTIQ Diné are sacred and had always been part of a community embracing harmony, balance, and belonging. Diné Equality is offering the Navajo Nation a unique opportunity to assert its sovereignty and traditions in a dynamic way by casting off colonial-based discriminatory dogma and reclaiming its own insightful understanding of gender, sexuality, and community that has existed for centuries and which courageous queer Diné people live out today.

The broader American society has much to learn from what the Diné and many other Native American peoples have long understood about beauty, diversity, fluidity, and harmony. As Diné Equality puts it on its Facebook page: “It is important for us to hold true to our traditional ways and to honor the LGBTQ+ identities that make us one family … . [W]e are all sacred beings and our community strengthens this Hózhó.” That wisdom applies not just to Diné but to all of us.

Nobody’s Stealing Our Joy
April 21, 2022

Alabama earlier this month enacted the most draconian state anti-transgender law yet. The grossly misnamed “Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act” makes it a felony for healthcare professionals to provide gender-affirming medical care, such as puberty blockers or hormone therapies, to transgender minors. When Governor Kay Ivey signed the legislation (which is anything but compassionate to vulnerable queer youth), she callously proclaimed: “I believe very strongly that if the Good Lord made you a boy, you are a boy, and if he made you a girl, you are a girl.”

To add insult to injury, Ivey the same day also signed a bill prohibiting trans students from using bathrooms or locker rooms that correspond with their gender identity, and outlawing classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity before the sixth grade. Medical providers and parents of trans kids immediately filed suit to block the trans health care law, and legal action against the education bill will soon ensue.

These are just a few of a slew of bills conservative Republicans are enacting to attack LGBTIQ youth, women, and racial minorities to energize their conservative political base as the midterm elections approach. However, amidst this horrific cruelty and vengeance, our minds also turn to an extraordinary exchange between New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson last month at her historic Judiciary Committee hearing for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Jackson, who with her full Senate confirmation will become the Court’s first African American woman Justice, had endured hours of conservative Republicans’ spurious attacks on her credibility and smears with racist subtexts that no white male nominee had ever faced.

When Booker’s turn to speak came, he proclaimed boldly: “Nobody’s stealing my joy. Nobody’s going to make me angry, especially not people that are called in a conservative magazine ‘demagogic’ for what they’re bringing up that just doesn’t hold water. I’m not gonna let my joy be stolen.”

Booker described what made Jackson’s ascension to the high court so profound to him as a Black person and to many other African Americans, especially Black women. He explained: “You did not get there because of some left-wing agenda. You didn’t get here because of some dark money groups. You got here how every Black woman in America who has gotten anywhere has done: by being like Ginger Rogers said, ‘I did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards in heels.’”

Then Booker articulated a unique patriotism based in radical love that many African Americans as well as LGBTIQ people, women, and other minorities, possess. He said that “there’s a love in this country that is extraordinary” in which minorities, such as Jackson’s own parents, “didn’t stop loving this country, even though this country didn’t love them back.” They persevered as we do today, saying, “America, you may not love me yet, but I’m going to make this nation live up to its promise and hope.”

Therein lies the challenge we as LGBTIQ people face today. How do we sustain our love and joy in the face of today’s vicious attacks on the humanity of queer youth, women, racial minorities, and other targets of conservative Republican politicians? How do we forcefully and effectively oppose tremendously harmful laws and undermine conservative Republicans’ divisive, self-serving tactics and rhetoric without feeding the “us and them” paradigm that is ultimately destructive to everyone? How do we not replicate “us and them” attitudes within our own movement?

Affirming each other and cultivating community are essential. They are so important that Booker, himself a U.S. Senator, felt the need to assure Jackson, a sitting federal appellate judge with impeccable credentials, poised to join the U.S. Supreme Court: “You have earned this spot. You are worthy.” Undoubtedly, Booker intended his words for a broader audience, and we must provide that same assurance to queer youth and our entire community.

In the face of the current onslaught, queer youth and their parents are finding their voices, organizing, and becoming involved as never before. Creating genuine community in and of itself advances our movement by strengthening ourselves and our connections to each other and providing the opportunity to experience joy, even as we struggle together against deeply deleterious laws.

A sense of love and community also unleashes creativity that provides pathways to change that we cannot yet envision. It offers the possibility of winning new supporters and furthering equality and dignity under law and in society without furthering polarization.

When Senator Booker told Judge Jackson that “you are here because of that kind of love, and nobody’s taking this away from me,” he was truly speaking to all of us.

When Conservative Republicans Accidentally Tell the Truth
April 7, 2022

Late last month, Indiana Senator Mike Braun made a stunning revelation when he declared that he disagreed with the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1967 decision Loving v. Virginia, which struck down all state laws banning interracial marriage. At a March 22, 2022, press conference, Braun opined that it was not the role of the U.S. Supreme Court to dictate to states whether people of different races should be able to marry. It was up to each individual state to decide. “It’s a beauty of the system” of American federalism, and “differences among points of view in our 50 states ought to express themselves,” said the senator, apparently unaware of the ominous implications of his position.

The question about interracial marriage arose after Braun expressed his hope that the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade in June, leaving states to be able to ban abortion and thus force pregnant women (as well as some nonbinary, intersex, and transgender people) to remain pregnant and give birth against their will even in cases of rape or incest. That itself should be a shocking position for a U.S. Senator to take, but sadly it’s currently the predominant Republican view that many observers believe that the Republican-dominated Supreme Court will adopt.

The reporter at the press conference presumably was incredulous that Braun expressed a similar point of view on interracial marriage and gave him a chance to clarify. The senator’s further response was unambiguous: “Yes, I think that that’s something that if you’re not wanting the Supreme Court to weigh in on issues like that, you’re not going to be able to have your cake and eat it too. I think that’s hypocritical.”

Within hours, Braun suddenly changed his position, claiming in a written statement that he actually believed that “the Constitution prohibits discrimination of any kind based on race.” But Braun’s press conference remarks illuminate the true extent to which arch conservatives like him appear willing to go to gut the Bill of Rights to intrude on individuals’ personal liberty and dignity for political gain—except when it comes to red meat political issues that excite their base, such as gun ownership or using religion as an excuse to justify discrimination.

Only when confronted with how politically unpalatable it was to say that states should be able to deny the right to marry to interracial couples, like Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife Elaine Chao, did Braun change his position. Thank goodness Braun does not sit on the Supreme Court. But it’s appalling that Braun, given his statements, has a vote on whether to confirm the Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who herself is married to a person of a different race.

Braun’s words also recall another remarkable moment of candor on the part of a Republican Hoosier: former Indiana Senator and U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle. During a 1992 appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live, Quayle, who supported a federal Constitutional amendment banning most types of abortions, praised a Pennsylvania law requiring minors to obtain parental consent before having an abortion. King then asked Quayle what he would tell his own teenage daughter if she had an unwanted pregnancy and came to him for advice. Quayle responded: “Obviously I would counsel her and talk to her and support her on whatever decision she made.” When King asked whether that included her choosing an abortion, the Vice President reiterated: “I’d support my daughter.”

The next day, Quayle’s wife Marilyn declared that, in fact, their daughter would not have an abortion and instead “take the child to term.” The Vice President himself also partially reversed course, saying that his daughter would not be allowed to have an abortion as a teenager. But strikingly, the Vice President maintained that he would support whatever choice his daughter made as an adult, even if it meant breaking the law to obtain an abortion. A prominent Republican taking such a position today is unimaginable.

Quayle’s words starkly betray the double standard that he and many of his fellow conservative Republicans live by. For political gain, they seek to enact draconian laws that they themselves don’t think should apply to them. Indeed, well-off Republicans in states with severe abortion restrictions like Texas and Mississippi can easily travel to other states to terminate pregnancies, while poor people who are disproportionately people of color lack the means to do so, and thus suffer the full consequences of the laws.

Trying to do damage control back in 1992, senior Bush campaign advisor Charles Black himself made a remarkable disclosure when he commented on what Quayle had said: “I thought it was a very human and personal and honest answer to the question that I would guess the majority of Americans could identify with.”

Astonishingly, Black’s statement suggests that he and Quayle both actually believed in their Democratic opponents’ position on abortion, not their own, and thought that most Americans concurred. But to pander to their political base, Black and Quayle forsook their own values, knowing that abortion would always be available to their daughters.

“Very human and personal and honest” responses to issues, not fear-mongering demagoguery, is what we need more of from conservative Republicans and indeed all people in government and politics. We need people on all sides of the aisle not just to accidentally tell the truth, but to do so in the first place.

Message to Anti-Trans Forces: Mind Your Own Business
March 24, 2022

Mind your own business. That’s what Republican and other opponents of LGBTIQ equality bluntly need to be told in response to their utterly cruel, hypocritical, and exploitative efforts to deprive transgender youth of life-saving gender-affirming medical care.

Last year, Arkansas became the first state in the union—with many more seeking to follow—to pass a law interfering with the ability of health care professionals and parents to ensure that transgender minors receive needed medical care, in accord with current standards of care for treating gender dysphoria. Medical professionals in the state who provide such care are subject to lawsuits and discipline for unprofessional conduct.

The ACLU immediately challenged the law upon its passage, and a federal district court enjoined its enforcement. Arkansas appealed the decision, and the case is now pending on appeal.

In legal briefing, the ACLU explained that medical protocols for treating minors with gender dysphoria involve a lengthy process that potentially entails carefully staged interventions, including puberty delaying medication, hormone therapy, and in some cases chest reconstruction surgery. Both the teenager and their parents must give fully informed consent, and no interventions are made unless deemed medically necessary. Every major professional health association in the country endorses these scientifically based medical protocols to prevent trans youth from experiencing extreme harm and distress.

The cruelty of interfering with trans youth receiving proper care is clear and manifest. The ACLU legal briefing describes how the mere introduction of the Arkansas legislation resulted in a local physician’s office receiving “calls from numerous families, panicking because their children were expressing suicidal thoughts at the prospect of losing the healthcare they rely on for their well-being, and four of the clinic’s patients—and three other transgender adolescents—were hospitalized after suicide attempts.”

Last month, the State of Texas took it a step further when Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton bypassed the legislature and issued a legal opinion stating that some types of gender-affirming medical care for minors constituted “child abuse.” Governor Greg Abbott then directed the state child welfare agency to investigate parents of children who received such care and called on the public to report parents they suspect of helping their children receive it. Trans kids face the threat of being removed from their homes and placed in the foster system. A Texas judge blocked the investigations from going forward, but Abbott and Paxton have appealed the decision and maintain the investigations can continue.

Even more draconian measures are currently under consideration in other states controlled by conservative Republicans. The Idaho Assembly early this month passed legislation making it a felony, punishable by up to life imprisonment, for a medical professional or parent to participate in providing gender-affirming care. The legislation criminalized going out of state to obtain it, too. Last week the Idaho State Senate rejected the measure, but legislation in Alabama making it a felony up to 10 years in prison for physicians to provide the care appears likely to pass. Legislation in multiple other Republican held states remains pending.

The hypocrisy of the Republicans’ efforts is unmistakable. Earlier this month, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis proclaimed 2022 “the year of the parent” as he endorsed Florida’s notorious “Don’t Say Gay” bill interfering with discussion of LGBTIQ people in public schools. The legislation, formally titled the “Parental Right Rights in Education” bill, declares that parents in Florida have “the fundamental right of parents to make decisions regarding the upbringing and control of their children.”

But what about the rights of the parents of transgender kids?  What could be a more fundamental right of parenting than the freedom to engage physicians practicing the latest professionally based standard of care to provide their children affirming live-saving treatment?

The hypocrisy appears too much for even some Republicans to bear. Conservative Republican Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson actually vetoed the Arkansas legislation, terming it “vast government overreach” that made “the state as the definitive oracle of medical care, overriding parents, patients and healthcare experts.” But the Arkansas legislature quickly overrode his veto.

For years, political opponents of LGBTIQ dignity and equality have used whatever message or strategy they have found effective to raise money, motivate their base, or scare voters—particularly in an election year such as 2022. They exploit public discomfort, uncertainty, or lack of understanding of a particular issue pertaining to LGBTIQ people for their own political gain without concern for the toll their actions take on LGBTIQ people and their friends and family.

Although these opponents care little about the actual substance of the issue they assert, their talking points often emphasizing the need to protect children, distract the media from their actual motives, and stir their base and sometimes the general electorate. It is critical to understand that opponents’ interests and tactics are political at their core and shift over time as Americans eventually come to reject each one of them.

We find this current iteration—Republicans’ naked exploitation of the vulnerability of trans youth—to be particularly callous and inhumane. As Lambda Legal Senior Counsel Paul Castillo said: “Parents who love their transgender children and work with healthcare providers to support and affirm their well-being should be celebrated, rather than investigated as criminals.”

Numerous courageous trans youth, their families, and other LGBTIQ people have spoken up to Republicans and other opponents at legislative hearings across the country about the devastating effects of legislation targeting trans and other LGBTIQ youth. It’s time we all tell them to stop interfering in our lives and simply mind their own business.

LGBTIQ Ukrainians Fighting for Their Lives
March 10, 2022

We’ll never forget gazing out our train window at the beautiful golden domes of Kyiv as we traveled through Ukraine from Moscow to Bucharest on a 1989 trip to the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Today, the Russian military at the command of President Vladimir Putin is reducing much of where we traveled in Ukraine to rubble. And untold thousands of Ukrainians have fled their country to Romania on trains travelling the same tracks we did over 30 years ago.

Countless other Ukrainians have fled by train, bus, and foot to other neighboring countries with by far the largest numbers going to Poland, followed by Hungary. Many will relocate to other parts of the European Union as well.

LGBTIQ Ukrainians, of course, make up a significant number of those refugees, and are also among the millions of Ukrainians who remain in the country to face the invading Russian military. (All Ukrainian men aged 18–60 are required to stay in the country.)

Vladimir Putin’s brutal and brazen attack on Ukraine represents first and foremost a horrific human tragedy for all people affected. Even after the fighting finishes, no one will be the same as before.

The unfolding crisis also gives us the opportunity to recognize the incredible strength and resilience of LGBTIQ Ukrainians as well as the queer community in Russia and neighboring parts of Eastern Europe. For years, our collective community has exhibited tremendous pride and resolve in the face of formidable obstacles and oppression—just as LGBTIQ Ukrainians are doing in extraordinary ways today.

The LGBTIQ Struggle in Russia

Many LGBTIQ Ukrainians greatly fear what life would be like under Russian control. Russia currently ranks 46th out of 49 European countries in the latest rankings of LGBTIQ rights by ILGA-Europe (European Region of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association).

When we visited the Soviet Union, we met gay Russians outside the Bolshoi Theatre when we stumbled upon the popular Soviet-era gay hangout. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, LGBTIQ Russians were hopeful for a better future. Homosexuality, which had been illegal for decades during the Communist regime, was decriminalized in 1993.

However, progress has been dramatically reversed in recent years under the nationalist leadership of Putin. Most notably, the Russian parliament, with the support of Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church, enacted legislation in 2013 designed to chill expression of support for LGBTIQ people, stop public education, and invite hostility and violence against the queer community. Known as the “Gay Propaganda” bill, the legislation banned “promotion of nontraditional sexual relations” to minors, including equating same-sex relationships to heterosexual ones—all falsely in the name of furthering “traditional Russian values.” The bill applies to all media, including print, radio, television, and the internet.

The bill may likely have caused the postponement of the July 2017 premier of the ballet Nureyev, depicting the life of Rudolf Nureyev, one of the greatest ballet dancers of all time, who was gay and tragically died of AIDS in 1993. The ballet openly portrayed Nureyev’s homosexuality, including a sensuous dance with him and one of his lovers. When the ballet finally premiered 5 months later to a restricted audience, its director was under house arrest on what most consider trumped up charges.

Also as part of a sustained anti-LGBTIQ campaign, Russian Pride events have been prohibited. In fact, Moscow authorities in 2012 banned gay pride parades in the capital for the next 100 years. LGBTIQ websites have been blocked, and LGBTIQ individuals and groups have otherwise faced discrimination or persecution. In 2017 and 2019, Chechen authorities carried out deadly anti-gay purges.

In 2021, Russia banned same-sex marriage under its constitution. And just last month, the Russian government asked a court to shut down the Russian LGBT Network, one of the country’s most prominent gay rights organizations. The Russian court declined to do so at present, but observers fear what lies ahead for the group.

However, as true testament to the strength and resilience of the Russian LGBTIQ community, a 47 percent plurality of Russian people responded that “gays and lesbians should enjoy the same rights as other citizens” in 2019 polling reported by the Moscow Times.

The LGBTIQ Struggle in Ukraine

Like their Russian counterparts, Ukrainian LGBTIQ activists and the community at large for years have shown extraordinary fortitude in the face of formidable challenges. Ukraine itself only ranks 39th out of 49 countries, just seven positions ahead of Russia, in the latest ILGA-Europe rankings. Same-sex sexual activity was decriminalized in 1991 when Ukraine gained independence with the disbandment of the Soviet Union. However, progress toward LGBTIQ rights and public acceptance has been slow.

A 2021 UCLA Williams Institute report ranked Ukraine a dismal 142nd out of 175 countries worldwide when it comes to social acceptance of LGBTIQ people. Russia, in fact, ranked higher at 126th. Anti-LGBTIQ militants’ burning of Kyiv’s oldest movie theater during the screening of an LGBTIQ film in 2014 serves as a powerful symbol of the threat under which the LGBTIQ community has lived in Ukraine.

Nevertheless, the LGBTIQ community has made advances. LGBTIQ people can serve in the military, and Viktor Pylypenko came out publicly as the first openly gay Ukrainian soldier in 2018. In 2015, the Ukrainian parliament enacted nationwide protection against employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, as part of the country’s efforts to qualify for admission to the EU.

Indeed, the EU required Ukraine to pass the measure as a condition for gaining visa-free travel to the EU. That access has proved invaluable to Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war today.

Despite threats of violence from far-right extremists, Pride parades have taken place annually in Kyiv since 2015. The first LGBTIQ equality march was held in Odessa in 2016 and in Kharkiv in 2019, with the first Kyiv Trans March taking place last year. Just a month after President Volodymyr Zelensky took office in 2019, Kyiv held the largest Pride parade in the nation’s history.  Zelensky helped ensure the safety of the event, and his office declared that “Ukraine’s Constitution states that citizens have equal constitutional rights and freedoms.” Indeed, the existence of Ukrainian democratic institutions provides hope for future progress so long as the Ukrainians prevail in the conflict.

LGBTIQ Refugees and LGBTIQ Ukrainians Fighting Back

As Ukrainian LGBTIQ refugees flee the war to elsewhere in Europe, they will first arrive in Eastern European countries whose governments themselves have been hostile to LGBTIQ people and where the queer community and its supporters have shown equally inspiring strength in the face of adversity. Poland, the county receiving the most refugees, is itself at a crossroads when it comes to LGBTIQ rights. Far-right Polish President Andrzej Duda has conducted virulently anti-gay political campaigns, vilifying LGBTIQ people for his own political gain.

LGBTIQ Ukrainian refugees coming to Poland face the indignity of traveling through so-called “LGBT-free” zones that permit the banning of LGBTIQ rights marches and other events and encompass fully one third of the country. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary, the nation receiving the second most Ukrainian refugees, is also an authoritarian leader who foments homophobia for his political gain, linking it to nationalist values and inspiring further hatred.

The Polish and Hungarian queer communities are already reaching out to arriving Ukrainian LGBTIQ refugees. Viktória Radványi, communications director for Budapest Pride, told NPR that LGBTQ Hungarians “have been giving anything they can to help—a spare room, a couch” and offering emotional support as well. Julia Maciocha of Warsaw Pride reported that the Polish queer community has been working to make sure that refugees are “placed with people who understand their needs” and to “welcome them and help them” before they likely relocate to more hospitable parts of Europe.

And LGBTIQ Ukrainians who have remained in the country appear defiant. Pylypenko reported to the Israel Hayem newspaper that a group of AWOL Russian soldiers unknowingly hid in a basement used by the Kharkiv queer community, and upon their being found, LGBTIQ community members beat and captured the soldiers. Pylypenko proclaimed that he and his queer comrades were fighting not just as Ukrainians, but also “as LGBTQ people” who “are confronting a tyrannical, homophobic enemy.”

Further, the Daily Beast reported that Veronika Limina of the Lviv queer community “has been running a camp, teaching volunteer LGBTQ cadets basic combat and paramedic skills.” Limina articulated how high she believes the stakes to be: “Either we defend our country, and it will become a part of the free world, or there will not be any freedom for us and will not be Ukraine at all.”

When we traveled through Ukraine in 1989, we could not have foreseen the tremendous changes that were about to occur there, and today no one knows what lies ahead. Perhaps Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will mark a moment of truth not just for Europe and the world, but also for LGBTIQ rights and dignity as well. We know that, regardless of what happens in the coming days, LGBTIQ Ukrainians and queer people around the world will never give up fighting for our lives.

In Search of Queer Poetic Justice
February 24, 2022

Oh boy, if you want to cheer my heart,
You must give me kisses after serving me the wine.

So reads a couplet from the 10–11th century Persian poet Farrukhi Sistaní giving voice to same-sex love. Farrukhi, a Persian literary luminary who lived in what is now Afghanistan, was not alone in writing about queer love. The famous 13th century poet Rumi, whose poetry enjoys enormous popularity in America today and whose family was from what is now Afghanistan, was also inspired by same-sex love. He wrote:

If anyone asks you,
how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting will look,
lift your face and say,
Like this.

And Rumi’s poetry connects human love to personal liberation and the divine:

Soul, if you want to learn secrets,
your heart must forget about shame and dignity.
You are God’s lover,
yet you worry what people are saying.

Queer life and love in present-day Persia is far different than it was 800 or more years ago. It is heart-wrenching that Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are three of eleven countries in the world today in which physical expression of same-sex love may be punishable by death. Today, poets like Farrukhi or Rumi might be hanged or stoned to death.

Six countries—Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Mauritania, Brunei, and the 12 Northern states of Nigeria—legally prescribe capital punishment as a penalty for same-sex sexual conduct, according to a 2020 report from ILGA World (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association). ILGA sources report that the death penalty may be imposed in five other countries, although there is less legal certainty about the punishment. Those five countries are: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Qatar, Somalia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Needless to say, these laws have a devastating effect on queer people in these countries. Ali Khoie, an Iranian LGBTIQ refugee now living in the U.S., described it this way at a 2015 event sponsored by ORAM (Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration):

“Imagine if you are in a closet with the doors closed. It’s dark in there. You are all alone and sometimes you are so far into the darkness you don’t even know your own self.”

Getting lost in despair is easy in the face of these conditions. Khoie was able to flee Iran and find freedom, which he described as “coming to a place where the doors are thrown wide open and the light comes in.” But he also described how adjusting to such sudden change can be difficult. Indeed, leaving one’s home can be traumatic, and LGBTQ refugees may face racial discrimination in their new host countries. And, of course, very few LGBTIQ people are able to escape.

Amidst the darkness, we find hope in the prophecy of another ancient Persian poet, Hafez, who wrote:

It happens all the time in heaven,
And some day, it will begin to happen again on earth

That men and women who are married,
And men and men who are Lovers,
And women and women who give each other Light,

Often get down on their knees
And while so tenderly holding their lover’s hand,
With tears in their eyes, will sincerely speak, saying:

“My dear,
How can I be more loving to you;
How can I be more kind?”

Hafez envisions not just a pair of lovers being more kind to each other, but for all people to extend this kindness to the world as their beloved. Nonprofit organizations such as ILGA World, ORAM, and Rainbow Railroad are doing just that for LGBTIQ people in need across the globe.

We must ask the leaders of the eleven countries with the death penalty for homosexuality and the approximately 60 other countries that still criminalize being LGBTQ, when will they do the same? Indeed, what would happen if we all awakened each morning and asked ourselves Hafez’s query: “How can I be more kind?”

English translations of poetry from:
https://tinyurl.com/2p928hhe

The Essential Rumi (HarperOne 2004)
https://www.rumi.org.uk

The Subject Tonight is Love (Pumpkin House Press, 1996) https://tinyurl.com/2p9hkz26
https://tinyurl.com/yc8x655y

Beijing Olympics Shine a Light on LGBTIQ Crackdown
February 10, 2022

As a record number of openly LGBTIQ athletes proudly compete in the 2022 Beijing Olympics, we must not forget that the host country China itself is in the midst of an intensifying crackdown against LGBTIQ people.

One of the most significant recent developments is the closure of China’s leading LGBTIQ civil rights organization, LGBT Rights Advocacy China, in November 2021. The pathbreaking group had promoted legislation, brought impact litigation, and raised public awareness of LGBTIQ issues for the last eight years.

Although China decriminalized homosexuality in 1997, it neither affords same-sex couples legal recognition nor provides LGBTIQ people legal protection against discrimination in employment, public accommodations, or housing. LGBT Rights Advocacy China had surprising successes in advancing LGBTIQ equality, such as a 2014 victory in a lawsuit against conversion therapy and a 2019 campaign in which nearly 200,000 people urged the Chinese government to enact nationwide marriage equality. Progress for the foreseeable future now seems in doubt.

The LGBT Rights Advocacy China’s shutdown comes on the heels of multiple WeChat accounts of LGBTIQ college students, student organizations, and informal groups being blocked and deleted without warning six months ago. For years, the online presence of these groups had served as a lifeline for many LGBTIQ young people and a valuable community building resource. And in 2020, Shanghai Pride, China’s only annual Pride celebration, was shut down after 11 years.

These clampdowns are part of broader cultural and educational repression of queerness and other forms of perceived nonconformity. Back in 2015, the government prohibited depiction of same-sex relationships and LGBTIQ people on television, and in early 2016, a popular gay web series was shut down.

In February last year, the Chinese government promulgated the “Proposal to Prevent the Feminization of Male Adolescents” for schools. According to the Communist Party’s China Daily, the plan requires schools to recast physical education classes to “cultivate masculinity” among boys, evaluate the physical intensity of classes, and “vigorously develop” contact sports such as soccer.

Last September, the government took it a step further when it banned effeminate men from appearing on television, declaring that media must “resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal esthetics.” The concern appears to be based on the cultural influence of enormously popular celebrities such as members of BTS and their Chinese counterparts who fail to conform to rigid gender norms.

The oppressive measures appear in furtherance of the vision of Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party of so-called “national rejuvenation” to a “new era” as China gains increasing power and prominence on the world stage. That vision involves greater central government control at the expense of human rights and freedoms. It includes the government imposing its view of traditional Chinese culture and morality as part of what it terms “Chinese Socialism,” separate from purported foreign influences.

Sadly, Xi and his compatriots ignore not only that the future lies with the embrace of diversity, but also that homosexuality, in fact, has been part of traditional Chinese culture for over 3,000 years—dating back to the Shang Dynasty (c. 16th century–11th century BCE). Although the history of homosexuality in China like anywhere else is complex, Chinese history, literature, and culture are replete with numerous examples of acceptance of homosexuality, such as gay Emperor Ai of Han in the 1st century BCE and forms of same-sex marriage in Fujian Province in the 17th century.

However, as we call attention to the anti-LGBTIQ crackdown in China, we must also turn the mirror on the U.S. itself. As the Olympics take place in Beijing, Republicans aligned with Donald Trump and other conservatives who together have their own nationalist anti-democratic agenda continue to wage their own campaigns against LGBTIQ people in the U.S.

Anti-transgender legislative proposals predominate. But most recently, regressive legislation in Florida, termed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and similar legislation in other states is gaining prominence. The Florida bill would prohibit school districts from “encourag[ing] classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.”

While the Chinese government is trying to make effeminate schoolboys more macho, Florida is attempting to “effectively silence students from speaking about their LGBTQ family members, friends, neighbors, and icons,” as Kara Gross of the Florida ACLU explained to the Associated Press. And attempts to ban LGBTIQ books from school libraries proliferate across Trump country from Texas to Oklahoma to Tennessee, along with countless efforts to ban books and curriculum that address racial inequities and other subjects.

A 7th century Chinese Buddhist metaphor likens the mind’s inability to perceive its innate luminescence to clouds obscuring the shining sun. LGBT Rights Advocacy China concluded its social media post announcing its closure with the words: “[W]e await the day when we can lift the clouds and see the daylight.” Chinese LGBTIQ activists are extraordinarily resilient and strategic. We know they will lift the clouds—as we know we will lift the clouds in the U.S. as well.

Sidney Poitier: ‘I Am the Me I Choose to Be’
January 26, 2022

When legendary actor and civil rights pioneer Sidney Poitier died earlier this month, we were struck to learn that Poitier credited the dignity he felt as a person of African descent growing up in the Bahamas as the foundation for his natural ease in portraying powerful, confident, and unapologetic African Americans on the big screen with incomparable eloquence and intelligence. Poitier explained: “I never had an occasion to question color; therefore, I only saw myself as what I was … a human being.”

Poitier’s insight about the sources of his personal confidence sheds light on the pernicious effects that legal and societal systems of discrimination have not only in specific substantive areas like employment, housing, and education, but also on the psyche of those oppressed or marginalized.

When Poitier came to the U.S. as a teenager in 1942 to live with his brother in Miami, he experienced very different attitudes than he had in his formative years in the Bahamas. As Poitier told NPR in 2009, he “couldn’t adjust to the racism in Florida,” because it was “so blatant.” He explained: “I had never in my life, my early life, been so described as Florida described me.” He interpreted Florida as saying to him that “you are not who you think you are. We will determine what you are.” In face of such insult, Poitier resolved: “No, I will determine who I am.”

Poitier decided to leave Florida and move to New York City, where he pursued an acting career. Throughout that storied career, he never wavered in that commitment to his dignity and embodied it in his numerous groundbreaking portrayals of African American characters, most iconically the fearless Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night. As historian and Black studies professor Elwood Watson put it, “Poitier skillfully showcased the dignity and pride of the Black experience to the entire world.”

Although Poitier did not directly address LGBTIQ issues in his work, the actor’s life, in particular his steadfast commitment to never compromising his integrity, served as a model for LGBTIQ people and indeed for all those who face discrimination and adversity. LGBTIQ people, like other marginalized minorities, deserve to live in a society that does not cause us to question who we are or our worthiness or to impose upon us its determination of who we are. Dignity and pride lie at the heart of the LGBTIQ movement.

Poitier’s discernment that white Floridians in the 1940s believed they possessed the power and entitlement to determine who he was as a Black person reminds us of the presumptuous attitudes of a prominent homophobic Floridian decades later—Anita Bryant, leader of the anti-gay “Save Our Children” campaign of the 1970s.

Several years ago during the height of the marriage equality movement, we rewatched Poitier’s classic film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. We, of course, appreciated the audacious statement the movie was making about race and love in 1967, the same year the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia ruled that laws banning interracial couples from marriage were unconstitutional.

The film also spoke to us across the decades as an LGBTIQ couple working as part of the movement to end discrimination against LGBTIQ people in marriage and all other aspects of our lives. Indeed, every time LGBTIQ people come out to their parents or introduce their partners to their families not knowing what will ensue, they play out their own real-life versions of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In the face of uncertainty and challenge, LGBTIQ people have needed to summon the same inner strength, commitment to ourselves and each other, and willingness to fight for our love that Poitier’s character and his fiancée display in the movie.

At the end of the film, the white father portrayed by Spencer Tracy, who has been reluctant to accept the marriage, recognizes that the young couple’s love is no different than his own love for his wife. He proclaims that “in the final analysis it doesn’t matter a damn what we think. The only thing that matters is what they feel.” In the face of bigotry, the father advises, “where necessary, you’ll just have to cling tight to each other and say screw all those people,” declaring “there would be only one thing worse” than the adversity they will face getting married and that is if they “didn’t get married.” Tracy’s character could have been speaking to LGBTIQ couples in 2015, the year the U.S. Supreme Court held that prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying violated the Constitution.

Poitier enunciated in his autobiography: “I am the me I choose to be.” May that dictum be true for all of us in all aspects of our lives.

LGBTIQ Afghan Refugee: ‘I Feel Like a Human Being for the First Time’
January 13, 2022

Years ago, I worked as an English teacher for refugee children from the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos at a camp in the Philippines that housed refugees before their final resettlement to third countries, such as the United States.

One of the most complex and emotional moments of camp life came when it was actually time for refugees to depart the camp to begin their new lives in America and other countries. Many of us teachers would gather to wave goodbye to the students and their families as they boarded buses to transport them to Manila Airport and their futures. We also made sure we exchanged each other’s contact information so we could reconnect in the U.S.

At first, I naïvely thought that departing the camp would be a moment of pure joy for the refugees. Their harrowing journeys, many of which had begun by fleeing Vietnam on flimsy fishing boats in the dead of the night, trekking through the Killing Fields of Cambodia to safety, or traversing the Mekong River from Laos to Thailand, were finally over. Hope for a bright future lay ahead.

But for many refugees, departing the camp was bittersweet—even heart-wrenching for some. For many, the moment represented the final act in leaving behind their home countries forever. Being able to return to Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos someday even just to visit seemed unimaginable given the countries’ oppressive regimes and very difficult living conditions after years of war. Tears streamed down many refugees’ faces as they believed this was the last moment they’d live in Southeast Asia together in community with people from their home country.

However, things changed over the decades. Beginning in the 1990s, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos started to open again to various degrees. Many things remain highly problematic, including Vietnam’s recent crackdown on peaceful dissent. But many refugees were able to do what had once seemed unthinkable: return home to visit loved ones, re-establish connections with their home countries, and, for some, even come back to live.

When the Taliban reclaimed control of Afghanistan last year after twenty years of American-led war, my experiences working with Southeast Asian refugees became meaningful to me in new ways. Vietnamese American friends explained how the images of Afghans desperately trying to flee at Kabul Airport retriggered the trauma they experienced escaping their own home country.

I also thought of the thousands of LGBTIQ Afghans now in extreme danger with the return of the Taliban and the reinstatement of Sharia law. While same-sex activity was criminalized under Afghan law during the American occupation, life for LGBTIQ Afghans is now far more precarious. A Taliban judge declared last year that “[f]or homosexuals, there can only be two punishments: either stoning, or he must stand behind a wall that will fall down on him,” according to an open letter from several major LGBTIQ rights organizations to President Biden urging him to take bolder actions to protect LGBTIQ and other particularly vulnerable Afghans.

The first 29 LGBTIQ Afghan refugees arrived in the United Kingdom last October. More followed in November with an unknown number making it to Canada in December. Upon reaching the U.K., one refugee told the BBC that he felt like “a human being for the first time” in his life, exclaiming: “I feel safe and free. This is amazing.”

But thousands of at-risk LGBTIQ people remain in Afghanistan, and the U.S. and other countries need to do more. Global attention also should not be confined to the plight of LGBTIQ Afghans. Thousands of LGBTIQ people live in fear for their lives across the globe, especially in the approximately 70 countries that criminalize homosexuality, including 10 that make it a capital offense.

Enabling LGBTIQ people to escape imminent threats of harm requires monumental effort. And sadly, even that is not enough. The anti-LGBTIQ attitudes and laws themselves must change, and the religious, cultural, political, and financial interests that support them must be subverted. Governments, businesses, and organizations that purport to support human rights must be active agents for change. No LGBTIQ person nor anyone else should have to choose between living in peace and personal freedom and their home.

Forcing Women to Go Through Pregnancy Has No Place in American Society
December 16, 2021

As we celebrate last week’s historic victory for marriage equality in Chile and take a break for the winter holidays, we must also remain cognizant of what happened at the U.S. Supreme Court on December 1 at oral argument in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. That’s the legal case in which the Republican Catholic Supreme Court majority could possibly strip women (as well as nonbinary, intersex, and transgender people who can become pregnant) of their most basic Constitutional right to exercise control over their own bodies when it comes to reproduction.

At issue in the case is a Mississippi law that prohibits women from obtaining an abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a time before which some women may not even know they’re pregnant or have the means or ability to obtain an abortion. The law makes no exceptions for cases of rape or incest.

The State of Mississippi also asked the Supreme court to overrule its 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade decision and allow states to outlaw abortion entirely, even in cases of rape or incest. U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar explained to the Court that “nearly half of the states already have or are expected to enact bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy, many without exceptions for rape or incest.”

The State of Mississippi and myriad other opponents of women’s reproductive freedom seek to permit states “to force women to remain pregnant and give birth against their will,” in the words of Julie Rikelman, Litigation Director of the Center for Reproductive Rights, who argued the case on behalf of Jackson Women’s Health. A woman who was brutally raped could be forced to go through a compelled pregnancy and bear the child of her attacker.

Rikelman further explained: “It’s 75 times more dangerous to give birth in Mississippi … than it is to have a pre-viability abortion,” and highlighted that “those risks are disproportionately threatening the lives of women of color.” Nearly a quarter of all American women have had an abortion. Black women have abortions at the highest per capita rate in the U.S., at a rate 2.7 times higher than non-Hispanic white women, according to 2017 data from the Guttmacher Institute. Hispanic and other women of color also have more abortions per capita than non-Hispanic white women. Further, 75% of women who have abortions are poor or low income, with 49% below the federal poverty level.

Yet the people whom the decision will most affect have no say in the decision. No poor women of color, or poor women at all, sit on the Court. The Court has no African American women Justices. The sole woman of color in the Court’s history, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, made no secret of her perspective on the case, dismantling the State of Mississippi’s arguments at each and every turn. She described the “stench” that would hang over the Court were it to overturn decades of abortion law precedent, less than two years after the last of three Trump nominees joined the Court.

The six-member wealthy, conservative Republican majority poised to undermine or overturn abortions rights in America includes: four white, cisgender, heterosexual men (three of whom are conservative Catholics and one who is conservative Catholic turned Episcopalian), a white Catholic woman, and Clarence Thomas, a Catholic African American man who in no way represents the perspectives of the majority of African Americans.

None of these Justices has demonstrated personal, first-hand familiarity with the struggles of poor women of color, upon whom they seek to impose their will. Thomas, who was elevated to the Court despite Professor Anita Hill’s sworn testimony that he sexually harassed her, and Brett Kavanaugh, who won confirmation in the face of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s sworn testimony that he sexually assaulted her, particularly lack credibility to decide the case.

Further, some Court observers fear that overturning Roe v. Wade could lead to the Court’s overturning Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated laws criminalizing intimate sexual activity between persons of the same sex, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which made marriage equality the law of the land. All three cases rely on the Constitutional doctrine of personal liberty founded in “substantive due process.” At oral argument, both Kavanaugh and Barrett appeared perhaps to try to assuage such fears, seeming to imply they saw distinctions between the cases.

Mississippi State Solicitor General Scott Stewart also emphasized that overturning Roe would not undermine these cases, and in so doing made a stunning admission. He described the court’s prior rulings that “you can’t ban intimate romantic relationships between consenting adults” and “can’t ban marriage of people of the same sex,” as “clear rules” upon which many people have relied that “have not produced negative consequences.”

After decades of fear mongering on the part of LGBTIQ rights opponents, Stewart’s acknowledgment that decriminalization of same-sex love and marriage equality have resulted in no “negative consequences” is truly an astonishing turnabout. Although one could dismiss Stewart’s words as well as those of Kavanaugh and Barrett as disingenuous or calculating, they may evince how far the LGBTIQ movement has come, as does the recent marriage equality victory in Chile after years of struggle and adversity.

Forcing women to remain pregnant and bear children against their will has no place in a free society and fundamentally undermines the human rights and dignity of women and other queer people who can become pregnant. Now is the time for all Americans who believe in basic freedom and bodily integrity to stand up and make their voices heard.

Don’t Forget Thanksgiving Amidst the December Holiday Frenzy
December 2, 2021

For many Americans, Thanksgiving is their favorite holiday. It precedes the frenzy of the consumerism, busyness, and attendant stress of the December holiday season, which is now upon us. Thanksgiving can be more a time to take a break and gather with friends and family, rest and relax, gorge oneself at the dinner table, or even watch football.

For some, it’s also a time to genuinely take stock of all they have in life for which they are grateful. Doing so raises the question: What does feeling gratitude actually mean and entail in 21st century America?

Maybe gratitude is simple—just taking the time to notice and appreciate all the good fortune we have, whatever it may be, and all the people in our lives we value. Inclining our minds to positive things that elicit warmth and happiness amidst all the difficulties of the world seems very healthy. Millions attest to the mental health benefits of maintaining a daily gratitude journal.

But when it comes to material wealth and comfort, is gratitude a sufficient response for those of us who have abundance when others do not? All too often, the reason for the disparity is systemic discrimination or the fact that countless people are not lucky enough to have been born into a measure of wealth or advantage, or they simply do not have the skills that modern American corporate culture rewards. Should contemplating gratitude lead us to reflect on the degree to which we are driven to value material wealth beyond such things as essential food, clothing, shelter, and medicine? Moreover, what does it mean more broadly to feel gratitude for something, material or otherwise, that we have that other people don’t?

In Theravada Buddhism, gratitude is linked particularly to one thing: another person’s genuine kindness. An ancient Buddhist text asserts that two types of people “are hard to find in the world.” One is a person who is the first “to do a kindness,” and the other is a person “who is grateful and thankful for a kindness done.”

Connecting gratitude to kindness takes us out of focusing on material things in and of themselves and instead directs us toward considering how we treat each other. It forces us to confront the complex question of who are the many people to thank for the good in our lives. It invites us to be thankful for people, not things apart from the people who made them possible. It points us to examining how we act and the intentions behind our words and actions and their likely consequences.

The Theravada texts emphasize that gratitude for kindness should not be static; it calls for an active response. That response is not repaying one’s benefactor in a one-for-one exchange. It’s acting with discernment, wisdom, and integrity oneself in myriad different ways in the world. The grateful response to kindness is more kindness.

The experience of receiving kindness and offering gratitude interpersonally can be very intimate. On a broader societal level, making kindness really mean something involves working for social and economic justice and preservation of the planet in the face of the climate crisis. Kindness that merits gratitude often entails hard work, political activism, and advocacy.

Indeed, increasing numbers of Americans are infusing a social and economic justice component into the Thanksgiving holiday. They remind us that in 1621, when tradition says the first Thanksgiving took place in the Plymouth Colony in what is now Massachusetts, colonialism and oppression—the legacy of which we still contend with 400 years later—were taking root in America. The native Wampanoag people had lived at Plymouth for 10,000 years before and called it Patuxet. As Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project reminds us, Anglo-based enslavement of Africans in what is now the U.S. began two years before the first Thanksgiving.

For many LGBTIQ people, the Thanksgiving tradition of spending time with family, something many non-LGBTIQ people take for granted, may not be comforting or even possible. Many of us create our chosen families. For some of us, Thanksgiving may be a painful reminder of our struggle to live our lives freely and openly in the face of discrimination, disapproval, or the threat of violence.

Although Thanksgiving 2021 has come and gone, something magical about kindness and gratitude intertwined together is that they may arise perhaps only for a brief moment even in the face of formidable personal challenges or long, momentous struggles for justice. And we have countless opportunities to choose kindness and gratitude in ways that might not be immediately apparent.

In his 1980 novel More Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin models such an opportunity through his fictional character Michael Tolliver when Tolliver learns that his parents to whom he has not come out have joined Anita Bryant’s anti-gay “Save the Children” campaign of the 1970s. Tolliver writes his mother:

“I know what you must be thinking now. You’re asking yourself: What did we do wrong? How did we let this happen? Which one of us made him that way? I can’t answer that, Mama. In the long run, I guess I really don’t care. All I know is this: If you and Papa are responsible for the way I am, then I thank you with all my heart, for it’s the light and the joy of my life.”

This month and beyond, let’s keep gratitude and kindness as vital parts of our lives.

U.S. Supreme Court: Transgender Discrimination Case Can Go Forward
November 18, 2021

Five years ago, Evan Minton, a Sacramento-area transgender man, scheduled a hysterectomy as part of his gender confirmation surgery to be performed by his physician at his local hospital, Mercy San Juan Medical Center. Everything was set for the procedure, and two days before the scheduled date, Minton received a routine phone call with a nurse to go over details. When Minton mentioned to the nurse that he was transgender, everything suddenly changed.

The next day the hospital unilaterally cancelled the procedure. Its sole reason was that Minton’s surgery was part of his gender confirmation process as a transgender man. The hospital justified its refusal on the grounds of religion because it is a Catholic hospital. Minton said he was shocked that his local community hospital would try to use “religious doctrine” to prevent transgender people like himself from having medically necessary hysterectomies as part of their gender confirmation. He was devastated and distraught.

But Minton stood up for himself and the broader LGBTIQ community. Along with his physician and lawyer, he brought legal, political, and media attention to the hospital’s actions. Mercy San Juan is part of the Dignity Health medical conglomerate. Under pressure, Dignity Health permitted Minton to have the surgery at a Methodist Hospital that was also part of Dignity Health.

Minton sued Dignity Health for discrimination. Dignity Health tried to get Minton’s case thrown out of court. When it failed, it went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court refused to hear Dignity Health’s appeal in a victory for Minton.

The Supreme Court’ s declining to hear the case is also good news, at least for now, for the LGBTIQ community at the U.S. Supreme Court. At present, the Supreme Court’s conservative Catholic majority does not seem to be targeting LGBTIQ freedom and equality in the same aggressive manner it sadly appears to be eviscerating women’s reproductive freedom.

Last June, the Supreme Court issued a setback to LGBTIQ people in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia when it ruled that Catholic Social Services could discriminate against same-sex couples while receiving taxpayer money to certify foster parents and place children. But it did so on narrow grounds under the particular circumstances of the case. Subsequently, the Court declined to hear appeals of two other lower court victories for LGBTIQ people in discrimination cases and now Minton’s case.

However, three Justices (Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch) voted to hear Minton’s case as well as one of the other cases regarding an attempt to discriminate under the guise of religion. And they urged the Court to issue a more sweeping decision in Fulton.

Additional cases of Catholic and other conservative Christian-affiliated organizations seeking to discriminate against LGBTIQ people in ways that would otherwise violate the law will undoubtedly come to the Court. Cases currently pending in lower courts include the following: an attempt by a for-profit business to engage in employment discrimination against LGBTIQ people in violation of Title VII on the grounds of conservative Christian religious beliefs; a social services agency under federal contract through the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops denying a lesbian the ability to be a foster parent because of her sexual orientation; and cases pertaining to private businesses denying services to LGBTIQ people on religious grounds. This term, the U.S. Supreme Court may decide whether conservative Christian schools that attempt to inculcate their Biblical views in their students and thereby prohibit openly LGBTIQ students from attending and refuse to hire LGBTIQ teachers can receive public tuition funding.

Minton’s case pertaining to his medically necessary care as a transgender person illuminates the potentially serious real life implications of businesses and organizations using religion to justify denying LGBTIQ people services or otherwise treating them unequally. San Juan Mercy Hospital was Minton’s local community hospital where he lived. We know the discomfort he would likely now feel if he needed to go there for an emergency or other medical treatment.

The Dignity Health’s slogan is “Hello Humankindness.” Two years ago, it became part of CommonSpirit Health. When it comes to Minton and discrimination against LGBTIQ people, the organization far from demonstrates kindness or a common spirit. It denies us our full dignity as LGBTIQ people.

Dignity Health operates not just in the Central Valley, but also in the heart of San Francisco and across the West. We hope that someday it will fully embody the values it professes.

Love Wins in Switzerland as the Struggle Continues
November 4, 2021

In late September, voters in Switzerland supported the freedom to marry by a nearly 2–1 margin in a nationwide referendum, making that nation the 30th country in the world with marriage equality. Over a billion people worldwide now live in nations with marriage equality. Swiss weddings will begin in July 2022.

ILGA-Europe Advocacy Director Katrin Hugendubel termed the vote “a huge achievement,” remarking to Euronews that “it’s been a very long process following the tireless efforts of activists over the years.” Indeed, it was a needlessly long struggle to make Switzerland the 17th nation in Europe with equal marriage rights. Back in 2013, public polling showed over 60 percent of Swiss people supported the freedom to marry, with that number soaring to over 80 percent by 2020. But conservative political interests were able to stall progress for years. When the Swiss government finally enacted marriage equality in late 2020, opponents collected sufficient signatures to put the matter to voters in this fall’s referendum.

The Swiss election brought back painful memories of Proposition 8. We in California know all too well the cost of putting our basic civil rights up to a popular vote. Like the Yes on 8 campaign of 13 years ago, the anti-equality Swiss campaign used cruel, exclusionary slogans such as, “Yes to marriage and family – No to marriage for everyone,” to try to sway voters. We were delighted and gratified that Swiss voters emphatically rejected that message, and instead embraced same-sex couples and LGBTIQ equality.

The Swiss success now makes neighboring Italy the only major Western European nation without marriage equality. Although Italy enacted civil unions in 2016, progress toward equal marriage rights and full LGBTIQ equality faces major challenges there because of the outsized influence the Vatican and other very conservative interests play in the country. Just last week, the Vatican and those interests successfully pressured the Italian Senate to reject legislation that would have made violence against LGBTIQ people, as well as women and disabled people, a hate crime. The Independent characterized the Vatican’s efforts as “unprecedented.”

Reuters reported that “the Vatican feared that the law could lead to the criminalization of the Church in Italy for refusing to conduct gay marriages, for opposing adoption by homosexual couples, or refusing to teach gender theory in Catholic schools.” Perhaps the Vatican doth protest too much with its overstated argument. Indeed, many may consider the Vatican’s long history of anti-LGBTIQ attitudes, edicts, and actions to be “criminal” in a rhetorical sense.

It would not be the first time the Catholic Church and criminality would be closely linked in recent times. Just last month, an independent French commission issued a 2,500-page report, finding that French Catholic clergy had sexually abused approximately 216,000 minors since 1950 in what it termed a “massive phenomenon,” kept hidden by a “veil of silence.” The commission’s head described the Church as having maintained “profound and even cruel indifference” for what it had done.

In response, the Pope expressed his “sadness and pain for the trauma” the victims had suffered. He declared: “It is also my shame, our shame, for the inability of the Church for too long to put them at the center of its concerns.”

The phrase “profound and even cruel indifference” could also describe the Vatican’s attitude toward LGBTIQ people in Italy and around the world. Just as the Catholic clergy’s sexual abuse has had long-lasting repercussions for their victims, the Catholic Church’s anti-LGBTIQ religious and political rhetoric and actions have devastating consequences on countless LGBTIQ people. We long for the day when a Pope expresses his “sadness and pain for the trauma” the Church has inflicted on queer people and speaks of his “shame” and the Church’s collective shame for all the harm it has perpetrated against LGBTIQ people.

We are confident that the Italian LGBTIQ movement will persevere. And we celebrate the message and promise of the marriage equality movement: “Love Wins.” LGBTIQ Swiss and millions of their supporters made that dream come true in Switzerland in September in a vote ILGA’s Hugendubel assures “resonates across borders.” Switzerland now joins Ireland as the second nation to enact marriage equality resoundingly through a nationwide vote. We know that love will continue to win elsewhere as long as our community continues to keep those words and their promise as our loadstar.

Perseverance Paying Off in Chile
August 26, 2021

It’s nearly 10,000 miles from Utqiagvik, Alaska, the northernmost community in the United States to Cape Horn at the southernmost tip of Chile. But very soon, same-sex couples may have the freedom to marry in these two poles of the Americas, spanning nearly the entirety of the Western Hemisphere.

It’s all because of the perseverance of Chile’s LGBTIQ community and its allies.

Nearly ten years ago in 2012, Chilean LGBTIQ rights advocates filed a lawsuit for marriage equality with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. After four years of delay, the Chilean government led by then-President Michelle Bachelet, a marriage equality supporter, agreed in 2016 to settle the case and promote marriage equality legislation in the national legislature. In August 2017, Bachelet finally introduced that legislation.

But in November 2017, Chile held its presidential and national legislative elections, and the pro-equality candidate whom Bachelet hoped would succeed her lost to current Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, who had introduced Chile’s civil union bill but staunchly opposed marriage equality.

There was still time left, though. Piñera and the new legislature would not take office until March 2018. If Bachelet and the sitting legislature that favored marriage equality—as did 60 percent of the population according to public opinion polls—scrambled, they could still pass the legislation.

Adding to the drama, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in a sweeping landmark decision ruled in favor of marriage equality (as well as transgender rights) in January 2018 in a case arising out of Costa Rica.

The Court decision is binding on Chile and 22 other Latin American and Caribbean countries, which are active parties to the American Convention on Human Rights. But the Court unfortunately lacks an enforcement mechanism to ensure that signatory countries implement so-called advisory rulings, like the marriage equality decision. Member countries must still change their laws through their own legislatures or courts.

And time ran out in Chile. Despite the ruling, the Bachelet government failed to pass the legislation before marriage equality opponent Piñera and the new legislature took office.

Far from giving up, the Chilean LGBTIQ community remained steadfast and vocal in its advocacy for full equality. Couples continued filing lawsuits both in Chilean courts and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights seeking equality.

In October 2020, Chileans voted overwhelming to hold a Constitutional Convention to rewrite the nation’s constitution. In May 2021, an unprecedented eight openly LGBTIQ people won election to the 155-member Convention that will draft the new document. The Convention also has gender parity and never-before-seen representation of indigenous people and other diversity. LGBTIQ candidates additionally won election in local and regional elections held at the same time.

Then in June, President Piñera stunned the nation when he did an about face and endorsed marriage equality in his annual address to the Chilean Congress. Piñera, who had been facing increasing opposition to his government overall, perhaps took note of the results of the May elections and ever-growing support for LGBTIQ equality. He requested that Congress act with “urgency,” a procedure authorizing expedited passage of legislation.

A few weeks later, the Chilean Senate approved the marriage equality bill by a 2–1 margin. All that remains is for the Chilean Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress, to approve the legislation.

Once again, time is of the essence. Chile will hold its presidential and national legislative elections in November 2021.

As we watched the events in Chile unfold, we are reminded of the countless times LGBTIQ people have had to fight with great urgency to convince courts, legislatures, and voters that justice delayed is justice denied.

Back in February 2004, we and thousands of same-sex couples from across the country and round the world dashed to San Francisco City Hall thinking we might miss a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get married. We remember our disappointment when one of the California Supreme Court Justices at oral argument on the validity of the marriages naively asked Therese Stewart, counsel for the City of San Francisco, what the rush was.

As we wrote in this column over three and a half years ago: “The time for full marriage and LGBTIQ equality is now.” Thanks to the perseverance of Chilean LGBTIQ people, now might come very soon.

The Edge of Glory
August 12, 2021

When Hmong-American Sunisa Lee took home gold as all-around women’s gymnastics champion, Cambodian-American Jordan Windle finished 9th in the men’s 10-meter platform diving competition, and openly LGBTIQ Filipinx boxer Nesthy Petecio won silver in women’s featherweight boxing at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, I felt a special sense of excitement.

Over 40 years ago, I had the great fortune to work with refugees from the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—first in the U.S. and then at a camp in the Philippines. I taught refugees English as well as cultural elements and practical skills needed to adapt to life in America.

But I learned far more from the refugees and my Filipinx colleagues than I ever taught them. The connection we shared and the introduction they gave me to their cultures have been lifelong gifts to me.

I remember spending many hours listening to Cambodian refugees recount how they survived the Khmer Rouge genocide that ensued after the U.S. military departed Southeast Asia. They faced torture and starvation and had to overcome the murder of close family members and dear loved ones. Vietnamese refugees told their stories of years of war, escaping on boats under the cover of darkness, and staying alive as their rickety vessels traversed the South China Sea. After working in the camp in the Philippines, I visited the Hmong refugee camp in northeast Thailand, just across the Mekong River from their home country Laos. Many of the refugees risked their lives as they crossed the river to safety.

Sunisa Lee is the first Hmong American and presumably the first Hmong person to win an Olympic medal. Jordan Windle is the first Cambodian American to compete for the U.S. in the Olympics. Windle, born in Cambodia, was orphaned as an infant and suffered from serious malnutrition and illness when he was adopted by an openly gay man from the U.S. Now, he’s the proud son of an openly gay father and his husband, another Olympic feat.

Windle is a vocal advocate for LGBTIQ and other marginalized people. He’s already working to help youth in his native Cambodia find opportunities. Upon her victory, Petecio declared: “This win is for the LGBTQ community. Let’s go, fight!” I feel truly proud of all of them.

Lee, Windle, and Petecio’s presence at the Olympics also serves as a reminder of the grave consequences of war. Neither Lee nor Windle would have competed as Americans had the U.S. military not been a pivotal force in the horrendous wars in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 70s that cost millions of lives. I’ll never forget as an 11-year-old boy watching President Richard Nixon on national television announce the 1970 U.S. troop invasion of Cambodia, following over a year of secret bombing.

Hmong people had lived for millennia in tightknit isolated communities in the mountains of Laos. In the 1960s, the CIA recruited thousands of them to fight a secret war against communists in Laos. The death rate of Hmong soldiers was 10 times that of American soldiers in Vietnam. Between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped more bombs on the nation of Laos than all the bombs dropped in World War II, making the tiny country the most bombed country in world history.

The Philippines were ruled by Spanish colonists for over 300 hundred years, then possessed as a territory of the U.S. for forty years, and occupied by the Japanese military during World War II, before gaining independence in 1946. Today, the Philippines still struggles to overcome the legacy of hundreds of years of occupation.

And a 29-member team consisting entirely of current refugees competed in the Tokyo Olympics as they did in Rio in 2016.

We must ask Bob Dylan’s question: “How many times must the cannonballs fly, before they’re forever banned?”

At the same time, we must take hope in the triumphs of Lee, Windle, and Petecio, and how their presence serves as an example that things can change for the better.

My dad and Stuart’s dad both fought against the Japanese military as part of the U.S. Army in the Philippines in 1945. Over 75 years later, we teach about marriage equality and LGBTIQ rights to Japanese university students, studying in the Olympic host city Tokyo, a place we love. As young soldiers, our fathers would never have imagined such a thing to be possible.

Although we all must participate in truth, reconciliation, and reparation for the present-day effects of the past, we don’t have to continue to live out the conflicts, hatred, and wars that previous generations enacted. Lee, Windle, and Petecio were born at the turn of a new century. Their Olympic triumphs symbolize what may be possible if we want it collectively as a global society—and are willing to undertake the dedication and effort that the three of them did to achieve their Olympic glory.

Counting Justices at the U.S. Supreme Court
July 29, 2021

The night Donald Trump was elected president nearly five years ago, we remember asking each other in despair: Will conservative religious forces go to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to take away our marriage? Would there be an all-out attack on LGBTIQ rights at the Court?

Now that the Court has completed its first full term with a conservative supermajority of three Trump nominees, as well as two Bush, Jr., and one Bush, Sr., nominees, it’s time to assess where things stand today.

Bear in mind, had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 Electoral College vote (she easily won the popular vote), the Court would look very different today. It would have a solid pro-LGBTIQ majority of one Bill Clinton, two Obama, and two Hillary Clinton nominees. The blatantly partisan way Trump’s three appointees gained Senate confirmation and the fact that a single election can shape Constitutional interpretation for decades lay bare the need for institutional reform of the Court.

But nonetheless, all is not lost with the current Court, and in some instances there is even cause for hope.

For example, even as the Court failed to rule in favor of LGBTIQ rights last month in the foster parenting case (Fulton), it recognized that equal treatment of gay couples in foster-parenting was unquestionably a “weighty” interest. The Court reiterated language from a 2018 decision (Masterpiece Cake) that “[o]ur society has come to the recognition that gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth.” It seems that three liberal Justices (Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor) forged a compromise with three conservatives (Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) to issue a decision that resulted in the Catholic Social Services winning the case on narrow religious exception grounds particular to the case instead of a sweeping decision with far-reaching consequences.

The Court’s trend especially over the last year with its conservative supermajority to consistently find a way to rule in favor of conservative religious claims in cases it hears is disturbing. But only three Justices (Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch) have urged a more aggressive approach in LGBTIQ cases, as they did in their Fulton concurrence last month.

Earlier this month they came together again to dissent to the Court’s decision not to hear the appeal of a Washington state florist who claimed that, because of her religion, she could violate state law by refusing to provide flowers for a lesbian couple’s wedding (Arlene’s Flowers). Significantly, neither Roberts, Kavanaugh, nor Barrett joined them in voting to take the case.

But last summer, Gorsuch broke with Thomas and Alito to author the Court’s landmark 6–3 Bostock decision, holding that employment discrimination against LGBTIQ people is unlawful sex discrimination prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Justice Ginsberg’s death reduced the vote margin by one, but the remaining five-Justice majority, which includes Chief Justice Roberts, ensures that Bostock is safe for now. It should have significant impact nationwide on LGBTIQ equality in housing, education, and health care, because parallel federal laws prohibit sex discrimination in those areas.

Many Court observers believe that the Court will someday address whether Title IX protections against sex discrimination apply to the right of transgender people to use the restroom that comports with their gender identity, an issue conservatives have used as a lightning rod wedge issue to motivate their political base and fundraise.

Although Kavanaugh joined Thomas and Alito dissenting in Bostock, he went out of his way to praise the “millions of gay and lesbian Americans [who] have worked hard for many decades to achieve equal treatment in fact and in law.” Will he now respect Bostock as precedent in future cases?

Remarks Barrett made in a 2016 speech before she became a justice cause us considerable concern as to how she might vote on the issue, but the 2020 Bostock decision now stands as precedent. When the Supreme Court last month refused to hear a Virginia county’s attempt to reverse courageous transgender youth Gavin Grimm’s victory in his multiyear battle regarding his right to use the bathroom at his high school, neither Barrett nor any of the other justices joined Thomas and Alito in voting to hear the case.

With respect to marriage equality, the departure of Justice Kennedy from the Court and the death of Justice Ginsberg mean that only three of the five justices who voted in favor of marriage equality in Obergefell remain on the Court: Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor. However, many believe based on a 2017 decision reaffirming Obergefell that Roberts now respects it as binding precedent even though he strongly dissented from the decision in 2015—and that Kavanaugh, Barrett, and hopefully Gorsuch do as well.

Thomas and Alito made national news last October when they blasted Obergefell in a statement upon the Court’s decision not to hear the case of the former Kentucky County clerk Kim Davis, who refused on religious grounds to issue marriage licenses to LGBTIQ couples. Neither Gorsuch, Roberts, nor Kavanaugh (Barrett was not yet on the Court) joined their vitriolic attack.

Recent polling shows that 70% of Americans support marriage equality and 83% support laws prohibiting discrimination against LGBTIQ people in employment, housing, and public accommodations. Our community and its millions of allies have created this dramatic societal embrace of equality. Our collective voice is what will sustain LGBTIQ rights at the Court.

No License to Discriminate
July 15, 2021

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia that Catholic Social Services could openly discriminate against same-sex couples while receiving taxpayer money to certify foster parents and place children. It was a setback for LGBTIQ people, but the Court largely limited its decision to the particularities of the case without issuing a broad decision with sweeping implications. As the ACLU said, the decision fortunately “does not create a license to discriminate” against LGBTIQ people based on religion.

Stepping back from the formal legal analysis and potential implications of the decision going forward, we were particularly disturbed by something else as we read the majority opinion and concurrences: the Court’s characterization of religion itself.

As an initial matter, the Court was highly selective in its recounting of the Catholic Church’s history regarding care and respect for children. At the beginning of the majority opinion, the Court baldly proclaimed that “the Catholic Church has served the needy children of Philadelphia for over two centuries.”

The Court made no mention of a scathing 2018 grand jury report that found that Catholic priests in Pennsylvania had sexually abused over 1,000 children and likely thousands more, while the Church covered up the crimes for 70 years. Neither did the Court note that even as it was drafting its decision praising the Catholic Church, mass graves containing the remains of 1,000 Indigenous Canadians were found near state-funded Catholic residential schools that housed Indigenous children taken by the Canadian government from their families from the 19th Century to the 1970s. Many of these children were physically and sexually abused at these schools. And the decision said nothing about the deleterious effect on children of the Church’s ongoing condemnation of being gay as sinful.

What also troubled us was the degree to which Justice Alito in his concurrence, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch, seemed to consider anger and hatred toward others to be part and parcel of holding religious beliefs. Alito asserted that members of one religion don’t just have different perspectives on religion than members of other faiths; they harbor vitriol towards others’ beliefs, finding them “hateful,” “offensive,” and “insulting.” For example, Alito posited that “declaring that Jesus was the Son of God is offensive to Judaism and Islam, and stating that Jesus was not the Son of God is insulting to Christian belief.”

When we were growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, we weren’t taught that religious beliefs different from our own were offensive or insulting; they were simply different. “Love your enemies,” “love your neighbor as yourself,” and “forgive and be forgiven”—not anger and hatred—were religious dicta we remember.

It’s important to understand that Alito’s purpose in describing religion the way he does is to liken it to speech, including political speech, with its broad protections under the First Amendment. In an earlier speech case, Justice Kagan criticized the Court for “weaponizing the First Amendment” and “wield[ing]” it in “an aggressive way.” Alito seems to want to weaponize religion in a similarly aggressive way to allow religiously affiliated organizations, like Catholic Social Services, to discriminate against LGBTIQ people, women, and other people in ways that would otherwise violate the law.

Unfortunately, Alito, along with Thomas and Gorsuch, hold enormous power in our country. But so far, their extreme views as expressed in their Fulton concurrence appear not to be fully shared by a majority of the Court, not even by the three other very conservative Catholic Justices.

We believe that’s because our movement for marriage equality and LGBTIQ rights have embraced something far different: love, common humanity, human connection, and empathy. We know that our religious LGBTIQ friends and allies embrace these values as well. They have refused to allow unwelcoming leaders and members of their own denominations to rob them of their faith, and many of them work tirelessly for LGBTIQ equality within hostile religious institutions. They and many other people of faith do not consider religion to be a political slugfest.

Our message is getting through. According to the Pew Research Center, 61% of American Catholics favored marriage equality in 2019, compared to only 36% just 15 years before in 2004. Similarly, white Evangelical support for same-sex marriage rose from 11% to 29% during that same time. A May 2021 Gallop poll showed a whopping 70% of Americans overall in favor of marriage equality.

It’s hard-won progress, achieved through education and advocacy, forged by dedication, determination, and bravery, and grounded in love. As the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote as he prepared for the 1963 Birmingham Campaign: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

The deepest foundations of the LGBTIQ movement lie in our self-respect, love, and coming out about the truth of our lives. When Dr. King accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, the year after the Birmingham Campaign and the March on Washington, he proclaimed: “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”

In other words: “Love Wins.”

Happy Lucky LGBTIQ Freedom Day!
June 24, 2021

Every year at Pride, we think of how lucky we are to be gay—as we also join with the community in rededicating ourselves to the ongoing struggle for full equality and dignity. This year, we’re particularly treasuring the unique perspective being LGBTIQ gives us on the constructs of gender and how it provides LGBTIQ people the opportunity to live inwardly and outwardly free from the constraints of gender.

We both grew up in Middle America in the 1960s and 70s, when gender norms were much more rigid than they are today. We were fortunate to have parents who themselves to varying degrees did not conform to many of the gender stereotypes of the day.

John’s dad took it a step further. He questioned people’s ability to define gender at all. As a counseling psychology professor, he challenged his students to question all assumptions they might bring to a client in therapy and to their lives as well—including gender.

When friends or colleagues came over for dinner, just as we had all sat down at the table to eat he would ask the guests a question: “Do you know what sex you are?” As soon as they responded (always either male or female), he would retort: “How do you know?” Regardless of their answer, he always had further questions to expose their assumptions and undermine their confidence in their assertions. For instance, if a person responded that their chromosomes determined their gender, he would immediately reply: “Have you personally checked your chromosomes? And what about transgender people?”

John’s dad engaged in these inquiries with others to help expose broadly how assumptions people make about themselves, other people, and anything else in life are to some degree subjective, arbitrary, and not fully accurate. They don’t reflect direct, lived experience. He wanted his students to see that as therapists their unexamined assumptions could interfere with helping their clients. More generally, he sought to shed light on how assumptions, views, and opinions can limit human communication, connection, and ability to live life fully. He wanted people to understand the power of not judging others and not pre-judging situations.

Without realizing it, he was articulating the basis for what was happening in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and some other parts of the country at the time: the movement then known as gay liberation and freedom—that today we call LGBTIQ Pride. At its heart lies freedom and liberation from the constraints of gender and consequently the unbound expression of our lives in all their beautiful dimensions.

Nearly 1,500 years earlier, the Bodhidharma, the legendary figure credited with bringing Zen Buddhism to China over the Silk Road, had made a similar assessment of gender. The Bodhidharma explained that the terms “male” and “female” are designations or descriptors of part of life, not fixed identities. The terms mean different things to different people at different times. He likened gender designations to labels people apply to nature such as “grass” or “trees” and myriad other parts of the physical world. He believed that people who see beyond the illusion of inherently fixed, predetermined gender identities have a greater insight into life.

As LGBTIQ people, we are lucky because one or more prominent elements of our lives—be it our love, sexual attraction, gender identity, appearance, way of thinking, or personal expression—defies the confines of the strict gender binary. We have the chance to see clearly through arbitrary definitions of gender and live more beautifully nuanced, complex, and creative lives than those dictated by strict gender norms. And we can help show the world that no one should have to live under artificial constraints.

For many of us, what the world calls “male” and “female” are dynamically at play within us. And what that interplay is capable of producing can be a gift to the world in ways big and small. Indeed, many Native Americans for millennia considered “Two Spirit” people to be a gift of supernatural intervention. We should all consider our own unique sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression to be that sacred.

Happy Gay Liberation Day, Happy LGBTIQ Freedom Day, Happy Pride!

Juan, Kimberly, Oscar, Amanda
June 10, 2021

Stanley, Rodolfo, Antonio, Darryl, Angel, Luis, Cory, Tevin, Deonka, Simon, Leroy, Mercedez, Peter, Juan, Paul, Frank, Miguel, Javier, Jason, Eddie, Anthony, Christopher, Alejandro, Brenda, Gilberto, Juan, Akyra, Luis, Geraldo, Eric, Joel, Jean Carlos, Enrique, Jean, Xavier, Christopher, Yilmary, Edward, Shane, Martin, Jonathan, Juan, Luis, Franky, Jerry.

These are the names of the 49, mostly Latinx, members of the LGBTIQ community who were senselessly murdered in the early morning hours of June 12, 2016, at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. When we visited the Pulse memorial 18 months ago, we saw beautiful photos of all these cherished members of our community. They were out on a Saturday night at Pulse, a place they thought was safe to relax, dance, and simply be themselves, when a lone shooter armed with a SIG Sauer MCX semi-automatic rifle and a 9mm Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol opened fire, killing them and wounding 53 others. This week marks the fifth anniversary of the massacre. It remains the deadliest hate crime perpetrated by a single individual in American history.

Jennifer, Serena, Dustin, Brenda, Giselle, Tamara, Michelle, Fabiola, Hilary, Leticia, Shakira, Felycya, Isabelle, Samantha, Sabrina, Nicole, Mateus, Francesca, Monique, Maria, Alexa, Ali, Vanessa, Isadora, Stephanie, Valeria, Anushka, Paloma, Kelly, Daniela, Naomi, Lexi, Dominique, Mira, Sasha, Natasha, Juliana, Katherine, Melody, Manuela, Rhyanna, Leona, Tiffany, Marilyn, Eduarda, Márcia, Brandy, Mateus, Pablo, Britany.

These are the names of just a few of the hundreds of transgender people, mostly people of color, who were murdered last year alone. They came from places as far and wide as Arkansas, Brazil, France, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Ohio, Puerto Rico, and New York City. They lost their lives because they had the bravery to live true to themselves.

We could add another name to the list of LGBTIQ people who died at the hands of hatred and gun violence: Harvey.

We remember Harvey Milk’s famous words he recorded in 1978 on a tape to be played in the event of his assassination: “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door in the country.”

Pride Month is a celebration of destroying closet doors, whether we smash them down in one fell swoop or close them quietly behind us as we liberate ourselves. For us, it’s about being loud, strong, and joyful, from the relative security of San Francisco and other places where we can speak out and be ourselves. For those of us who live in homes or communities where doing so publicly is unsafe, Pride may manifest through a powerful inner strength and sense of well-being that refuses to lock the beauty of our sexuality and gender expression in an internal closet. We resist becoming figuratively our own internal assassin, forsaking our inner happiness, and surrendering hope.

A sundrenched and faded trans rainbow flag at the Pulse Memorial reads: “Bullets Cannot Break Our Pride. More Love, Less Hate.”

Since the 2015 nationwide marriage equality victory, Republican and other anti-LGBTIQ political forces have carried out a cynical and unprecedented attack on the rights and freedoms of transgender people for their own political gain. They have turned to exploiting Americans’ relative lack of familiarity with and understanding of trans and gender nonbinary people because their previous attacks on LGB people no longer resonate with most of the country. This orchestrated vilification and stigmatization of trans people is having deadly effects as evidenced by record numbers of murders of trans people, especially trans women of color. And the grim data show that transphobia is a worldwide epidemic.

This new attention makes trans people particularly vulnerable right now, and together we must advocate strongly for transgender rights and support trans people. But as we have seen with marriage equality and the broader LGBTIQ movement, breaking down closet doors over time produces more love, dignity, and respect—and civil rights.

Even though this year, like last, the COVID-19 pandemic prevents us from showing up millions strong on Market Street as usual, Pride remains a time for us to delight together in the beauty and joy of being LGBTIQ and to dedicate ourselves to doing everything we can to stop hate violence from taking any more lives of our community. Happy Pride Month—let’s keep changing the world!

What a Difference 17 Years Make: Cicadas and LGBTIQ Equality
May 20, 2021

2021 is a special year. Although cicadas and their sonorous sounds are a regular part of summer in much of the world, this summer trillions of cicadas who have an unusual 17-year life cycle will emerge from beneath the earth in the eastern United States. The last time these cicadas saw the light of day, it was 2004. Gavin Newsom had just burst open the doors of San Francisco City Hall for same-sex couples to marry. Massachusetts had recently become the first state in the union with marriage equality. The national freedom to marry movement was in its nascence.

Those cicadas spent very little time above ground back then; they were newly hatched nymphs that quickly burrowed below to feed, grow, and live for the next 17 years. During that time, the marriage equality and LGBTIQ rights movements grew and gained momentum, too. Many challenges arose, including 31 states voting to prohibit same-sex marriage from 2004–2008. But the tireless work of countless LGBTIQ people and their supporters means that today these teenage cicadas resurface into a country that has had nationwide marriage equality for six years. And the nation has never had a more pro-LGBTIQ president and vice president than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

We can’t help but wonder if the cicadas actually burrowed underground in 2004 to flee the presidency of George W. Bush, who advocated a federal Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and remained there until Trump and Pence no longer occupied the White House.

Recent public opinion polling also shows nationwide support for marriage equality at an all-time high of 70 percent, with 83 percent of the nation favoring laws prohibiting anti-LGBTIQ discrimination in employment, public accommodations, and housing. A recent study revealed that a whopping 66% of age 13–18 gay and bisexual boys are now out to their female parents, with 49% out to their male parents. We envision those percentages only rising.

Interestingly, the first thing a cicada does after it tunnels its way back above ground is to come out. It sheds its golden, nymphal exoskeleton, leaving it behind forever. Its soft, vulnerable body is nearly translucent, but soon gains strength and color, soars upward, and begins to sing. Cicadas’ pervasive, all-consuming hum is beloved by many as a daily auditory reminder of the bounteous warmth of summer. This year, we think of them as an operatic chorus, proclaiming, “Love Wins.”

The revered Japanese haiku master Bashō, who was also queer, described this process over 300 years ago:

The shell of a cicada;
It sang itself
Utterly away.

(Translation by R.H. Blyth.)

Murasaki Shikibu, in her 11^th century novel Tales of Genji, also likened a lover shedding their robe to a cicada’s molting its outer shell.

A cicada’s sound derives from its vibrating body, shaped similarly to a violin with a resonating inner chamber. Millions of cicadas vocalizing together powerfully amplify their voices, such that every 17 years can become deafening to those who try to resist it. They are nothing short of “loud and proud.”

We think of the power of the voices of the LGBTIQ community and our supporters both individually and collectively. For instance, when Proposition 8 took away same-sex couples’ hard-fought right to marry in California, a nationwide no-H8 LGBTIQ movement arose louder, stronger, and more numerous than ever before. It ultimately led to the U.S. Supreme Court establishing nationwide marriage equality in 2015 and prohibiting anti-LGBTIQ employment discrimination last year.

Today, our movement’s success has spawned another backlash. This time, it’s a wholesale Republican-led attack on the health, well-being, and civil rights of transgender and gender non-binary people, coupled with a cynical campaign to justify blatant discrimination against LGBTIQ people under the guise of religious freedom. We and our allies must summon the same strength, political commitment, and determination to give voice to the truth of our lives as we’ve done before.

Poignantly, an individual cicada only lives at most a few weeks above ground as an adult, but collectively their sound permeates the consciousness of all those who hear it. Although many struggles remain, we can only imagine what a difference the next 17 years of our movement will make to the lives of LGBTIQ people when the next generation of these cicadas emerges in 2038.

‘This is the Result Because Mommy Worked So Hard’ – A Mother’s Day Reflection
May 6, 2021

“This is the result because Mommy worked so hard.” When South Korean actress Yuh-Jung Youn uttered those words last month in her acceptance speech for the best supporting actress Oscar, our thoughts immediately flashed to our own mothers and the ongoing struggle for women’s dignity and equality.

Seconds earlier, Youn with a touch of humor had thanked her two children “who made me go out and work.” What Youn didn’t explain was that, years ago, she was a newly divorced single mom in her late 30s, raising two young children as a Korean immigrant in Florida.

Before she married and followed her husband to America in the 1970s, Youn had been a pathbreaking Korean movie star at the peak of her career. But she suddenly had to ask herself whether she could support herself and her two children on a minimum wage job in Florida that she estimated paid about $2.75 per hour. She determined she couldn’t. Even though the Korean entertainment industry shunned divorced actresses, Youn’s tremendous talent and hard work ethic enabled her to return to Korea as an actress and make ends meet. Her grit and determination took her to the Oscar stage last month.

As Youn spoke, we recalled how Stuart’s mom, also a woman of Asian descent facing formidable odds, worked full time, completed her doctorate, and raised children all at the same time on her own. For many academics, successfully completing your doctoral dissertation almost feels like winning an Academy Award. At the beginning of her doctoral dissertation on the struggle of women in higher education, Stuart’s mom thanked Stuart and his siblings for their unfailing support of her work, which she said “made the entire process a cooperative one.”

Of course, millions of mothers and women in America, Korea, and around the world do not receive Oscars for their extraordinary feats forged by their hard work and often unacknowledged skills. The struggles of those women were also recognized at this year’s Academy Awards.

The film Nomadland about women living on the margins of American society won best picture, and its director Chloé Zhao made history as the first woman of color and only second woman to take home the prize. When the film’s star Frances McDormand received the best actress Oscar, she emphasized the power of women’s voices and work, declaring: “My voice is in my sword. We know the sword is our work. And I like work.”

McDormand has shattered gender stereotypes throughout her career not only through her acting and producing but also through her authentic presentation of herself on the high-glam red carpet, as she did at this year’s Oscars. No makeup, no fancy hairdos, no form-fitting attire—just “Fran” as a real 63-year-old woman.

We could not help but think of John’s mother, a barrier breaking professor, who also had no interest in makeup or hairstyles and along with John’s father turned many gender role stereotypes upside down to the extent they were able to in 1960s America, where women workers earned just 59 cents to the men’s dollar.

Oscar-winning actress and director Regina King began the ceremony by giving voice to other women’s struggles, that of African American moms whose sons live daily under the specter of police brutality. “As a mother of a Black son, I know the fear that so many people live with—and no amount of fame or fortune changes that.”

Later, producer Tyler Perry praised his mother as a role model and thanked her for the wisdom she imparted to him, forged as a woman who came of age in the Jim Crow South where she often grieved the murders of numerous of her African American peers. Perry recalled as a boy coming home from school one day to find his mother at home and “in tears,” and not at her job working with small children at the local Jewish community center. Her tears that day were not born of anti-Black violence but of an anti-Semitic threat to blow up the center. Perry said: “My mother taught me to refuse hate. She taught me to refuse blanket judgment.”

As we mark Mother’s Day this weekend, we think of these powerful women and mothers and the value of their words, work, and example not just to themselves and other women but also to their children and society more generally. But even with so many “mommies” working “so hard” and achieving so much, American women on the whole still earn 82 cents to a man’s dollar. The struggle continues forward.

‘My Little Asian Thing’: Everyday Anti-AAPI Bias and Its Effects
April 22, 2021

few years ago, at a professional event we regularly attend, we struck up a friendly conversation with a newcomer. As the man repeatedly used the word “we” in talking about his household, we asked him whom he lived with. The man’s response: “It’s me and my little Asian thing.”

We were stunned. The man was referring to his wife. And soon thereafter he revealed his “little Asian thing” was, in fact, a physician at a major medical center.

The man’s casually referring to his physician wife in such a manner truly revealed to us the depth of marginalization that Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women face. He not only dehumanized her by referring to her as a “thing” that was “little,” but he also expressed his ownership of her. She was “my little Asian thing.”

We can only imagine the degree to which the mass murderer of Asian-American spa workers in Atlanta considered those women his possessions with which he could do as he wished, including killing them when he was having “a really bad day.” Of course, it should go without saying that no AAPI woman should face such degradation and violence regardless of her station in life, whether she be a physician, spa worker, or vice president of the United States.

Sadly, this incident is just one of a number of times people have nonchalantly marginalized Asian Americans in otherwise friendly conversations with us. Several years ago, we ate dinner at a popular San Francisco restaurant in which the warm and outgoing owner was clearly friends with many of his customers. When he didn’t recognize us, he immediately pulled up a chair to converse. We soon realized that we lived very near each other, whereupon he exclaimed with delight: “It’s so nice to meet neighbors who are not Chinese!”

Of course, at that very moment he was meeting a Chinese neighbor: Stuart. He was clearly oblivious to that fact and was perhaps ignorant more generally that there are many mixed-race Chinese Americans like Stuart. It probably didn’t even cross his mind that both of our families could be multi-racial white/Asian-American families as, in fact, they are.

The restaurant owner likely sensed we were taken aback by his words, because he immediately stammered: “Nothing against the Chinese! I’d just like to be able to speak with my neighbors.” Attitudes about race can be multi-faceted, nuanced, and complex. Not everything is blind hatred. But the restaurant owner’s confidence in initially making such a broadly anti-Chinese statement greatly disturbed us.

The very casualness with which some people have felt free to denigrate Asian Americans to us reveals the insidious pervasiveness of anti-Asian attitudes. This conceptualization of Asian Americans as “other” undergirds the strikingly persistent perception that Asian Americans, even those who have been in the U.S. for multiple generations, are not Americans, but instead “perpetual foreigners.”

When a man spray-painted “No More Chinese” in large letters in multiple locations in our neighborhood six years ago, he invoked verbatim the racist rhetoric employed to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. When a man brutally attacked a 65-year-old AAPI woman in broad daylight on a New York City sidewalk last month, police said he yelled anti-Asian slurs, telling her, “You don’t belong here.” The person who graffitied “F–k China, Get Guns” on a telephone pole just a half block from our house last year delivered a chilling message of intimidation to his many AAPI neighbors.

According to a recent report from Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition formed to address anti-Asian discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 70 percent of reported anti-AAPI hate incidents over the last year targeted Asian-American women. The Atlanta murders and the New York City attack represent two of the most horrific examples of such racist and misogynist violence and demonstrate the gravity of the consequences of our society’s maintaining the attitude that Asian Americans are foreigners.

Educating the nation about our lives by telling our personal stories has been a key element in the successes of the marriage equality and LGBTIQ rights movement. The marked increase in anti-Asian hate incidents over the past year has finally brought much-need attention to Asian Americans’ struggles. We hope that America’s hearing the personal stories of Asian Americans in tandem with other proactive legal and political strategies will greatly reduce physical and verbal violence. We yearn for a day when no AAPI person will ever again be referred to as “my little Asian thing.”

Love Is Winning in Japan
March 25, 2021

When we were first invited to Japan to speak about marriage equality and LGBTIQ rights seven years ago, we asked those in attendance at our talk to raise their hands if they knew a gay person. No one did. Japan not only did not have marriage equality, but also not even a single locale had passed any form of same-sex partnership recognition.

Last week, a court in Sapporo, Japan, declared that the nation’s exclusion of LGBTIQ couples from marriage is unconstitutional. The court did so in one of a coordinated set of lawsuits brought by queer couples across the country. One of the plaintiffs, Ryosuke Kunimi, said that after learning of the ruling he simply “could not stop crying.” It reminded us of the joy we felt when the trial court ruled in our favor back in 2005 in the California marriage cases.

Recognizing that sexual orientation is immutable, the Sapporo court held that barring same-sex couples from marriage was discrimination forbidden by the Japanese Constitution. Plaintiffs believe the Sapporo decision will likely influence upcoming decisions in the other four lawsuits across the country expected later this year. Gon Matsunaka, director of the Marriage for All Japan coalition, characterized the importance of the Sapporo decision as “absolutely measureless.”

The decision will be appealed, however, and legal experts appear to believe that even with victory in the courts, Japan’s parliament will need to pass affirmative marriage equality legislation. The current conservative ruling party holds a strong majority in the Diet and has been resistant to change.

But the Sapporo decision could be a turning point, and the change we’ve witnessed in Japan over the last seven years gives us much hope. Last year, we were lucky enough to make a trip to Japan to speak in Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto just before the COVID-19 worldwide lockdown. This time when we asked audience members at a university whether they personally knew a gay person, many hands shot into the air.

By the end of 2021, at least three Japanese prefectures (similar to states) and over ninety municipalities will be issuing partnership certificates to same-sex couples. Although the certificates have little legal significance, their symbolic importance is substantial and the sheer speed of enactment from zero to over ninety in less than seven years is unprecedented in Japan.

On our trip last year, we also had the honor of meeting some of the plaintiff couples and attorneys in the Japanese marriage equality cases when we gave joint presentations at LGBTIQ community centers in Tokyo and Osaka. One of those couples was Ikuo Sato and his partner. Connecting with these queer kindred spirits who live 6,000 miles away was electric.

Sato and his partner’s life journey reflects that of many Japanese gay people. When the case was originally filed, Sato described to the court and world the traumatic struggle he experienced being gay. Sato, a professional HIV educator, also explained that he was HIV-positive with additional serious medical conditions. He wanted to use his visibility in the lawsuit not only to achieve marriage equality but also to further HIV education in Japan. He told the court, “There would be no greater happiness than legally marrying my partner and becoming a couple in the real sense before I die.”

Strikingly, Sato’s partner was not by his side at the court, but sat anonymously in the audience because he had not come out either to his family or co-workers because of fear of discrimination. Risk of discrimination at the workplace and within families, schools, and the broader community remains a serious concern for many LGBTIQ Japanese. At the news conference, Sato read a statement from his partner, saying: “I really want to stay side-by-side with my partner, but can’t. I would like to win the suit, show my face in public, and end my legal battle with a smile.” Together, they hoped for a better life for themselves and for future generations.

One of the most frustrating aspects of civil rights advocacy is that the need for change is immediate, yet the undeniable reality is that changing laws, institutions, and public attitudes nearly always takes time. Tragically, Sato and his partner’s personal dream of equality for themselves will not come true. Sato died in January of this year.

We know Sato’s partner’s grief must be immense. But their motivation that their advocacy benefits not just themselves but also today’s youth and queer people not yet even born serves as an inspiration to us all. Indeed, we had barely been born when Frank Kameny’s fighting back against the so-called “Lavender Scare” decades ago commenced the modern movement for legal LGBTIQ equality in the U.S. The shared wish of many LGBTIQ activists that future generations not suffer the way we did has been instrumental to our successes and imbued the movement with generosity. The movement is about both now and the future.

The time we spent with Sato last year was magical, and Sato’s magic will benefit many to come. We hope that last week’s court decision in Sapporo marks a turning point for Japan that will emanate across other parts of Asia and beyond.

The Equality Act: ‘Equal Dignity in the Eyes of the Law’
February 25, 2021

Seventeen years ago this month—February 2004—San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom made history when he burst open the doors of City Hall for LGBTIQ couples to be able to marry. When we said, “I do,” we felt something transform within us. We experienced our government for the first time treating us as fully equal human beings as gay people. At that moment, we vowed to do everything in our power to make LGBTIQ equality—and most importantly, the respect and dignity that comes with it—available to all.

When the U.S. Supreme Court established the freedom to marry nationwide in 2015, it declared that anything less than full marriage equality for LGBTIQ people would “disparage” our “choices” and “diminish” our “personhood.” Gay people deserve ”equal dignity in the eyes of the law.”

Although we now have marriage equality, the very dignity that the Court recognized as our birthright as LGBTIQ Americans is still denied us because federal law does not explicitly protect us from discrimination in myriad other aspects of our lives, from jobs to housing to health care to education.

We can think of no better way to affirm the dignity of LGBTIQ people and to mark the 17th anniversary of San Francisco’s “Winter of Love” than for Congress to enact the Equality Act, something that has been 46 years in the making since the first version of the legislation was introduced in 1974.

Today, where an LGBTIQ person lives determines whether legislation protects them from discrimination in areas such as employment, housing, and public accommodations. Twenty-seven states do not explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Some cities within those states have some form of protection. Twenty-one states have extensive prohibitions against LGBTIQ discrimination.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court held that employment discrimination against LGBTIQ people constitutes unlawful sex discrimination in violation of Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. Logically, the Court’s reasoning would apply to federal civil rights statutes barring sex discrimination in many other aspects of life.

But queer Americans should not have to wonder whether we have rights or need to file countless lawsuits to establish them one by one. We should not be subject to the whims of how different presidential administrations interpret and apply federal law. The Equality Act would comprehensively make these many vital protections explicit as a matter of federal statute.

A gender nonbinary teenager in Alabama should no more fear being treated unequally in school than a gay student in Seattle. A lesbian in Idaho should have the same access to a loan as a bisexual man in Massachusetts. A transgender Oklahoman should be able to have gender affirmation surgery safely at home in Tulsa and not have to move to Connecticut.

Personally, we are not just San Franciscans or Californians; we are Americans. When we travel to other states of our country, we should not have to fear whether a hotel could refuse to give us a room. We should be able to relocate to another state without losing any of our rights.

How can any of us have true dignity when only some of us are protected some of the time, and we are safe in one part of the country, but not another?

Today, the House of Representatives stands poised to pass the Equality Act, and President Biden is ready to sign it. Everything depends on the Senate, which under the leadership of Republican Mitch McConnell had previously blocked the bill. Today, things are different with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer now in charge of a Democratic-controlled Senate.

Getting 50 Senators to vote in favor of the Act may be within reach and potentially give Vice President Kamala Harris the opportunity to cast the tie-breaking decisive vote, a task she would no doubt relish. However, current Senate rules require 60 votes to break a likely filibuster.

Opponents’ primary arguments are newfangled versions of scurrilous claims they have made many times before. They center on stoking fear of transgender people and legitimatizing discrimination under the subterfuge of “religious freedom.” The predominant purpose underlying opponents’ tactics is political fundraising, and keeping their base engaged and motivated by feeding them the lie that LGBTIQ people are somehow a threat to them. This age-old strategy, cultivated in the Lavender Scare of the 1950s, has been reworked from Anita Bryant to Proposition 8 to the present day. Tragically, it feeds senseless division.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

President Biden’s primary message in his inaugural address was “bringing America together” and “uniting our people.” He observed that American “history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality” that, in addition to racism and nativism, “fear and demonization have long torn us apart.” Establishing equality and dignity for those denied it need not result in loss to others. Enacting the Equality Act and bringing dignity to millions of LGBTIQ Americans from all walks of life across our country would truly further our collective quest to make the American ideal a reality.

Pete Buttigieg and the ‘Damned Lesbian’
February 11, 2021

When Pete Buttigieg won Senate confirmation last week becoming the first openly gay member of the Cabinet, our thoughts immediately turned to the first openly LGBTIQ person ever to receive Senate confirmation: San Francisco’s own Roberta Achtenberg.

In 1993, Achtenberg was nominated by President Bill Clinton and confirmed by the Senate to be the Assistant Secretary for the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. However, unlike today, it was a bruising battle back then. The Christian Right launched a virulently homophobic campaign to fight Achtenberg’s nomination. The notorious former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, famously denounced Achtenberg as a “damn lesbian.”

Achtenberg and many others would later claim the title “damned lesbian” as a badge of honor. But Linda Rapp in the glbtq Encyclopedia recalls a “long and grueling” confirmation process in which several conservative Senators attempted to block her nomination. Helms also attacked Achtenberg as an “intolerant radical.” At the time of her nomination, Achtenberg had been an LGBTIQ rights activist for years. She was one of the co-founders of the Lesbian Rights Project (later renamed the National Center for Lesbian Rights), and she and Carole Migden in 1989 became the first lesbians elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Achtenberg and her then-partner Judge Mary Morgan were one of the most visible lesbian couples to have a child at a time when such role models were rare, and their family was an inspiration to many. But Helms accused Achtenberg of launching an “insane assault on family values.” He also decried her as a “mean person” who “tried to bully the Boy Scouts.” Achtenberg as a board member of the San Francisco United Way had voted along with all of her over 50 colleagues to deny funding to the Boy Scouts because of their anti-gay policies. Achtenberg ultimately won Senate confirmation by a 58–31 margin.

By contrast, 28 years later Pete Buttigieg won Senate confirmation by a 86–13 vote without even a whisp of anti-gay rhetoric from opponents. The primary stated reasons the 13 Republican Senators voted against Buttigieg were his opposition to the Keystone Pipeline and his support for Green New Deal policies. Far from opposing Buttigieg, one of his home state senators, Indiana Republican Todd Young, declared he had “a great deal of respect” for Buttigieg and that “it will be good to have a Hoosier” as Transportation Secretary.

After Buttigieg’s committee hearing, Democratic Senator John Testor of Montana lauded him for having “put on a clinic for how a nominee should … act.” Part of Buttigieg’s presentation included introducing his husband Chasten to the committee and having him at this side throughout.

The road to LGBTIQ people being able to win Senate confirmation based on their qualifications has not been easy, and the struggle continues. Four years after Achtenberg’s confirmation, the Christian Right successfully blocked gay philanthropist and activist James Hormel’s nomination to become the first openly gay ambassador—even to the tiny country of Luxembourg. Clinton was only able to appoint Hormel as acting ambassador through a recess appointment that required no Senate approval.

Now, a number of openly queer people have won Senate confirmation as important government officials, federal judges, and ambassadors, but adequate representation is still lacking. No openly gay person has ever been nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court, and only two LGBTIQ people have served in the U.S. Senate itself. We are excited about President Biden’s diverse LGBTIQ appointees, in particular Dr. Rachel Levine as Assistant Secretary of Health, who if confirmed will become the first openly transgender person to win Senate approval.

Vice President Harris acknowledged in her victory speech last November that she stood “on the shoulders” of countless women who had fought for equality. So too does Secretary Buttigieg stand on the shoulders of Achtenberg and myriad other LGBTIQ activists who have stood fearlessly for our right to be ourselves and be equal. Indeed, Buttigieg was just eleven years old when Achtenberg prevailed in her confirmation battle.

When Achtenberg was confirmed years ago, we felt that “we” as a movement had risen to a new level of acceptance and access to power. We remember how, shortly after the 1992 election, Achtenberg convened a community meeting where she articulated hope for the future for us as a movement like never before. Unlike Achtenberg, Buttigieg did not cut his teeth as an LGBTIQ activist. But when we hear Buttigieg speak authentically about his experience as a gay person, advocate for full equality, and kiss his husband Chasten on the presidential primary debate stage, we feel the sense of “we” as well.

We take inspiration from LGBTIQ people in public office or otherwise in the public arena who are not just in it for themselves but consider themselves participants in a broad civil rights movement for freedom, dignity, and equality. We embrace a movement where we not only stand upon the shoulders of others who worked so hard to make our dreams possible, but also we move forward shoulder to shoulder together. Our individual victories become collective victories. “We” win, and we can all proudly claim the moniker “damned lesbian” in our own way.

Time to Multi-Task for LGBTIQ Rights
January 28, 2021

Now that the Biden-Harris administration has taken office, there’s no time to waste to reverse the last four years of backsliding and to make up for lost time with an aggressive LGBTIQ federal agenda.

We were heartened that President Biden issued an important executive order to combat LGBTIQ discrimination immediately upon entering the Oval Office. It proclaimed: “All persons should receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.” Further, “every person should be treated with respect and dignity and should be able to live without fear, no matter who they are or whom they love.” The order also emphasized that “children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports” and underscored the particular burden that LGBTIQ people of color and LGBTIQ people with disabilities face.

The order was not mere rhetoric; it dictated action. Over the next 100 days, every federal agency must review its regulations, orders, and programs to identify any policies that fail to comply with the order’s intent and create a plan to bring those policies into compliance. We are also encouraged by the new administration’s commitment to ending discrimination against transgender and gender nonbinary people in many areas including the military and identification documents.

Enacting the Equality Act should also be a priority in the first 100 days. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court held that employment discrimination against LGBTIQ people constitutes unlawful sex discrimination in violation of Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Court’s reasoning would logically apply to federal civil rights statutes barring sex discrimination in myriad other areas of life: housing, finance, health care, immigration, education and school sports, public accommodations (such as hotels and restaurants), and juries.

The Equality Act cements these protections into law by explicitly amending the federal civil rights statutes to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Federal civil rights protections for LGBTIQ people would no longer depend on the Court.

An October 2020 PRRI poll showed that a whopping 83% of Americans favored laws ending such discrimination. The poll, which focused on people’s religious affiliations, revealed that even 59% of Evangelical Christians supported such laws, while over 80% of every other major religious classification and 92% of religiously unaffiliated people supported them.

The House passed the Equality Act last session and can quickly do so again. Last session, 46 senators co-sponsored the legislation. The addition of two pro-LGBTIQ senators from Georgia and Vice President Harris’ ability to break ties mean the Act could become law if Biden and Harris are able to use their political capital to persuade the few additional senators needed for passage. When overwhelming majorities of the public favor such a law, the administration and Senate leadership should be able to prevent opposition senators from blocking it for the narrow political interests of their polarized political base.

Another particularly urgent priority is reversing the Trump administration’s eleventh-hour Health and Human Services Department rule allowing social service providers who receive federal funding to discriminate against LGBTIQ people. The Trump administration claimed that Obama-era rules forbidding such discrimination violated the so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Opponents of LGBTIQ rights and women’s rights have weaponized the RFRA to enable discrimination under the guise of free exercise of religion.

We call on the Biden administration to reverse this rule and on Congress to amend the RFRA itself to prevent the statute from being used to justify any type of discrimination, including that based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. The RFRA invalidates all federal laws and actions of the federal government that “substantially burden” a person’s religious exercise, unless they further a “compelling governmental interest.” Congress must amend the RFRA to make clear that eliminating discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other protected classifications is such a compelling interest.

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide a parallel constitutional issue pertaining to the efforts of a conservative religious foster-care provider that receives local government funding to discriminate against LGBTIQ couples. Congress needs to send the Court a clear message about the importance of ending any vestige of such discrimination.

Indeed, reform of the Supreme Court is perhaps the most important matter the Biden-Harris administration must ultimately address when it comes to LGBTIQ equality and to women’s rights, racial justice, campaign finance, gun control, and myriad other issues that profoundly affect millions of people’s lives. Realistically, actual legislation to reform the Court will not come soon given current political obstacles, but the groundwork can begin to be laid immediately. And when it comes to marriage equality, Congress can forthwith repeal the discriminatory “Defense of Marriage Act” that the Court ruled unconstitutional in 2013, to ensure that it could not come back into effect if the Supreme Court were to take the unconscionable step of reversing its prior decision.

Vice President Harris said that she and President Biden were ready to “multi-task” as soon as they took office. They have a lot to do. We and our communities stand ready to help them make lasting LGBTIQ equality under the law, as well as many other important priorities, a reality.

Treasuring Our LGBTIQ Community Amidst a Crisis in Democracy
January 14, 2021

As we began to settle from the shock of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, we were surprised that one of our many reactions to the events of the day was to realize how much we treasured being part of the worldwide LGBTIQ community and civil rights movement. As the currently popular slogan goes, “Stonewall was a riot,” but unlike the January 6 mob insurrection, Stonewall was a riot for love, respect, common humanity, and the freedom to live as our authentic selves in community with others. Our movement is not based on delusion, denial of reality, white nationalism, violence, bullying, and conflict for its own sake. It is based on the genuine wish for LGBTIQ people to live freely, safely, and peacefully in a world that is better for everyone.

By chance on the evening of the insurrection, a gay friend of ours who lives under Sharia law in one of the most anti-gay parts of the world, and therefore must keep his sexuality completely secret in his home country, happened to message us to say hello. He had not heard any news about what had gone on in Washington. When we explained it to him, he was astonished, especially since he thinks of the West as a place of greater freedom and stability.

As we related the events of the day to him, we explained how deeply disturbing they were in and of themselves. Further, the lawless efforts of the mob to keep Trump and Pence in power means supporting their anti-LGBTIQ policies and numerous judicial nominees hostile to LGBTIQ rights.

We see roots of the insurrection’s utter lack of respect for the democratic process in Ronald Reagan and the decades-long insidious Republican effort to destroy American’s respect for government. Reagan in his inaugural address 40 years ago famously declared: “Government is not the solution to our problem—government is the problem.”

Having lived through the entire AIDS pandemic, we can attest that Reagan’s government was indeed a huge part of the problem when it came to AIDS—actively denying the reality of the disease as it ravaged our communities. Reagan did not even publicly mention AIDS until four years into the pandemic, and nearly 90,000 Americans died of the disease under his watch. Reagan and then both Bush presidents as well as Trump have appointed all the Supreme Court justices who have tried to stand in the way of advancement of LGBTIQ rights. Their administrations and Congressional supporters have actively opposed LGBTIQ rights for decades.

Many activists have rightfully called out the starkly different treatment federal law enforcement gave Black Lives Matter protestors last summer compared to the treatment given the white nationalist pro-Trump insurrectionists on January 6. We also remember back during the Reagan administration how the federal police were out in force with riot gear at the completely peaceful 1987 LGBTIQ demonstration outside the Supreme Court to protest the now infamous anti-LGBTIQ Bowers v. Hardwick decision. Clad with plastic yellow gloves out of fear of AIDS, police arrested nearly 600 queer demonstrators and AIDS activists that day, compared to the mere handful of arrests on January 6, 2021.

We place responsibility for the current crisis not only with Trump, but also with the myriad Republican leaders—from outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who refused for weeks to acknowledge the simple fact that President-elect Biden had won the election, to Senators Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and over a hundred other members of Congress whose strategy to object to the election results on the 6th fueled the delusions of the mob and millions of other Americans who inexplicably reject the clear fact that Biden won the election.

A right-wing joke circulating January 6 on the internet read: “Big game at the Capitol today! Patriots vs. the Stealers!” To many in the mob, was it all just a game? A West Virginia state legislator brazenly recorded himself on Facebook Live storming the Capitol with the mob, providing video evidence of himself committing numerous federal crimes. Others proudly posted selfies of themselves doing the same. Had these people so lost touch with the fact their actions have consequences that they thought they were living in a big reality TV show, just like Trump himself? Were they creating conflict simply for its own sake and whipping themselves into a frenzy for no meaningful purpose at all?

Mitch McConnell’s placing winning raw political power for its own sake above all else reflects the way some football fans root for their team simply out of a sense of tribalism. We are reminded of the degree to which the anti-LGBTIQ political movement has been fueled by Republican and conservative political Christian interests in raising money and mobilizing political support by any means they can.

As we conversed with our gay friend many thousands of miles away on the evening of January 6, one of his first questions for us was whether we were personally safe. His fears for our safety that evening stood in stark contrast to our usual interactions where we have extended our support to him as he faces extraordinary challenges living as a gay man under Sharia law. His reaching out his hand across oceans to hold ours deeply touched us. It was a true act of friendship and connection, a palpable experience of the richness of our LGBTIQ community for which we are truly grateful.

202Q: Two Moons Over America?
December 17, 2020

On an early September evening several months ago, I opened my eyes from meditation and gazed out our back window at a hauntingly beautiful half-moon, glowing orange in the night sky. As the moon’s sumptuous color captivated me, I also realized it meant that the atmosphere that night was particularly filled with smoke from the wildfires that had been burning for weeks across Northern California.

When I awakened the next morning and glanced at my clock, I was surprised to see that I had slept well into the morning. When I glanced bleary-eyed out the back window, things got stranger. I saw not only that the cars still had their headlights on, but also a shimmering pink orb now hung against a blue grey sky exactly where the luminous half-moon had been the night before. I immediately wondered: How in the world did the moon grow from half to full overnight? And, for that matter, how could it be rising again just 12 hours later?

Before going to sleep the night before, I had been reading Haruki Murakami’s dystopian masterpiece 1Q84, in which Murakami reimagines the George Orwell classic, setting it in 1984 Japan. In the book, the main characters see not one but two moons in the sky as they step out of the ordinary way of experiencing the world into a psychologically and spiritually dystopian one.

Were there now two moons over San Francisco? Were we now living in the year 202Q?

A couple hours later, Stuart and I ventured out for a short walk up to McLaren Park. A nearby meadow shone a luminescent green. Redwoods and cypress stood silhouetted against the now orange-grey sky. An eerie stillness and silence pervaded, punctuated only by a few birds chirping. On our way home in the muted darkness, we saw our neighbors’ faces illuminated by the light of their computer screens through their windows as they worked busily on a workday. We would soon return ourselves to the separateness of our own computers and go through the motions of our regular daily routines, even though the day was anything but normal.

Now at years end, the altered reality of that September day seems like a metaphor for all of 2020 or 202Q.

In March, we awakened to another other-worldly experience—an order to “shelter in place,” a term prior to that I had associated with an urgent need to protect oneself when an active shooter was in the immediate surroundings. Looking out our same back window last March, nothing seemed different; yet a global pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences had begun. Assessing how long one’s toilet paper (and hand sanitizer) supply would last, and strategizing how to get more—things that would have seemed crazy just days before—suddenly seemed reasonable. For those of us who lived through the worst of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, overnight feelings of vulnerability and fear of loss were disturbingly familiar.

In July, we encountered something else previously unimaginable: experiencing from our living room the death of Stuart’s dad in a hospital ICU via Zoom. It felt oddly intimate, in some ways creating the ultimately false impression that we were there in person. But we were present in a different way. We simultaneously felt both deeply connected and separate. And after such an experience, do you just go back to work in your living room? The other loved ones we wanted to hug, something not even safe to do in the pandemic, were many miles away.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump created a reality-denying belief in his followers that there was nothing to worry about. He declared that 99% of COVID-19 cases were “totally harmless” and that the pandemic would soon “disappear … like a miracle.” Last month, an incredulous Wisconsin physician reported that one of her patients refused to believe COVID-19 was a serious concern even as the disease killed her. And, according to a recent poll, some 88 percent of Trump’s supporters live in the delusion that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

At the same time, the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery exposed the reality of racism in 202Q America, making it even more difficult for people to look the other way. These horrific killings laid bare not only racial bias in law enforcement and the judicial system, but also how differently and separately many Americans of different races and classes live. Persistent segregation and income inequality give rise to very different perceptions of the world to the detriment of those who are disadvantaged. Far too many Americans look up at the same moon in the night sky from very different perspectives.

During the height of the September wildfires, a Mendocino resident reported that his roosters crowed all day long. Were they trying to alert us to wake up?

In 1Q84, a random taxi driver cautioned the protagonist that “there’s always only one reality.” Even as we contend with competing perceptions of reality, many of which are patently false and cause great suffering, we retain a great deal of control over how we perceive the world and whether we live with intention and integrity. Compassion, connection, and capacity for circumspection are all real.

As we transition from 2020 to 2021, will we personally and as a society make the coming year another 202Q or something different? The choice is ours.

A Queer Pandemic Metamorphosis
December 3, 2020

“Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find he had been transformed into a gigantic cockroach.” So reads the first sentence of Franz Kafka’s 1915 masterpiece The Metamorphosis.

Kafka and The Metamorphosis immediately enthralled me as soon as I encountered the book in my high school German class. Why was Gregor transformed overnight? What were his “uneasy dreams” that night? How in the world was Gregor going to get out of his most unfortunate predicament? As a teenager thirsting to understand the nature, meaning, and purpose of life (and sexuality), I felt as if Kafka was speaking to me and we shared a common path.

The events of 2020 reveal the enduring relevance of the story of Gregor Samsa. Although we weren’t turned into cockroaches this year, COVID-19 dramatically altered our lives overnight in a way Gregor might recognize. As millions of us “sheltered in place” and spent more time alone than ever before, we experienced isolation that recalls the painful separation from others that Gregor experienced when he became a big bug. Just as Gregor struggled to find the way forward when his life was turned upside down, so have we.

I also began to wonder whether my struggles with being gay back in high school were another reason I had found the story so compelling.

In high school and college, I understood the book as an allegory about the human condition and our apparently fruitless efforts to find or ascertain spiritual truth. Gregor’s plight as a cockroach and his efforts to survive and liberate himself are a metaphor for people’s search for freedom from suffering, isolation, and the apparent futility of life.

Like any timeless tale, this work can be interpreted in many ways. This year, I learned that The Metamorphosis can also be viewed as the Jewish writer Kafka’s cautionary tale about the precarious position of European Jews in the early 20th century. Scholars have read Gregor’s predicament as a metaphor for the anxiety European Jews experienced as Europe began to allow their assimilation into the broader society.

Gregor’s struggle symbolized both Jewish concerns about maintaining culture and identity amidst assimilation, and fear of ongoing anti-Jewish hatred and scapegoating. It seems no accident that Gregor was transformed not into a benign butterfly but, in fact, according to some translations a “monstrous vermin,” a well-known anti-Semitic trope. Gregor’s initially caring sister Greta eventually turns on him, saying they must get rid of “it.” Tragically, the Holocaust proves Kafka’s apparent fears to have been prescient.

The Metamorphosis speaks to me now as a queer parable as well. As a queer youth in 1970s Kansas City, I felt unable not only to express my sexuality and gender but also to come into touch with it internally. Even as I had positive experiences growing up and in high school, I felt enormous internalized pressure to conform to others’ expectations. Being different in any significant way was inconceivable to me. I had unknowingly donned an emotional, spiritual, and sexual straitjacket that resembled the large exoskeleton that trapped Gregor. I didn’t even know it, but I was emotionally isolated and struggling to become free without any idea of how to do it. Gregor and I faced similar problems.

Of course, back in the 1970s, much of American society viewed LGBTIQ people as menacing objects of disgust like cockroaches. From the Lavender Scare to Anita Bryant’s “Save the Children” campaigns, to Prop. 8, to stigmatizing transgender people, the political fear tactics characterizing LGBTIQ people as fundamentally dangerous to others sadly retains some of its force today, especially among politically conservative Christians. Gregor died alone of starvation after even his sister and parents abandoned him. We know all too well the continuing devastating effect of familial, religious, and societal homo-transphobia on too many LGBITQ people today.

Although The Metamorphosis does not have a feel-good ending of love and acceptance, one scholar commented that Gregor underwent a second transformation in the book—coming to embrace “his true form.” So too have millions of LGBTIQ people. Just as The Metamorphosis is a story about the search for freedom, our movement was originally known as Gay Liberation and we marched in Freedom Day parades.

Gregor never sacrificed his own heart and lost empathy and the desire to connect meaningfully with others even as they rejected him. Paradoxically, Kafka’s fictional tale of Gregor’s isolation, which we know reflects the writer’s own actual experience, reminds us that none of us are actually alone in our struggle to find peace, freedom, and happiness. Indeed, being reminded during the current pandemic that we are all struggling in different ways has helped me breathe easier.

Perhaps the genius of The Metamorphosis is its presentation of the human predicament for which we all must find solutions. Does Kafka point us to love? The marriage equality movement’s celebratory declaration that “Love Wins” brought a divided nation closer together by striking to the heart. It also may be a hope that sustains as we go forward.

Kamala Harris: Marching to the Beat of a Different Drum Major
November 19, 2020

As I skimmed through my yearbook at my 40th high school reunion a few years ago, I stumbled upon my friend and fellow band member Marilyn Grant’s note to me that read: “Thank you for wanting me to try out for Drum Major—Boy was that ever fun.”

Memories flooded back to me of encouraging Marilyn to compete against the typical group of boys vying for the position and supporting her all the way. It was 1975. The Equal Rights Amendment neared ratification with 34 of the necessary 38 states having passed it. Unfortunately, the ERA has still not become part of the U.S. Constitution. But in fall 1975, Marilyn Grant became the first ever female drum major of the Center High School Marching Band in Kansas City, Missouri.

Although Marilyn’s breaking the gender barrier in our local high school marching band may seem insignificant, decades of countless such victories culminated in this month’s triumphant election of Kamala Harris as vice president of the United States. In her first nationwide speech as vice president-elect, Harris thanked the many generations of women of all races, especially Black women, who tirelessly fought for the voting rights that made her election possible. “I stand on their shoulders,” she said. Harris also marches shoulder to shoulder as part of a movement with myriad Marilyn Grants as well.

Harris, the child of Asian and African American immigrants, especially praised her late mother Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a biomedical researcher, in her speech. Like Harris’ mother, our late mothers were also Ph.D. academics, although 15 years earlier. Growing up, we experienced our moms’ struggles as women seeking their rightful place in their professions and family life in the face of blatant discrimination. This profoundly shaped our understanding of the world. And like Harris’ mom, Stuart’s mother overcame obstacles as an Asian American academic. Stuart’s mom was a professor of cross-cultural education, and like Harris, Stuart is a mixed-race Asian American.

We also grew into the realization that the movement for gender freedom and equality was vital to us because we were queer. As our mothers strove to defy gender norms, we too struggled to liberate ourselves from the constraints of gender. Our mothers’ struggles informed our own, and we saw them as deeply connected. It took over 50 years, but the U.S. Supreme Court last year finally recognized sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination as, in fact, sex discrimination.

Kamala Harris will soon become the most steadfast and outspoken supporter of LGBTIQ rights ever to be vice president. We met Harris while doing coalition work in 2005 to defeat Proposition 73 that threatened young women’s access to safe abortions statewide, and our paths crossed periodically through the years of the California marriage equality movement. Harris’ refusal to defend Proposition 8 in the federal courts was instrumental in its being declared unconstitutional.

We remember how when Harris was locked in an extremely tight campaign for California attorney general against Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley in 2010, she unflinchingly vowed she would not defend Prop 8, even though she faced the same electorate who had passed it just 2 years before. Cooley promised to defend the measure. Harris won the race by just 0.77% of the vote. Personally, we’ll never forget how Harris took the risk to speak at one of Marriage Equality USA’s large rallies in San Francisco during the campaign.

And we’ll always remember how Harris delighted in marrying one of the Prop 8 plaintiff couples in City Hall the afternoon the initiative became unenforceable. She then forcefully instructed a reluctant local Southern California clerk over her cell phone: “You must start the marriages immediately,” and added, “enjoy it—it’s going to be fun!”

When President Biden delivers the State of Union address before a Joint Session of Congress in early 2021, two extraordinary San Francisco Bay Area women, Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris, will share the dais as Speaker of the House and Vice President of the United States. Although our nation’s pervasive partisan divisions persist, two women who embrace San Francisco values—and have strode down Market Street in rainbow regalia many times in the San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade—will sit at the very center of American political power.

My friend Marilyn became drum major as a junior and had to wait a year to become senior drum major. We can hardly wait for the day when a woman who embraces San Francisco values as American values delivers the State of the Union address and truly directs the band herself.

Don’t Harm People in the Name of Religion
November 5, 2020

“Don’t Kill Innocent People in the Name of Religion.” So read a wall mural in Kolkata, India, which we happened upon when we were backpacking in South Asia years ago. The artist’s plea stayed with us and came to mind again recently as the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, a case that could potentially have devastating consequences for LGBTIQ people—all in the name of religion.

In Fulton, Catholic Social Services (CSS) under the guise of “religious freedom” is asking the Supreme Court to force the city of Philadelphia to contract with it to provide foster care placement services even though CSS refuses to place children with loving, committed same-sex couples in flagrant violation of the city’s anti-discrimination laws.

As background, CSS, along with over 20 other private organizations, has provided foster care services for years for the city of Philadelphia per contracts with the city’s Department of Human Services (DHS). These services include, among other things, recruiting and certifying foster parents for children. For years, CSS and the other organizations have entered into contracts with DHS, agreeing as a condition of receiving taxpayer money to abide by the city’s nondiscrimination laws.

But in 2018, CSS made clear to DHS that it would not certify same-sex couples as foster parents in blatant violation of its contract with DHS and city law, claiming that doing so contravened their religious views. Accordingly, DHS suspended new placements through CSS, while maintaining contracts with CSS for all the other foster care services it provided. CSS stands alone among Philadelphia foster service providers, both religious and not, in their refusal to certify same-sex couples and wants the Supreme Court to compel DHS to enter into discriminatory arrangements with it.

Back in 2018, then Philadelphia Human Services Commissioner Cynthia Figueroa invited CSS leaders to meet with her in an attempt “to find a mutually agreeable resolution.” Both then and now, DHS wants Catholic Social Services to be able to continue providing foster care placement services for Philadelphia. In that meeting, Figueroa, herself a Catholic, appealed to CSS that “it would be great if we followed the teachings of Pope Francis.” She was likely thinking of Francis’ opining five years before: “If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has a good will, then who am I to judge him?”

Figueroa’s words proved prescient when, just two weeks ago, the documentary Francesco, made with Vatican approval, revealed that Pope Francis himself supported civil unions for same-sex couples. The film shows the Pope saying that gay people “have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out of the family or made miserable over this. What we have to create is a civil union law, for they have the right to be legally covered.”

The New Yorker describes how the documentary explores the lives of people personally affected by Pope Francis, including “Andrea Rubera, a gay man who lives in Rome with his partner and their three adopted children.” After Rubera attended Mass at the papal residence, he gave the Pope a letter explaining that he and his partner wanted “to raise the children as Catholics.” Francis then called Rubera and “offered encouragement,” while cautioning him that not everyone in his parish “will share your choice of having a family like that.”

We are, of course, disappointed that Pope Francis has not called for full marriage equality and has not fully embraced LGBTIQ people in the Catholic Church. But CSS should follow the lead of the Pope and heed his words supporting gay parents, family, and legal rights for same-sex couples.

Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court should rule in accord with Francis’ reasoning, not because he is the Pope, but because it expresses the meaning and importance of the separation of religion and state embodied by the First Amendment. Regardless of what private Catholic religious doctrine may be, Francis recognizes secular legal protections for same-sex couples as separate.

If the Supreme Court follows its own precedent, it will affirm the separation of religion and state. In Masterpiece Cakeshop, the Court opinion joined by conservative Justices Roberts, Alito, and Gorsuch, explicitly cautioned against service providers “who object to gay marriages for moral and religious reasons” effectively being “allowed to put up signs saying ‘no goods or services will be sold if they will be used for gay marriages.’” The Court warned such actions “would impose a serious stigma on gay persons.”

That is exactly what would happen if the Court forces the city of Philadelphia to use taxpayer money to contract with Catholic Social Services as it openly discriminates against same-sex couples. Not only are LGBTIQ parents demeaned by not being able to become foster parents through CSS, but also LGBTIQ kids in foster care, desperately in need of caring parents, lose out and are treated as second-class children. All LGBTIQ Philadelphians face the indignity of their tax dollars going to an organization that openly discriminates against them.

The Court’s decision in Fulton may reveal for the first time how its new five-person conservative Catholic majority responds to what should be a straightforward application of the separation of religion and state. If the majority adopts an unwise ideological point of view, the implications for LGBTIQ people, other minorities, and women could be far-reaching, not just in foster care but also in such critical matters as health care, public accommodation, education, and public services. Our lives and well-being could be on the line. We urge the Supreme Court: Don’t Harm People in the Name of Religion.

Outing Originalism as Outrageous
October 22, 2020

Illinois Senator Richard Durbin called it “shameless”; Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: a “sham.” They were, of course, talking about last week’s unprecedented U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to engineer Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The purpose of the nomination, culminating a decades-long partisan Republican effort to pack the Court with staunchly conservative ideologues, was laid bare by the words of Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham. Despite Barrett and her Senate allies repeatedly maintaining that her personal views had nothing to do with how she would act as a Justice, Graham proclaimed: “This is the first time in American history that we’ve nominated a woman who’s unashamedly pro-life and embraces her faith without apology and she’s going to the Court … . This has been a long time coming and we have arrived.”

The fact that the nomination is proceeding just days before the presidential election further underscores Graham and his colleagues’ partisan motives. After Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republicans blocked confirmation of President Obama’s March 2016 nomination of centrist Merrick Garland to the Court, Graham promised that “if an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term and the primary process has started, we’ll wait to the next election.”

Graham and his fellow Republicans are now reneging on that promise, exposing once and for all their nakedly partisan approach to the judiciary. Their aim is to further their own political power and to cater to the personal interests of their financial backers and political base. They seek not to serve the American people who largely reject much of their radically conservative agenda.

Barrett, with connections to the homophobic hate group Alliance Defending Freedom and far right Catholic group People of Praise, appeared duplicitous herself at the hearing. A key moment came when she claimed it highly unlikely that a case challenging Obergefell, the landmark nationwide marriage equality decision, would make it to the Court.

Barrett simplistically told the Committee that any case challenging Obergefell would first go to lower courts who would have to say: “‘We’re going to flout Obergefell.’ And the most likely result would be that lower courts, who are bound by Obergefell, would shut such a lawsuit down, and it wouldn’t make its way up to the Supreme Court.”

Surely Barrett is aware that the losing party in any such case may simply ask the Supreme Court to hear their case, and if four Justices agree, the Court will do so. Indeed, the State of Indiana right now is asking the Court to take its case challenging the right of married same-sex couples to have both their names on their child’s birth certificate. A Texas case challenging the clear directive in Obergefell that same-sex spouses of government employees have the right to health care and other spousal employment benefits on the same terms as different-sex spouses is working its way through the Texas appellate courts and could reach the U.S. Supreme Court in perhaps two years. And just two weeks ago, Justices Thomas and Alito wrote an opinion all but inviting potential litigants to challenge Obergefell.

This term, the Supreme Court will also decide Fulton v. City of Philadelphia determining whether Catholic Social Services can take local taxpayer money to provide foster care placement services when it flagrantly violates local anti-discrimination laws by refusing to place children with loving same-sex couples.

Barrett throughout the hearings embraced “originalism,” a doctrine by which judges claim to decide cases without considering their own views. Barrett asserted she neutrally interprets the Constitution “to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it.” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot put her view of originalism this way: “You ask a gay, black woman if she is an originalist? No, ma’am, I am not … originalists say that, ‘Let’s go back to 1776 and whatever was there in the original language, that’s it.’ That language excluded, now, over 50% of the country.”

More importantly, most of the Constitution’s actual provisions are, in fact, broad and general because they are intended as fundamental principles to apply to a wide variety of circumstances arising over centuries as society evolves and gains new understandings. The fact that the Constitution’s original drafters made the document exceedingly difficult to amend demonstrates how they intended it to be adaptable and not amended every time something new arose. By contrast, many state constitutions like California’s can be amended by simple majority vote every two years at statewide elections and contain numerous very particularized provisions.

The truly originalist view of the U.S. Constitution has never been more eloquently expressed than in Justice Kennedy’s concluding paragraph of Lawrence v. Texas, the case that finally ended the criminalization of the physical expressions of queer love:

“Had those who drew and ratified the [Constitution] known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.”

Those words remain the highest law of the land today: a search for ever greater equality and freedom. We must stand up for our lives now more than ever to try to keep those words and the promise of the Constitution alive.

Meeting ‘Everyday Jacquelyn,’ the Inspiring Security Guard Who Nominated Biden
October 8, 2020

Jacquelyn Brittany got up the morning of December 16, 2019, and went to her job as a security guard at The New York Times just like any other day. She had no idea that her life was about to change forever.

Joe Biden had a meeting with The New York Times editorial board that day to try to gain their endorsement for the Democratic nomination for president. Biden and his staff happened to get Jacquelyn as their security escort on the elevator going up to his meeting. In typical Joe Biden fashion, he greeted her, saying, “Hi, how are you today?” with a great big smile. Jacquelyn took it from there.

As captured in a New York Times video that went viral, Jacquelyn responded spontaneously: “I’m great. I love you.” And as he thanked her, she continued: “I do. You’re like my favorite.” The two decided to take a selfie together. The last thing we see in the viral video is Jacquelyn telling Biden, “You are awesome.”

Last week, we learned first-hand that Jacquelyn herself is awesome. In the months following Jacquelyn’s chance encounter with Biden, she has emerged as a powerfully articulate, fearless, and magnetic advocate, who was given the honor of nominating Biden for the presidency at the Democratic National Convention in August. Since nominating Biden, Jacquelyn in collaboration with the founders of the Everyday American Joe website ( http://everydayamericanjoe.com/ ) recently embarked on a national education and advocacy tour for “everyday Joes, Janes, and Jacquelyns.” Their vision is to “give a voice” to the many “working class Americans across the country, (who) are rarely given a platform or voice in politics at a national level.”

We had the pleasure of spending a truly delightful afternoon with Jacquelyn along with her fellow activist Chris Gilroy when they visited San Francisco recently. We loved Jacquelyn as soon as we saw her on national television, but we fell in love with her when we met her. We realized we are kindred spirits.

Sixteen years before Jacquelyn’s life-changing encounter with Biden, we too had gotten up one morning—February 12, 2004—unaware that our life was about to change forever. February 12, 2004, was the day San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom opened the doors of City Hall for LGBTIQ couples to marry. We showed up for an already planned Marriage Equality USA rally at City Hall that day, and because of that we got to be one of the first 10 couples to marry and have been working actively for marriage equality and LGBTIQ rights ever since.

For us, the marriage equality and LGBTIQ rights movements are about our human dignity and our common humanity. Jacquelyn and Biden’s interaction in the elevator last year embodied those same values for all to see.

As Jacquelyn explained to the nation in her nominating speech: “I take powerful people up on my elevator all the time. When they get off, they go to their important meetings. Me, I just head back to the lobby. But in the short time I spent with Joe Biden, I could tell he really saw me. That he actually cared; that my life meant something to him.”

Most importantly though, it was not just Biden’s graciousness, but Jacquelyn’s respect for herself that gave her the confidence to engage with Biden as an equal in the elevator and spontaneously share her perspective directly with him. Her openhearted confidence catapulted her to becoming a national voice on behalf of countless other people who saw themselves in her.

And like those of us in the marriage equality movement, Jacquelyn seized the moment with love. When we met Jacquelyn last week, her unique combination of intelligence, inquisitiveness, and personal warmth really struck us. As an African American lesbian, Jacquelyn strongly identifies with both the Black Lives Matter and LGBTIQ movements. As we showed her around the Castro on her first visit to San Francisco and shared stories and discussed LGBTIQ history, we saw for ourselves how naturally she related to everyone she met and embodied the vision we shared of inclusion and non-division. It was abundantly clear to us that just as Jacquelyn told the nation that “Joe Biden has room in his heart for more than just himself,” so too does Jacquelyn.

If we hadn’t made the effort to show up for a marriage equality rally 16 years ago, and if Jacquelyn hadn’t taken the risk to speak her heart and mind to Biden last year, we likely never would have met and become friends. And now we are fellow activists on the path to achieve equality and dignity for all.

Election day is just weeks away. We invite you to join Jacquelyn and many others on her journey on Twitter @_Jacquelyn2020 and at https://wegotavoice2.com/coast-2-coast

Help Spread the Word: Critical Need for Poll Workers in Major U.S. Cities
September 24, 2020

I’ve been a “political junkie” since I was 10 years old and followed every presidential election closely ever since. Naturally, I was very excited when I could vote myself in the 1980 presidential primary in Illinois, where I was attending college in Evanston, just outside Chicago. I rose early to vote before going to class, but when I arrived at the polling place, the head poll worker greeted me with some very disturbing news: she had no record of my being registered to vote. I handed her my voter registration card to prove I was. She examined her voter list again and consulted with her fellow poll workers, but still found no record of my being registered.

I knew I had registered and resolved at that moment that Cook County, Illinois, infamous for rigging elections in the 1960s under the influence of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, would not deny me the right to vote. Voting was sacred to me.

The poll workers were very sympathetic and helped me in every way they could. I skipped my classes to make numerous phone calls and trips back and forth to the polling place, trying to prove I was legally registered. I had known that the City of Evanston could be somewhat hostile to students’ interests. I learned that day it also tried to make voting difficult for students in order to protect vested local interests. Local authorities conducted canvasses to verify voters during the summer to effectively cleanse voter rolls of many students, like me, who were away at that time of year. Unbeknownst to me, my name had been removed the previous summer.

It took all day, but at 5 pm, I received a call from Cook County telling me that I had prevailed and was, in fact, entitled to vote. The County called the local poll workers separately as well.

As soon as I stepped into the polling place to actually vote, all the poll workers rose spontaneously to give me a standing ovation. I’ll never forget that moment. I’m sure the other voters in line were confused about what was going on, but it was clear to me that the poll workers cared about my right to vote as much as I did.

Forty years later, our nation faces an unprecedented shortage of poll workers because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We need people who care deeply about democracy to step up, just like the poll workers stood up for me back in 1980. The need is especially critical in cities like Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Detroit.

A staggering 77% of polling places were closed in Philadelphia during the June 2020 Pennsylvania primary because of a shortage of poll workers. Closed polling places mean extraordinarily long lines and wait times to vote, and long distances to travel to vote. The result is thousands of people effectively being denied the right to vote.

A repeat of the primary in Philadelphia at the general election would strike a mortal blow to American democracy in its very birthplace. Philadelphia needs thousands of city residents to sign up as poll workers as soon as possible. Likewise, in Milwaukee, only 5 of 280 polling places were open for the April 2020 Wisconsin primary. Meagan Wolfe, Wisconsin’s chief election official, announced last month that the state “needs thousands of its citizens to step up and become poll workers for November.”

To actually serve as a poll worker in Philadelphia, Milwaukee, or Detroit, you must be an American citizen who lives there. Specific requirements and compensation vary from city to city. However, all of us who care about democracy can help to spread the word.

Stuart and I are volunteers for a grassroots effort based here in Northern California, to support local efforts to recruit poll workers in those cities. We’re spreading the word in every way we can, and in the internet age you can do so as well. Our local group’s efforts have already resulted in hundreds of Philadelphians signing up as poll workers.

Anyone may sign up to be a poll worker in any location and get more information through the nonpartisan organization Power the Polls at https://www.powerthepolls.org/?source=CFG

My namesake, the late, great Congressman and life-long voting rights champion John Lewis, wrote in his posthumous New York Times essay: “The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.”

Together, we must help to ensure that our fellow citizens do not lose that most powerful change agent—the vote. Please spread the word.

Power the Polls: https://www.powerthepolls.org/?source=CFG

Poland at a Crossroads with LGBTIQ People in the Crosshairs
September 10, 2020

On a warm summer evening in 1987, I found myself hanging out in the heart of the medieval main square of Krakow, Poland, with my three new East German friends I had met a few hours before. As we passed around a bottle of Bulgarian red wine, we conversed about our lives in America and behind the Iron Curtain. It was the perfect final evening of my trip to the Soviet-bloc, a place I had long wanted to visit having grown up during the Cold War. The next morning, I would board a train to Vienna.

My East German friends were members of a theatre troupe and in town for an arts festival. They would return to East Berlin the next morning. Suddenly, one turned to me and said: “I would give anything to be with you on that train to Vienna tomorrow morning.” We all knew that the Eastern Bloc’s repressive travel restrictions forbid it.

Moments later, the exquisite hourly call of a trumpeter, atop the highest tower of St. Mary’s Catholic Church, reverberated across the square. Trumpeters have been sounding such a call live since the 1300s when it then announced the opening or closing of the old city’s gates.

What’s unique about the trumpeter’s call is that it stops abruptly midway through. Legend has it that centuries ago a trumpeter was announcing the closing of the gates to ward off an invading army, when an enemy soldier’s arrow pierced his throat and silenced him before he could complete the call.

That evening, Krakow’s main square was nearly silent, save the trumpeter’s call and the sound of our voices. Poles were suffering through a period of severe government repression; restaurants, bars, and shops were closed at the time of the evening. Just two years later, Poland would find itself at a crossroads when the Cold War unexpectedly ended.

Poland is now a member of the European Union and one of the largest recipients of the EU structural fund, but it once again stands at a crossroads. Poland’s far right Law & Justice Party is trying to establish an authoritarian, nationalist government based on their very conservative view of the values of the Roman Catholic Church and traditional Polish norms. They already control the presidency and the powerful lower house of Parliament. They have effectively seized control of the influential state media and for the last few years have been doing the same with the judiciary, a move the EU declared “a clear risk” to “the rule of law in Poland.”

This July, President Andrzej Duda’s successful re-election campaign demonized LGBTIQ people as its primary political weapon to attract and energize conservative voters. Duda invoked the virulent homophobia of deceased Pope (now Saint) John Paul II, who remains hugely popular in his native Poland. He quoted John Paul II’s declarations that being gay was an “intrinsic moral evil” and “objective disorder,” and same-sex marriage was “perhaps part of a new ideology of evil.”

Duda slandered the LGBTIQ movement as being more dangerous than communism, claiming that LGBTIQ “are not people, but ideology.” Like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Duda is an authoritarian leader who foments homophobia for his political gain, linking it to nationalist values and inspiring further hatred. Indeed, some 100 Polish locales covering about one-third of the country have passed “LGBT-free” or “LGBT Ideology-free” zones, authorizing banning of LGBTIQ rights marches and other events.

But Duda won re-election by a razor-thin 51% to 49% margin. And in response to Duda’s viciously homophobic campaign and policies, the LGBTIQ community and its allies have arisen in ways never seen before. Despite extremist violence and police brutality and unwarranted arrests, many thousands of people have participated in pro-LGBTIQ marches and demonstrations, most recently fueled by the weeks-long pre-trial detention of nonbinary activist Margot Szutowicz.

On August 30, thousands of people gathered for Krakow’s 16th annual Equality March in the historic main square, the same spot where my East German friends and I conversed late into the night 33 years earlier. They did so even though Krakow itself is in a regional “LGBT-free zone.”

As I reflect on events in Poland, I recall George W. Bush’s fomenting anti-gay hysteria against marriage equality as a political tool in the 2004 U.S. Presidential election. My mind also turns to the homophobic 2008 Proposition 8 campaign that, like Duda’s reelection, prevailed by a narrow margin, 52% to 48%.

After Prop. 8’s passage, something completely unanticipated and transformative took place. Across California and the nation, the LGBTIQ community and a broad cross section of the public awakened to rise, organize, and speak out against homophobia and hatred.

The situation for many LGBTIQ Poles seems dire today, and some are fleeing the country. Indeed, the future of Poland as a free state is on the line. But the awakening of widespread, fearless, and outspoken activism in support of LGBTIQ people and democracy has led some to term this summer’s events “Poland’s Stonewall.”

Poland is at a crossroads with LGBTIQ in the crosshairs. The Krakow trumpeter’s disrupted call warns of the threat of imminent danger. We hope this summer’s unprecedented outpouring of support for LGBTIQ people and democracy leads to a day when the trumpeter may complete its call, heralding Poland’s opening its doors to LGBTIQ equality, and indeed, the restoration of a free society.

My Father the Lifelong Activist (Mason Gaffney)
August 13, 2020

My father died last month at age 96. He was a remarkably gifted and talented economics professor, who The New York Times reported “was at the forefront” of a progressive tax-policy movement to create a more equitable society and to protect the environment. To me and my five other siblings, he was also our beloved—and charmingly eccentric—Dad.

But being the child of not one, but two, accomplished university professors carried with it pressure to match their successes. Dad, in particular, was not shy about making his expectations known, and whether I was measuring up—or not.  Barely concealing his disappointment, Dad asked me on more than one occasion if I would have been more ambitious if I hadn’t read so much existentialist literature in college.

All of that changed a number of years ago in ways I never could have imagined.

When I came out to Dad over 35 years ago, it surprised me how much he struggled with it, given what a free thinker he was. In Dad’s own words, he went through “denial, guilt, and remorse” and tried everything, including “lecturing, exhorting, ‘reasoning together,’” and appealing to the need for survival of the species to try to convince me I wasn’t gay. At one point, he even told me he was concerned that homosexuality may have caused the fall of the Roman Empire.

Throughout it all, I remained patient, never giving up on our relationship. I always took his calls, and always had time to spare—sometimes hours—for his questions, lectures, and theories. At some point, Dad himself tired of his intellectual mind games and indeed my patience with him. He told me, “Stuart, I think it might be time just to tell me to f–k off.”

This was Dad’s way of telling me he finally accepted I was gay.

Dad met John 32 years ago, and soon thereafter described John to his colleagues as someone the family had “grown to love dearly.” Dad was thrilled when we got married in 2008, and at the reception not only toasted us but also apologized for letting me down and “not being there” for me when I needed him.

Dad campaigned actively to defeat Proposition 8, sending an email to numerous colleagues, including Mormon ones, with the urgent subject line: “Please VOTE NO on Prop 8! Please forward to everyone you know!” After Prop 8 passed, Dad joined a “Repeal H8” rally in Riverside County, where the anti-gay initiative had garnered nearly 65 percent of the vote.

The day after the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre, Dad wrote to us: “More than ever, you have my love and support, and total empathy for what you and your whole community are enduring … . This cuts close to home … Special love, Dad.”

And even on a family Zoom call from skilled nursing in June, Dad applauded the U.S. Supreme Court’s outlawing employment discrimination against LGBTIQ people nationwide and recalled his joy at marching together as a family in the 2007 San Francisco Pride Parade.

Dad had come to make our cause his cause, and considered LGBTIQ rights and marriage equality activism to be a family affair.

Several years ago, I had an epiphany about Dad and most importantly about our relationship. Our family joined Dad at an economics conference to celebrate his receiving a lifetime achievement award from his peers. To my surprise and delight, Dad in his acceptance speech not only discussed tax policy, but he also told everyone about our wedding and advocated for marriage equality. I looked around the banquet hall and saw it was filled with people who were not just economists but who were also activists working to make the world a better place.

I had always thought of Dad as a somewhat absent-minded economics professor. But at that moment, I realized Dad was a lifelong activist, fighting an entrenched system of unfairness.

It dawned on me for the first time that, in this way, Dad had grown to see me as a “chip off the old block.” The activist in him recognized the activist in me. He was no longer upset with me for being gay; he was proud of me as his gay son fighting an unjust system. I was following in his footsteps.

Indeed, some people viewed Dad and his colleagues’ ideas based on the theories of Henry George to be more radical than those of Marx. In the 1950s, a fellow graduate student at UC Berkeley tried (unsuccessfully) to brand him a Communist and have him expelled from the doctoral program. Dad stood up to developers and co-led two successful voter initiatives to limit urban sprawl and establish a greenbelt in Riverside. In the early 1960s, Dad participated in the Congress of Racial Equality’s lunch counter sit-ins and protests to fight segregation in Columbia, Missouri, where he was a professor at the time. And in Missouri, Dad’s marriage to Mom was illegal because they were of different races.

One of Dad’s close colleagues termed Dad’s death a “terrible blow for the cause of justice” because of “his willingness to patiently help others to see the light of justice.”

Last month, not only did my siblings and I lose our Dad, but we also all lost a fellow activist. However, as John and I, his colleagues, and our family carry on his legacy, Dad through us will remain very much alive.

Harry Britt Will Always Sing in Our Hearts
July 16, 2020

On June 24, the LGBTIQ movement lost one of its greatest unsung heroes, Harry Britt. As not nearly enough people know today, Harry Britt took up the mantle of LGBTIQ leadership on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in January 1979, succeeding Harvey Milk after Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were murdered by former Supervisor Dan White. Indeed, Milk had specifically named Britt as one of the people he wished to succeed him if he were assassinated in office.

When Britt assumed Milk’s seat in the wake of the horrific tragedy, he himself became one of the very first openly gay public officials in the nation. Britt went on to win election to the Board four times. In 1988, he made history by becoming the Board’s first openly gay President when he won the most votes of any Supervisorial candidate at a time when elections were citywide.  Britt’s victory marked a watershed in LGBTIQ electoral politics and inspired numerous other queer candidates to pursue and win elected office.

The year before in 1987, Britt had sought to do something even more monumental: become the first member of Congress to run as an openly gay man with the specific intention of giving LGBTIQ people “our ownvoice” in Congress, as he put it in his campaign literature.

In spring 1987, San Francisco had an open seat in Congress because of the untimely death of Representative Sala Burton. Britt, along with 12 other hopefuls, faced a formidable challenge in the quick special election against an experienced Democratic Party official who was largely unknown to the general public: Nancy Pelosi.  Pelosi entered the race with a double-digit lead in the polls and far outpaced her rivals in terms of establishment support and fundraising.

But something remarkable occurred. An extraordinary grassroots campaign arose to support Britt. In a 1987 Mother Jones piece, Britt described how his campaign “became a magnet for progressive causes.” He won the endorsement of the Sierra Club and the support of numerous other environmental, labor, and left-leaning organizations. Britt recognized that “[c]entral to [his] campaign was an unprecedented effort by lesbians and gay men,” although Pelosi herself garnered significant lesbian and gay support, too.

On the evening of March 17, Ben Schatz, then an attorney with National Gay Rights Advocates and now of Kinsey Sicks fame, held a house party for Britt, which ended up changing our lives forever. We, in fact, met at that party, when Ben introduced us and we shook hands right over the fruit bowl, a seemingly perfect place for two 20-something politically minded, idealistic gay men to meet. We ended up being the last guests to leave that evening and have been together ever since.

At the party, former State Senator Carole Migden, then Chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, told those gathered that we had a rare opportunity with Britt to elect a truly progressive, openly gay man to Congress. With the election taking place at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, Britt’s campaign emphasized his years of experience in the face of relentless adversity as one of the most effective leaders in the battle against what Britt termed a “terrifying disease.”

Britt had also been a visionary on same-sex partner recognition, introducing and then winning passage of domestic partner legislation way back in 1982. The law would have been the first in the nation had then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein not vetoed it.  Britt later wrote San Francisco’s domestic partnership law that was passed by initiative in 1990.

Shortly before election day, the San Francisco Sentinel reported that “Britt had pulled even” in the polls. But in the end, Pelosi narrowly defeated Britt by 3.5 percentage points. With Britt’s campaign gaining momentum as the campaign went on, political experts speculated at the time that Britt might have won the race if the election had been held just a week later.

Perhaps Britt’s boldest statement of his career was his powerful pronouncement of gay resolve the morning after the so-called “White Night Riots” that erupted after a jury convicted Dan White merely of manslaughter for the cold-blooded assassination of both Milk and Moscone. Britt proclaimed: “Harvey Milk’s people do not have anything to apologize for. Now the society is going to have to deal with us not as nice little fairies who have hairdressing salons, but as people capable of violence. We’re not going to put up with Dan Whites anymore.”

Although we do not condone violence, the fearless commitment of LGBTIQ people to our freedom, dignity, and equality that Britt articulated 41 years ago undergirds all that came after it and all that will come in the future. Harry Britt will always sing in our hearts.

A Supreme Court Decision We Can All Take Pride In
June 15, 2020

Over six decades ago, courageous queer Americans fought for their dignity and livelihood in the face of the so-called “Lavender Scare,” the 1950s federal government witch hunt that cost some 5,000 LGBTIQ federal employees their jobs. In the words of historian David K. Johnson, they began a movement in which gay people “could stand up for themselves and demand equal rights as ‘homosexual American citizens.’”

Last week, the activists’ nearly 70-year-old dream came true when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed employment discrimination against LGBTIQ people nationwide. By living as authentically, courageously, compassionately, and openly as possible, LGBTIQ people together won this great victory.

We bow to all the brave LGBTIQ people who did not live to see this day, but whose steadfast efforts and commitment made it possible. Today, we are particularly happy for the millions of LGBTIQ people who live in one of the 29 states that lack full statewide protection from employment discrimination. Queer people living in those states must no longer worry that if they get married on a Saturday, they could find a pink slip on their desk Monday morning.

The Supreme Court’s decision is straightforward and clear. Employment discrimination against LGBTIQ people constitutes unlawful sex discrimination in violation of Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Court is unambiguous: “An individual’s homosexuality or transgender status is not relevant to employment decisions. That’s because it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”  The reason is that “[a]n employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex.”

The ruling will likely have significant impact nationwide on LGBTIQ equality in areas such as housing, education, and health care—indeed, any matter upon which federal law prohibits sex discrimination.

The decision could have worldwide impact as high courts in other countries sometimes look to the U.S. Supreme Court for guidance. LGBTIQ activists in other nations can now point to the U.S. as a model and put greater pressure on their own governments to pass anti-discrimination laws.

The Court’s opinion demonstrates personal respect and understanding of LGBTIQ people, particularly transgender plaintiff Aimee Stephens, who tragically passed away just weeks before the decision was announced. Without qualification, the ruling refers to Stephens as a woman and uses her pronouns “she” and “her” and her surname title “Ms.” It describes Stephens’ “despair and loneliness” living contrary to her true gender and how “clinicians diagnosed her with gender dysphoria and recommended that she begin living as a woman.”

Remarkably, conservative Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch authored the decision, and John Roberts joined it. The six-member majority consisted of Clinton, G.W. Bush, Obama, and Trump nominees.

Sadly, Kavanaugh dissented, but he wrote almost a gay pride statement at the end of his dissenting opinion: “Millions of gay and lesbian Americans have worked hard for many decades to achieve equal treatment in fact and in law. They have exhibited extraordinary vision, tenacity, and grit—battling often steep odds in the legislative and judicial arenas, not to mention in their daily lives. They … can take pride in today’s result.”

Although it’s fantastic that Gorsuch and Roberts voted in favor of LGBTIQ equality in the recent cases, we have no assurance how they will vote in future cases.

The Title VII cases pertained to interpretation of a federal statute, not to LGBTIQ constitutional rights. Fortunately, Roberts, who vigorously dissented from the 2015 Obergefell marriage equality decision, did not dissent in a 2017 case pertaining to birth certificates that applied Obergefell as precedent. Gorsuch, however, dissented in the 2017 case, taking an ill-considered and unprincipled position. The State of Indiana last week asked the Court to hear another birth certificate case. Further, Gorsuch suggested in his 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop concurrence that he might support religious exceptions to anti-LGBTIQ discrimination laws.

Kavanaugh’s vote in the Title VII cases also does not mean he will necessarily vote against us in constitutional cases.

Next term, the Supreme Court will decide whether Catholic Social Services can take local taxpayer money to provide foster care placement services when it flagrantly violates local anti-discrimination laws by refusing to place children with loving same-sex couples because of its homophobic religious views. In Kavanaugh’s recent dissent, he expressly endorsed prior Supreme Court precedent, that Roberts, Gorsuch, and Alito also signed onto, proclaiming that LGBTIQ people could not be treated “as inferior in dignity and worth.” Kavanaugh and the rest of the Court will have to ask themselves what dignity LGBTIQ people have if their hard earned tax dollars are allowed to go to an organization that slanders them as unfit foster parents and deprives abused and neglected children of safe and nurturing homes.

This Pride week, we as a community celebrate this month’s enormous nationwide victory for LGBTIQ equality—even as we and our nation continue to confront additional issues of urgent concern. Now is the time for LGBTIQ people and all fair-minded Americans to seize the moment and press boldly for further long-overdue change to bring about dignity and equality for all.

Happy Pride to all!

Pride in Not Hating During Difficult Times
June 11, 2020

“Hatred never ceases through hatred. Only by not-hating does it end.” So reads an enigmatic 2,000-year-old Indian Buddhist text. As LGBTIQ Pride month begins, we find ourselves taking pride in the fact that a gay African American man’s forceful yet considered response to a completely unprovoked act of racism against him provides us an opportunity to see how this ancient adage can still apply in today’s tumultuous times.

As millions around the world are now aware, Christian Cooper, an acclaimed “pioneer of queer representation in comics,” was enjoying birdwatching in a part of New York’s Central Park where dogs must be leashed to protect bird habitat. After Cooper asked a dog owner to put a leash on her dog, he began filming what ensued on his phone.

The dog owner first started to come at Cooper to grab his phone, and he firmly but politely told her: “Please don’t come close to me.” Perhaps disarmed by Cooper’s clarity and equanimity, the dog owner attempted, in Cooper’s words, “to get an edge in [the] situation,” threatening to call 911 and falsely “tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.” She soon did just that and launched into histrionics to the 911 operator: “There’s a man, an African-American man. He is recording me and threatening me and my dog.” She implored the operator: “Please send the cops immediately!”

In an interview with The View, Cooper explained that he began filming the dog owner, because he and many other birdwatchers had been documenting incidents of dog owners failing to abide by park rules designed to protect wildlife. The city itself had done very little to enforce the rules.

Cooper described the dog walker’s fabrication that he as a black man was about to attack her as a racist act, and “I decided consciously that I was not going to participate in my own dehumanization.” He later told The New York Times: “There are certain dark societal impulses that she, as a white woman facing in a conflict with a black man, that she thought she could marshal to her advantage.”

This same sense of power and entitlement perhaps led Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin to think he could jam his knee into a handcuffed George Floyd’s neck to the point of asphyxiation, or gave Travis and Gregory McMichael the idea they could gun down Ahmaud Arbery as he was innocently jogging down the street.

But Cooper has also spoken out against reported death threats the dog owner has now received, telling CNN they were “wholly inappropriate and abhorrent and should stop immediately.” He reflected: “I find it strange that people who were upset … that she tried to bring death by cop down on my head would then turn around and try to put death threats on her head. Where is the logic in that? Where does that make any kind of sense?”

Can hatred cease by more hatred?

Significantly, Cooper has resisted invitations to up the ante and brand the dog owner herself a “racist,” saying “only she can answer that.” And Cooper believes she will do so by “how she conducts herself” in the future and how “she chooses to reflect on this situation and examine it.”  Could Cooper’s “not hating” the dog owner enable her to be less defensive and reflect more deeply on her actions?

Cooper is interested in quelling racist impulses and stopping racist acts—not vilifying the dog owner as a person. He said that “it’s not really about her … . It’s about the underlying current of racism … that has been going on for centuries.”

Cooper’s heart is even big enough to feel compassion for the dog owner as she faces what he terms a “tidal wave” of public criticism. “[I]t’s got to hurt … . I’m not excusing the racism, but I don’t know if her life needed to be torn apart.”

Cooper also holds the dog owner responsible for her actions. If “this painful process … takes us a step further toward addressing the underlying racial, horrible assumptions that we African-Americans have to deal with … then it’s worth it.”

A less reported detail of the incident is the fact that Cooper was actually in the process of offering the dog a treat when the dog owner began to escalate things. Does Cooper’s decision to act with kindness and not hate from the beginning reflect a type of queer sensibility? How does “not hating” influence our actions and those of others? Answering these questions may guide us as we begin Pride month and as our nation searches for a way forward.

We Love You, Aimee Stephens!
May 20, 2020

“Aimee, Aimee, Aimee! We love you! We love you! We love you!” That’s what Aimee Stephens, plaintiff in the historic transgender rights case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, heard thousands of her supporters chant as she emerged from the Supreme Court last October after oral argument in her case.

We sense that Stephens may not have fully received that message of love ever before in her life. Stephens had known she was a girl since age 5, but wasn’t able to live in accord with her true self until nearly 50 years later. In an ACLU video she explained, “I’m fighting for my rights and the rights of others to be who we are. I did not realize that there [were] that many people in support, but to hear them outside [on] the courthouse steps chanting my name, telling me that they loved me—that had a big effect on [me].”

Tragically, Stephens passed away from kidney failure last week before she could learn whether her vision of transgender equality would become reality.

Among those showering Stephens with love that day was a supporter holding a sign that read, “We are all Aimee Stephens.” The sign’s simple declaration attested to the fact that Stephens was standing up for the civil rights of over 1.5 million transgender Americans and countless intersex and gender non-binary people. The sign also articulated Stephen’s message and the core, universal value of the entire LGBTIQ movement: Our common humanity, our common desire to love and be loved, our common aspiration to be free to be our true selves, and our common need for equality under the law.

As Stephens had put it in a Detroit News interview: “If you’re part of the human race, which we all are, we all deserve the same basic rights.” In an ACLU video, Stephens’ wife Donna observed, “Everybody wants to be their true self.”

And couldn’t we all benefit from experiencing more love the way Stephens did on the steps of the Supreme Court—not in a narcissistic way, but in a sustaining sense of safety, wellbeing and happiness within?

As a young adult training to become a pastor, Stephens found herself drawn to comforting families mourning the death of loved ones and ended up having a nearly 30-year career working in funeral services. She was known for her “sensitivity and compassion” for grieving clients.

However, even as Stephens comforted others in crisis, she struggled with inner turmoil because she had been unable to live in accord with her true gender identity. She fell into “despair, loneliness, and shame.” After several years of psychotherapy, she decided to live her life fully in accord with her true gender. In 2013,  she penned an extremely forthcoming, caring, and reassuring letter to her friends and work colleagues, explaining that she had struggled with gender dysphoria her “entire life” and that finally for her “peace of mind and to end the agony in [her] soul” she was going to live as her “true self.”

Two weeks after Stephens gave the letter to her boss, he fired her, declaring it was “wrong for a biological male to deny his sex by dressing as a woman.”

Stephens stood up for herself, and her case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, representing the hope of millions of transgender people to be their “true selves” in the workplace.

As Stephens advocated for transgender rights through her lawsuit, few of us knew she was battling kidney disease and needed frequent dialysis. When Stephens’ employer fired her, she not only lost her income but also her health insurance.

After being fired for being transgender, Stephens found looking for other work in the funeral services industry difficult, and her wife Donna was forced to take on several jobs to make ends meet, depriving them of precious time together. We can only imagine the deleterious effect these additional stresses, coupled with decades of transphobia, had on Stephens’ health. In late April, Stephens’ kidneys failed and she entered hospice care.

In the ACLU video, Stephens says: “The more I’ve seen the support, it gives me the strength to get up another day, to go on fighting another day and give that same hope to all the rest.” Whether “you win or lose, the wheel still keeps turning—whether it be for you or not.” Thank you, Aimee, for turning that wheel and emanating love for all of us.

Gay Blood Is Thicker Than Water
April 23, 2020

Many years ago, when I was a college student, I did my civic duty and decided to participate in a Red Cross blood drive publicized on campus. As a nurse prepared me to donate, I told her I was gay in response to a screening question, and she said she didn’t know whether I could donate. To find out, she yelled to her supervisor on the other side of the crowded donation site: “Marjorie—do we take gay blood?!”

Before I could explain that my blood was not “gay,” Marjorie hollered back: “No!”

Not surprisingly I, like many LGBTIQ people, have been deeply disturbed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s decades-long policy discriminating against gay and bisexual men in blood donation, founded on fear and prejudice and not medical science.

On March 19, 2020, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams at a White House press conference urged all Americans to give blood as the COVID-19 crisis threatens to deplete the U.S. supply. But the Surgeon General’s call by its very nature excluded gay and bisexual men—or at least all gay and bisexual men who had not been celibate for over a year, per the FDA rules updated in 2015. In response to Adams’ call, LGBTIQ leaders, such as State Senator Scott Wiener, who termed the FDA restriction “completely unnecessary” given “overwhelmingly accurate” current laboratory blood screening technologies, urged the FDA to end its anti-gay policy immediately.

A week later, the FDA reduced the gay celibacy requirement from 1 year to 3 months, stating that the reduction would remain in effect even after the COVID-19 crisis ended. The FDA’s actions, though a welcome step forward, reveal their recognition that the anti-gay policy itself makes no sense. Why would it suddenly be OK to ease the restriction on a permanent basis? If the COVID-19 crisis enabled the FDA to let go of 75% of its anti-gay prejudice, why not just let go of it all?

Some prominent Americans and also personal friends have said they notice that people have been kinder to each other during the COVID-19 crisis, much as they perceived people to be after 9/11. I hope that we as a society and many of us individually take advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to reflect upon and re-evaluate how we live and act now and in the future.

However, a half block from our house in our heavily Asian-American neighborhood, I recently saw scrawled on a telephone pole anti-Chinese graffiti, calling on neighbors to buy guns. It reminded me of a South Asian American friend’s observation that after 9/11 people were not nicer to her or other people thought to look Middle Eastern.

Ongoing discrimination not just about blood donations continues to loom over the LGBTIQ community during the current crisis as well. Earlier this month, we completed our U.S. Census questionnaire—something critical for each of us to do to ensure our representation in Congress and access to federal funds. As soon as we read the gender question offering respondents only the binary choice of male and female, we were reminded of how the Trump administration 3 year ago eliminated questions about gender identity and sexual orientation that could have provided invaluable information about our community and enabled us to be fully seen and dignified in the Census.

The Evangelical Christian charity Samaritan’s Purse, led by the notoriously anti-LGBTIQ minister Franklin Graham, has for weeks run a makeshift overflow tent hospital in Central Park for COVID-19 patients, sanctioned by the City of New York during the crisis. Although the organization claims it does not discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity in caring for patients, it openly discriminates in employment and who can volunteer. I can only imagine how disturbing it could be for an LGBTIQ person to receive life or death medical treatment under those tents.

Looming over us is the real possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis could rule that Title VII, the nation’s law prohibiting employment discrimination, does not apply to us. Although the legal arguments presented to the Court are strongly in our favor, we remember how back in 1986 at the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the Supreme Court held that states could put LGBTIQ people in jail for sexual expression of our love, even in the privacy of our own homes. When employers resume hiring as the COVID-19 crisis recedes, nothing in federal statute would prevent employers from openly discriminating against LGBTIQ people if the Court rules against us in the current cases.

All of this and more could potentially whip us into a state of fury. Although some activists say that anger at injustice is an important motivator for them, two quotations often attributed to the Dalai Lama come to mind. It is said that someone asked the Dalai Lama how he could harbor no anger towards the Chinese government given all it had done to him and Tibetan culture and people. He replied, “They have taken everything from us, why should I let them take away my peace and happiness as well?” And “don’t ever mistake my silence for ignorance, my calmness for acceptance, or my kindness for weakness.”

These words bespeak the importance of protecting our ability to love, care, and find peace and stability even when external circumstances make it difficult. And although John and I fervently wish that the HIV/AIDS epidemic never took place, we cherish what it has taught us about love, care, dignity, community, and life itself, and recognize its role in increasing the visibility of LGBTIQ people, thereby laying groundwork of the marriage equality movement and other advances.

Let us take this opportunity now to learn from the current pandemic so that when restrictions are finally eased, we don’t move backwards but instead move forward towards a more equal, just, and caring society.

2020 Foresight: Expect the Unexpected
April 9, 2020

When I was a senior in high school back in the 1970s, I played classical piano and was invited to perform the difficult Mendelssohn Piano Concerto in G-Minor before hundreds of students and their parents at our school’s annual holiday concert. I prepared for months on end. The morning of the concert was a sunny and crisp early winter day in Kansas City where we lived. But by afternoon clouds moved in, and soon it began to snow. I remember my mother was so nervous about my performance at the concert and how difficult it might be to get there through the snow, she baked the ham we were having for dinner with the plastic wrapper on it, yielding a completely inedible gooey mess.

And it just kept snowing and snowing. The roads became nearly impassable. We made it to the concert, but few others did. I performed the concerto that I had worked on so hard before a very small audience.

I was crestfallen, but years later at my 40th high school reunion I saw my old music teacher, who also still remembered that night decades ago. Seeing him made me feel something very different: how marvelous and nourishing it was to have played so much music together with him and my fellow students from grade school through high school graduation. (I also played clarinet and tenor saxophone in many different bands, ensembles, and orchestras.) Despite the fact that I never got to perform the Mendelssohn concerto as I had imagined, I had completely immersed myself in the music for all those months I had practiced. In fact, I had been very fortunate. I’ve never again played as much music as I did during my senior year of high school.

The experience gave me a taste of one of life’s most basic truths: things don’t always turn out the way we expect them to. Several years later I confronted that truth again when I came to terms with my sexuality. I had known since I was a small child that I was attracted to people of the same sex, but one reason that I didn’t come out until my 20s was because I simply could not conceive that there was anything different or out of the mainstream about me. When I finally connected the dots late one evening while riding my bike in front of the iconic mosaic at the heart of the Stanford quad, I remember stopping in astonishment with the realization: “Wow, I can’t believe it! I’m gay!” Things weren’t the way I expected them to be. It was also the beginning of my realizing, in fact, how lucky I was to be gay.

We in the LGBTIQ community are perhaps particularly familiar with the truth that life can turn out other than planned. For instance, during the heady days of San Francisco in the late 1970s, no one could foresee the havoc that the HIV/AIDS epidemic would wreak on the community just a few short years later.

As we popped the cork to ring in the New Year 2020, neither I nor anyone else I know imagined that less than three months later in the face of a new deadly virus, we’d be sheltering in place at home, doing everything we could to keep six feet away from any other human being except those with whom we lived—and, of all things, fretting about whether we had enough toilet paper.

It’s not surprising that many of us in the LGBTIQ community who lived through the 1980s and 1990s in San Francisco are experiencing varying degrees of PTSD these days. But our community learned a lot about life, death, how to truly care for each other, and how to fight back and stand up for our lives during the darkest days of the AIDS crisis and beyond. We hope some of that wisdom is proving useful amidst the COVID-19 outbreak.

Life’s unexpected turns can be wonderful, too—like when 33 years ago as I was preparing to leave a party because none of my friends were there, I turned around and met Stuart and we ended up being the last guests to depart and have been together ever since. Or the morning of February 12, 2004, when then-Mayor Gavin Newsom surprised the world and burst open the doors of San Francisco City Hall for LGBTIQ people to marry, igniting the marriage equality movement.

None of this negates the value of planning for the future and anticipating it as best we can. Indeed, the balance, skills, and stability we can bring to life before something unexpected takes place can help us when it does. Reminder to self: We really need to update and upgrade our earthquake kit!

Although Stuart has been working harder than ever at his job in health policy at UCSF during the shutdown, we’ve also enjoyed slowing down, spending more time outdoors, seeing neighbors (six feet apart) to and from walks in the park, and living life much more simply. We hope to maintain some of these things when life eventually returns to so-called normal.

And we hope to have learned something more about the vicissitudes and unpredictability of life—and to experience and appreciate each present moment and each loved one here and now. Please take good care of yourself and others during these unexpected and challenging times.

Ellen Pontac (1941–2020): Flooding the World with Love and Life
March 24, 2020

We met the extraordinary Ellen Pontac, along with the love of her life Shelly Bailes, on the miraculous first day of San Francisco’s Winter of Love, February 12, 2004. To our collective amazement, we, Shelly and Ellen (affectionately known as “Shellen”), and other same-sex couples had just gotten married, thanks to then San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom suddenly opening the door for same-sex couples to tie the knot.

As we stood in the grand rotunda of San Francisco City Hall in wonder at what was taking place, we saw an elated Pontac and Bailes signing up people to join Marriage Equality California, which later became Marriage Equality USA (MEUSA). We eagerly joined, commencing over eleven years working side by side with them and many other committed activists for marriage equality.

On March 15, 2020, Pontac passed away after a long illness at her home in Davis, California, with her wife Bailes and other loved ones by her side. Pontac and Bailes had been together for 46 years—years in which they “laughed, played, traveled, and worked together,” and “life was the best it could be,” as Bailes described in a recent Facebook post.

Pontac and Bailes met in New York City back in 1973, just four years after the Stonewall Riots. They moved in together the next year—a daring move because both were going through divorces and had children. As Bailes recounted to ABC-10 television in Sacramento last year, “Both our lawyers at the time told us that if we told anybody about our relationship, we would lose our kids. They would take them right out of our home.” Indeed, “one time Ellen’s ex-husband broke down our door, dragged her kids out by the hair in their pajamas, and threw them in the car,” Bailes recounted.

For a number of years, the couple kept a low profile in order to protect their family, but after moving to California and hearing Harvey Milk’s call to come out at San Francisco Pride 1978, they decided they needed and wanted to come out and be activists.

In 1986, the pair were instrumental in the city of Davis, which became one of the first municipalities in the country to pass an ordinance prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination and that defeated (by a 16 percentage point margin) an effort to repeal the measure at the polls.

In 2000—way before marriage equality was a cause celebre and a time when many in the LGBTIQ community did not understand its importance—Pontac and Bailes became marriage equality activists.

Together with other activists, we joined Pontac and Bailes in lobbying, organizing, and speaking at countless rallies. MEUSA created numerous events to publicize the importance of ending marriage discrimination, and Pontac and Bailes, other couples, and MEUSA activists showed up for every twist and turn of the marriage equality roller coaster to put a human face on the issue. No one was more committed, resilient, and visible than Pontac and Bailes.

At MEUSA’s 20th anniversary celebration in San Francisco, MEUSA leader Molly McKay described Pontac, Bailes, and other MEUSA activists as the “rebellious energizer bunnies of the movement.” McKay recounted that Pontac always said that to win marriage equality, we needed to “flood the world with our truth to share our lives, our loves, our stories and to help find and encourage others to do the same.”

One of the memorable things we did with Pontac and Bailes was to join 40 other activists on a 2004 nationwide bus tour from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., on the “Marriage Equality Express,” nicknamed “the caravan.” The caravan was the brainchild of another MEUSA leader Davina Kotulski, who wanted to channel the seemingly boundless energy that San Francisco’s Winter of Love had generated and to reveal to the nation the real lives of LGBTIQ people harmed by marriage discrimination. The caravan culminated in a national rally, featuring speeches from all of the caravan riders.

Marriage Equality activists Ellen Pontac and Shelly Bailes with Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis aboard the organization’s float in the 34th Annual San Francisco Pride Parade. Photo Source: ljworld.com

We were also humbled to ride with the pair and other seasoned activists on Marriage Equality California’s float in the euphoric 2004 San Francisco Pride Parade as we were just getting involved in the movement.

Pontac and Bailes were renowned for their creative and catchy homemade signs, their expressive personal reactions to the wins and losses on the road to equality, and their expression of their love for one another—all making them one of the most prominent couples in the nationwide marriage equality movement.

Their signature sign highlighted the longevity of their loving and committed relationship: “Shelly & Ellen, Together 30 Years, 7 Mo, 19 Days, 10 Hrs.” With each successive year that they fought for full marriage equality, they crossed out the number 30 and added an additional year, while holding an additional sign highlighting the particular issue at that time in the struggle. At a rally before the federal court hearing to determine whether the videotapes of the Prop 8 trial should be made public, their sign read: “Free the Tapes!” The judge hearing the case grinned when he saw the sign as he walked into the courthouse that morning, and even referred to the sign in his remarks from the bench.

Through everything, Pontac and Bailes not only maintained their sense of humor, but also never wavered in their confidence that love and equality would ultimately prevail. We and many other MEUSA activists shared that faith. Perhaps it was something that the magic of the Winter of Love instilled in us.

Pontac wrote in The People’s Victory: Stories From the Front Line of the Fight for Marriage Equality: “I always knew we were going to win this fight. When we joined Marriage Equality I believed that ‘Marriage was a Portal to Full Equality’ and I still feel that way. I know that when you open the hearts and minds of everyday people they not only begin to understand what equality means, but their hearts and minds don’t shut closed so easily.” Pontac and Bailes’ advocacy was never just for themselves personally; it was for all LGBTIQ people.

More than anything else, Pontac and Bailes revealed through their activism how much they loved each other and loved being married. Pontac and Bailes were one of the first two couples to marry legally in California when they tied the knot in Davis at 5:01 pm on June 16, 2008. Pontac exclaimed, “I’m just overjoyed. I can’t … imagine a better life,” according to ABC-10.

At a rally subsequent to the passage of Proposition 8, Pontac declared: “There are so many things about being married that are amazing … . The thing that thrills me most often is when I’m able to introduce someone to my wife.” She continued, “When you say this is my wife, everyone knows what you mean. And the feeling is absolutely glorious … when I’m able to say: ‘This is my wife Shelly Bailes.’” Bailes for her part declared in a recent Facebook post: “I am the luckiest person on earth.”

At one rally, Pontac held a sign that read simply, “I LOVE HER,” while Bailes’ sign proclaimed: “We are NEVER GOING AWAY.” Indeed, they never did and their love shone widely to the world. The contribution Ellen Pontac and her wife Shelly Bailes made to marriage equality and to LGBTIQ rights will be felt for generations to come.

Transforming the World One Outfit at a Time
March 12, 2020

Over the past few months, we’ve been busy cleaning out my mom’s condo since she died. My mom had a great fashion sense and kept herself feeling young even in her later decades not only by acting young, but also by dressing according to current trends and pulling it off with style. Dressing on the outside the way she felt on the inside was vital to her. John, my siblings, and I carted countless pieces of clothes to charities, including one designed to help economically-disadvantaged women to have free clothing to wear to job interviews as they re-enter the labor market.

We would’ve loved having something nearby like the new nonprofit Transform Cincy, founded by Nancy Dawson and her friend Tristan Vaught in Cincinnati, Ohio. Dawson, who runs a successful bridal makeup business called BRIDEface, is the proud parent of a transgender daughter, Phoebe, who came out to her family as transgender at age 10. As Dawson told NBC’s Today show, “as soon as we started recognizing Phoebe as Phoebe, she really blossomed.”

However, they soon realized “there wasn’t a safe space we could go and just try on dresses, skirts, without being judged or looked at.” Then one day, Dawson saw a social media post from her friend Vaught, saying that instead of doing “gender reveal” baby showers, people should do “showers for people who are transitioning.” A dream was born.

Together with Dawson’s other daughter Ella, they created Transform Cincy, a safe space where trans youth can build a new wardrobe at no cost, housed at the storefront where Dawson operates BRIDEface. Daughter Phoebe explained to Today how important being able to dress in accord with one’s gender identity was: “When I first started wearing clothes that … matched my identity, it was really affirming. And it felt like I could express outwardly how I felt on the inside.”

When trans youth contact Transform, they answer a few questions to help Ella, who serves as the stylist. She curates a session just for them, and then when they arrive in person, outfits are waiting for them to try on.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Transform has become far more than just a place for trans youth to find clothes that are a great match for them; it has evolved into a safe space where trans teens can find support. Transform’s first client, 17-year-old Elliot Reed, told National Public Radio: “It made me feel so accepted and validated.” A 15-year-old told Today after their recent visit, “ … today was just so totally awesome; you feel so loved and welcomed when you’re at Transform. They choose clothes specifically for you and your identity, and it’s so validating, walking out with a new part of yourself.”

Nancy recounted to Today the story of a teen who had driven three hours from a small town to Transform. The teen “had never met another trans person in her life, and neither had her mom, so it was so great to give them that support.” Indeed, the Transform experience provides support for both parents and children. As Ella told Today, “They’re getting a lot more than clothing. A lot of the times, the parents need somebody to talk to; they need somebody that understands, because a lot of times this is a big journey for the parents as well as the kids.”

In explaining the need for places like Transform, cofounder Vaught told local television station WCPO, “Can you imagine when you’re transitioning, trying to go to a department store and where do you go to actually change?” In California, Assembly Member Evan Low introduced state legislation last month requiring retail department stores with over 500 employees to maintain an undivided, gender inclusive area of its sales floor where children’s clothes, toys, and childcare items that have “traditionally been marketed for either girls or for boys [are] displayed.” The bill serves to help enable children to develop and express themselves free from constraining gender norms and thus helps all children, not just trans youth. We hope that it is part of a movement to free all consumers from restrictive gender constraints and biases in clothes and other products.

Tragically, Dawson received a cancer diagnosis late last year that will likely cut her life short soon, and her daughters will have to grow up further and live without her. However, Dawson told Today that she sees “Transform as being one of my legacies along with my children.” Everyone will miss her greatly, but Transform will continue. As donations grow and demand increases, Transform will need to grow soon as well—into a larger storefront. Vaughn described Dawson as “truly a light. Her energy, her passion, her courage is still going to be seen throughout each person we see here.”

We can’t help but remember another bright Cincinnati area trans teen whose light was never allowed to shine: Leelah Alcorn. Six years ago, Leelah committed suicide, leaving a gut-wrenching social media post describing her despair. In it, she described how she had been raised in a very conservative Christian environment and when she came out to her mom as transgender at age 14, her parents reacted very negatively and undertook a series of actions the resulted in her hating herself and descending into isolation: “No friends, no support, no love. Just my parent’s disappointment and the cruelty of loneliness.” In the note, Leelah pleads for societal change: “The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights.”

Dawson and everyone else at Tranform Cincy are not only helping to save trans youth from suicide, but are also helping trans youth to flourish as their own people. They and other caring people across the country are working to make Leelah’s vision a reality. Let’s all join them.

Every Moment a Marriage Equality Moment: Breakfast with My Dad at His Retirement Community
February 27, 2020

You never know for sure what awaits you at breakfast time at my 96-year-old dad’s Southern California retirement community, where John and I visited over the recent Presidents’ Day weekend. And I don’t mean whether it’ll be fried eggs or pancakes; I mean the conversation around the breakfast table.

One morning my dad, my sister (who was also visiting), John, and I dined with two other residents: Mr. and Mrs. Paulson, a couple I had met on a previous visit with my dad on my own. Our breakfast was unremarkable. I introduced John and my sister to the Paulsons, who told us about their children and grandchildren, not an unusual experience.

On the final morning of our visit, John skipped breakfast, and by chance my dad and I ate with the Paulsons again. We soon learned that our prior breakfast with the Paulsons had been anything but ordinary for them.

A few minutes after we sat down, Mrs. Paulson turned to me and asked, “Was that your wife we met yesterday?” I said, “No, you may be thinking of my sister. You met my husband John at breakfast the other day.”

Mrs. Paulson looked at me puzzled and said, “Why do you call him your husband, when that’s against the will of God?” Taken aback, I explained, “I call him my husband because we love each, we’re spending the rest of our lives together, and we’re legally married.”

She turned to her husband and asked, “That’s not the same as our marriage, is it?” Mr. Paulson, apparently knowing the desired response, responded, “No.” At which Mrs. Paulson continued on with me: “Why do you call it a legal marriage, when it’s not recognized by our church?” I explained, “We weren’t married in your church. We were married in City Hall, and our marriage is legally recognized in all 50 states.” She persisted, “But why would you want to get married when it goes against the Bible?”

“We got married for the same reason that most people do—we love each other, we’re committed to each other, and we’re spending our lives together,” I said. “Marriage comes with many rights and responsibilities, and that’s part of how we are able to care for each other in sickness and in health. We are married under the law.”

Befuddled and clearly not getting the answer she wanted, Mrs. Paulson turned to my father who had been listening intently but had said nothing. Her eyes seemed to say to my dad, “Do you hear what I’m hearing? Surely as his father you’re not OK with this?”

Not missing a beat, Dad met her gaze and said, “And they can legally adopt children too!”

At that, Mrs. Paulson returned to her bacon and eggs.

After breakfast, Dad said nothing to me about what had transpired and proceeded to his room to take his morning nap. When John and I finished packing and returned to his room to say goodbye, I awakened Dad from his slumber. Before I could say anything, Dad, still half-asleep, exclaimed with a wry smile, “Be sure to tell John what happened at breakfast! You handled it expertly.”

I responded that he had too. “We’re a team. We’re a family.”

I told Dad, “I love you.” He said, “I love you too. More than ever.”

Negotiating Meiwaku and Getting Your Fair Share of Rice
February 13, 2020

We’ve just returned from a wonderful two weeks in Japan, where we gave talks on marriage equality, HIV/AIDS, and LGBTIQ rights, and met with fellow activists. We spoke to hundreds of students, professors, activists, and businesspeople, who showed great interest. The New York Times recently reported a “’boom’ in LGBT awareness” in Japan, citing recent polling showing that nearly 80 percent of Japanese under age 60 now support marriage equality.

The “boom” was immediately evident to us. When we first gave marriage equality talks in Japan seven years ago, we asked a class of university students whether they personally knew someone LGBT. Barely anyone raised their hand. When we asked the same question two weeks ago, many hands popped up, with one woman telling the class that she knew an LGBT person because, in fact, she was one herself.

Seven years ago, nowhere in Japan offered partnership certificates to same-sex couples. During our trip, Osaka Prefecture, with a population of nearly 9 million people, began issuing certificates, meaning that 20 percent of Japanese now live in places that offer certificates. Although the certificates offer few substantive legal rights, they hold symbolic value not just for the couples themselves but also as a signal to the nation of growing governmental support for LGBT rights. Activists are pressing hard in the lead up to the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics to increase the number of places that offer certificates.

And a year ago, a diverse group of same-sex couples filed marriage equality lawsuits across the country. The influential Japan Federation of Bar Associations, a legal regulatory authority, opined that the country’s current laws excluding same-sex couples from marriage violate the Japanese Constitution.

Last week, the plaintiffs and lawyers in the lawsuits held public events to mark the anniversary. We were delighted to meet some of the plaintiff couples in Tokyo, to discuss our shared journeys, and to provide inspiration to each other. We also met with Kanako Otsuji, the first openly LGBTIQ elected member of the Diet (Japanese Parliament), who last year introduced marriage equality legislation in the Diet.

But substantial barriers to winning equality remain. The conservative government led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has shown no indication that it would give Otsuji’s marriage equality bill a hearing in the Diet. The Japanese Supreme Court is considered a conservative institution that historically has rarely invalidated legislation as unconstitutional.

In the U.S., the fact that millions of LGBTIQ people have come out has been foundational to the victories our community has won. In Japan, the route to winning equality may differ because coming out remains personally challenging to many Japanese LGBTIQ people.

Japanese women face parallel struggles to that of LGBTIQ people. Although Japan boasts the third largest economy in the world, it ranked a lowly 110th out of 149 countries in the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Gender Gap Index. And the country ranked 165th out of 193 nations in terms of women members of representative national legislatures, according to a 2017 study. A few years ago, Otsuji told us that, in some respects, it was more difficult for her to run for the Diet as a woman than as an LGBT person.

On our last night in Japan, we dined with two Japanese friends, who are both successful professionals: one a man, and the other a woman. We ate at a cozy vegetarian Japanese restaurant, tucked away on a winding alley in central Osaka, with just two tables and a few seats around the counter behind which the young owner prepared set meals for his customers. When the owner presented our set meals at our table, an animated conversation in Japanese between the owner and our Japanese friends ensued.

When the flurry of words ended, we asked our friends what had transpired. They explained that the owner had brought our woman friend a smaller serving of rice for the meal, explaining that female customers received less rice than male customers because they needed less food (even though, we note, we all paid the same price for our meals). Despite our friends’ protestations, the owner insisted. Our friends decided not to escalate the disagreement further and simply let it go, leaving our female friend to internalize the anger and frustration she felt.

Earlier, she had explained to us the Japanese term meiwaku. We understand it translates roughly as being an annoyance or causing disturbance to others. Japanese children are taught from an early age not to assert themselves in ways that are perceived as disturbing or troubling to other people. Doing so is considered selfish in a society that values group harmony above all. Our friend confided to us that even though she was completely in the right when it came to receiving the same amount of food as male customers, she, in fact, felt guilty for raising the issue even to the limited degree she did.

Another female Japanese friend told us this type of disparate treatment of women at restaurants is a thing of the past in Tokyo. But this profound societal value of not being meiwaku seems to pose a great challenge to LGBTIQ people coming out and to women’s professional and political advancement.

We do not profess expertise in Japanese societal norms, but it seems that the ability to which LGBTIQ people and women can demonstrate that their full and open participation in society is not meiwaku may be key to personal, political, and professional success—and both metaphorically and literally to getting a fair share of rice.

Fasten Your Seatbelts for 2020!
January 16, 2020

It’s finally here, the year so many of us have been waiting for: 2020. The year millions of Americans, including many in the LGBTIQ community, hope will bring forth the end of the Trump presidency. A year that will likely have a monumental impact—for better or for worse—on the LGBTIQ community, the nation, and the world.

In her classic 1950 film All About Eve, gay icon Bette Davis cautions her evening party guests, “Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy night.” Indeed, 2020 could turn out to be a bumpy nightmare for the LGBTIQ community—or a watershed year for the advancement of LGBTIQ rights.

In the next few weeks or months, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on whether employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity constitutes sex discrimination in violation of Title VII, the federal law that outlaws race and sex discrimination in employment nationwide. The decision will have major nationwide impact, especially in the nearly 30 states that lack full state law prohibitions on discrimination against LGBTIQ people.

The ruling will also have ramifications in the areas of housing, public accommodation, education, and sports. A victory would be huge. But even though the actual legal arguments are strongly on our side, we could easily lose because of Trump’s two appointments to the Court: Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

The Gorsuch and Kavanaugh appointments already cement a strongly conservative 5–4 majority on the Court for years to come. At age 71, Clarence Thomas, the oldest person in that 5-member majority, could remain on the Court for years. If Trump were re-elected and had the opportunity to replace any of the 4 liberal/moderate members of the Court minority, the impact could be felt for generations. Achieving full constitutional protections for LGBTIQ people—an unfinished work despite nationwide marriage equality—would be even more at risk than it is today.

A Trump/Pence re-election would also likely mean continued executive level attacks on the transgender community, the undermining of the rights of transgender people, and further measures to legitimate discrimination against all LGBTIQ people under the guise of so-called “religious freedom.” With Gorsuch and Kavanuagh on the Court, the federal courts would likely provide little if any protection against these efforts.

However, all of these Republican threats to our community come as we, as LGBTIQ people continue to make significant strides toward greater societal embrace of gender and sexual orientation diversity than ever before.

From a national political perspective, the prominence of openly gay Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is testament of a sea change in public acceptance. As political junkies who have followed the influential Iowa Caucuses since their inception in the 1970s, we find it truly extraordinary from a historical perspective that polls show that a gay man who appears with and speaks openly about his husband could win the caucuses. That would have been unthinkable even just a few years ago.

And who knows? Mayor Buttigieg could be inaugurated president of the United States on January 20, 2021, with his husband Chasten at his side. Stranger things have happened … and indeed arguably did happen with the election of the current occupant of the White House four years ago.

And if Buttigieg became president, he could lead a restructuring of the Supreme Court of which he has often spoken to restore balance and reshape the future of constitutional rights, not just for LGBTIQ people but for millions of other Americans as well. And he would support full federal protections for LGBTIQ people and end the attacks on transgender Americans, as many other Democratic contenders would do as well.

Or Trump could be re-elected.

Bette Davis’ admonishment to “fasten your seatbelts” is delivered as a sassy throwaway line. But when we consider the uncertainties that lie ahead in 2020 and the tendency of some of us to fret and despair or become outraged at every twist and turn along the way, Davis’ words offer sage advice.

Although 2020 is the time to stand up, speak out, and be counted, “fasten your seatbelts” is a wise reminder to take care of each other and ourselves as we do. After all, seatbelts are designed to protect us from the minor bumps and the hard knocks along the way. We wish you a truly happy new year, buckled up individually and bound together as community.

Wishing You an Imaginative Holiday
December 19, 2019

Years ago, at SF MOMA’s retrospective of the work of Japanese conceptual artist Yoko Ono, we remember climbing a tall ladder, and then using a magnifying glass to read a word, written in tiny letters on a piece of paper suspended from the ceiling. The word was “YES.”

Ono first exhibited the piece at a 1966 gallery show in London when John Lennon, whom she had not yet met, walked in, climbed the ladder, and read that same word. In Lennon’s words: ” … in tiny little letters it says ‘YES.’ So it was positive. I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn’t say ‘no’ or ‘f–k you’ or something. It said ‘YES.’”

Of course, Lennon and Ono’s collaboration went on to become legendary. For us, Ono’s work illuminated the vitality of hope, engagement, optimism, and yes—imagination. Five years later, Lennon inspired millions for generations to come by singing: “Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one … .”

Indeed, he was not. Lennon attested that Ono was responsible for much of the song, and in 2017, she finally received the co-writing credit he had wished for her to have.

This holiday season we find ourselves pondering the wonder and power of imagination. The holidays are perhaps the time when many Americans embrace imagination most, in particular the idea of an old, plump gentleman dressed in red, who resides at the North Pole.

The poet and novelist Alice Walker declared, “I have fallen in love with the imagination. If you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.” The painter Vincent Van Gogh advised: “Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.” The writer Maxine Hong Kingston keenly observed, “A good strong imagination doesn’t go off into some wild fantasy of nowhere. It goes to the truth.”

Imagination provides us the opportunity to recognize truth and find hope that might be less accessible if we limit our minds to analysis and reason. One of the greatest scientific geniuses of all time, Albert Einstein, proclaimed: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

And imagination can be transformative in politics and activism. It has played a pivotal role in the LGBTIQ movement. Thinking over the past year, who could have imagined that Pete Buttigieg, the openly gay Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, would be a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination? Pete and his husband Chasten could. Forty years earlier, Harvey Milk imagined himself on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and with a lot of work by thousands inspired by a dream, he won election.

On February 12, 2004, Gavin Newsom, in allegiance to the Constitution but in defiance of state law, imagined San Francisco as a place that recognized the truth of the dignity and equality of same-sex love and marriage equality for all. He was able to make that truth a reality for 30 days in 2004, and thousands from around the globe, including ourselves, responded.

When those marriages were nullified six months later, who could have imagined that just over a decade later the dream of nationwide marriage equality would become a reality? Although devastated, many of us could. The experience of that 2004 dream come true inspired countless people, not just in San Francisco but across the country, to work for lasting equality.

Today, LGBTIQ activists in China are imagining their country passing marriage equality legislation, even as Chinese President Xi Jinping presides over a political and cultural crackdown not seen since the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. This fall, Chinese queer activists launched a grassroots campaign encouraging the community to submit their personal stories and desires for equality to the national legislature during the authorized public comment period for an unrelated marriage and family code bill. Upwards of 200,000 people appear to have submitted comments.

Imagination abounds in the LGBTIQ community—from artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers to drag performers to the Radical Faeries and more. It is foundational. Queer people come out because we imagine a better life no longer hiding or repressing our sexuality. Transgender people take courageous steps because they imagine the wholeness they will feel when their body matches their gender. Our community’s political engagement and activism are founded not just on our desire to make our own lives better, but also on the dream that LGBTIQ youth growing up will not face the same challenges we did.

This year, we’re asking Santa to bring us the gift of letting our imaginations run wild to discover new truths and possibilities. We wish you an imaginative holiday season and New Year 2020!

Strawberries and Cream with the ‘Bad Boys’
December 5, 2019

This holiday season, I find myself reminded of two old family stories. The first comes from my dad’s side of the family and is a story about my paternal Great, Great Grandfather Amos recounted for posterity when he died. Amos was a Quaker minister who with his wife Nancy founded a tiny Quaker meeting in southern Illinois in the 19th Century.

“It was said that Mr. Lewis had a very fine strawberry patch which the ‘bad boys’ of the neighborhood used regularly to loot, stealing the fruit and destroying the vines; that one day while such ‘bad boys’ were so engaged, they were surprised by Mr. Lewis. But instead of collaring and soundly thrashing them when they were caught, as they expected and as was done by others to them, Mr. Lewis said to them in a kindly and gentle voice: ‘Boys, the best of the berries have been picked and taken into the house, but if you will come in, you can have some here with sugar and cream.’”

I like this story, not only because it was told about my great, great grandfather, whom of course I never met, but also because it recounts a very simple act of kindness. I imagine that Amos felt so content, safe, and at peace in his own life that he felt no need to lash out at the so-called “bad boys” in anger.

Given that they all lived in a very small town, it is likely that Amos knew the boys and how other townspeople had repeatedly treated them harshly when they were caught misbehaving. Amos not only chose an alternative nonviolent approach, part and parcel of the Quaker way of life, but also to indulge the boys with kindness, sharing the best strawberries with them—with sugar and cream to boot.

The second story is a very different account from my mother’s side of the family, from my maternal Great Grandmother Jenny, and takes place years later and hundreds of miles away in small town North Carolina. It’s in the form of a letter Jenny wrote in her early 60s to her son, my grandfather, from the Tranquil Park Sanitarium, where it appears she was receiving treatment for debilitating panic attacks:

“I am not allowed to write at length but I want to tell you how glad I am that I came here. I have such a cool room with private bath and attentive nurse and a nice cool porch where we gather with congenial company and it’s as pleasant as the mountains and I’m improving all the time. I took a long walk yesterday and slept fine last night. I am not exaggerating. I would not deceive you.”

The letter continues: “At home you know how it is. I got nervous over things and here I have nothing to think about and everything is so quiet. We have music by the Victrola a great deal. You know how I enjoy music … . I think what a blessing there is such a place provided for suffering humanity.”

Unfortunately, anxiety and panic disorders run through part of my mother’s family. My grandfather to whom this letter was written had a mental and physical breakdown himself two decades after Jenny did. Jenny returned home from Tranquil Park, but became ill again, and despite further residential treatment, became isolated and suffered mental illness for the rest of her life.

My great, great grandfather Amos on my dad’s side of the family is, of course, no relation to my great grandmother Jenny on my mother’s side. However, when I reflect on these two stories together, I imagine Amos’ kindness and generosity reaching across time, space, and blood to Jenny in her suffering.

I am struck by how caring Jenny described the sanitarium staff to be and how comforting the environs were. I find myself relaxing as I contemplate the “nice cool porch with congenial company,” where it’s “pleasant as the mountains.” Listening to music around the wind-up Victrola, doubtlessly the latest in technology at the time, sounds both nurturing and exhilarating. I love how Jenny writes that “everything is so quiet,” in striking contrast to her previously racing mind, swirling in fear and anxiety. Over a century later, I find myself wanting to care for Jenny.

The holidays can epitomize the extremes of human emotions, from great joy and generosity to stress, anxiety, and disappointment. Our DNA, life experiences, and relationships greatly influence what we encounter in our hearts and minds this time of year. Stuart and I hope that during this season we all can check in to our own versions of Tranquil Park when we need a break, and when we feel safe and whole, even invite the “bad boys” in to share our best strawberries—with sugar and cream.

Will an Ambulance Dump You on the Side of the Road?
November 28, 2019

Imagine you’re a transgender person who after years of waiting finally has been able to have life-affirming gender confirmation surgery. But some unlikely and unexpected complication arises, and you need to be rushed to the nearest ER. When in the ambulance en route you tell the EMT what’s going on; the EMT commands the driver to stop the car immediately. After the EMT and driver exchange a few words among themselves, they open the door and dump you on the side of the road—left on your own to somehow make it to the ER.

You later learn that your having gender confirmation surgery had offended the EMT and driver’s personal religious beliefs.  Under the Trump-Pence administration’s new religious “conscience” rule, more aptly called the “denial of care” rule, they could refuse you services at any time because the medical provider, like most medical facilities nationwide, received particular types of federal funding through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Fortunately for the time being, this scenario is less likely to take place because Northern California Federal District Judge William Alsup last week joined federal court judges in New York and Washington State in ruling that the denial of care rule had no basis in law and enjoined its enforcement nationwide.

The breadth of the Trump-Pence Administration’s denial of care rule that they are attempting to enforce is astonishing. The rule’s preamble focuses on abortion-related care and services, but the new regulation applies to any medical service provider who objects to providing their services to anyone for any religious belief. In the context of Trump-Pence political strategy, it is clear that the rule panders to conservative political Christian interests and targets women, LGBTIQ people—especially transgender people—and other politically vulnerable populations.

Judge Alsup in his ruling explicates how the denial of service rule does not just apply to physicians and nurses, but to ambulance drivers and many other staff who have at best a remote connection to the medical care being provided. Using abortion (and that includes emergency abortions necessary to save the life of the mother) as an example, Alsup explains that “a clerk scheduling surgeries for an operating room could refuse to reserve slots for abortions … . So could an employee who merely sterilizes and places surgical instruments or ensures that the supply cabinets in the operating room are fully stocked in preparation for an abortion.”

Professional staff who provide “[p]re- and post-op tasks [that] include monitoring and ensuring that a patient is stable and/or recovering following a procedure such as taking vitals and placing an intravenous line” could refuse to do so based on their religious objections. “Medical laboratories run tests that assist in diagnosing or in analyzing the outcome of certain procedures” could close their doors to people they chose to based on religious grounds.

Pharmacists whose “only possible role in an abortion … procedure would be dispensing advance medication to facilitate the procedure or post-procedure medication to stabilize or heal the patient, such as pain medication” could turn their backs on a patient.

Housekeeping staff could even object to cleaning a patient’s hospital room. And “an entity could lose all of its HHS funding if it fired a hospital front-desk employee for refusing to tell a woman seeking an emergency abortion for a [life-threatening] pregnancy which floor she needed to go to for her procedure.”

Although we are gratified that three federal district courts have struck down the denial of care rule that could cause so much harm, these cases will very likely wind their ways through the federal appellate courts and could ultimately end up at the U.S. Supreme Court.

And that’s one of numerous reasons that arch anti-LGBTIQ conservative Brian Brown’s October 29th tweet of a photo of himself with Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh and very conservative Catholics advocates inside the Supreme Court itself deeply disturbs us. The New Yorker reports that Brown believes that “the rights of L.G.B.T. people shouldn’t be protected at all—that, in his ideal society, there would be no L.G.B.T. people, in fact.”

Brown’s misnamed National Organization for Marriage is a strident opponent of LGBTIQ equality in the U.S. and worldwide.  The group has filed numerous legal briefs against LGBTIQ rights, including briefs in the employment discrimination cases now pending before the Court—even as Brown met with Alito and Kavanaugh inside the Court.

We are a democracy, not a theocracy. But even from a religious point of view, it seems particularly incongruous for people who purport to be devout Christians to trumpet denying medical care to other human beings. After all, one of the things that Jesus of the Gospels is most famous for is healing the sick. He didn’t assert conscience-based religious objections to caring for people.

Where is that compassion now?

Presidential Candidates Debate a Crucial Issue to the LGBTIQ Community
October 31, 2019

Hours into the October Democratic Presidential Debate, four of the twelve candidates (Biden, Buttigieg, Castro, and Warren) were asked whether they would favor adding justices to the Supreme Court to protect women’s rights in the event the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. The composition of the Court is also of vital importance to the lives of LGBTIQ people and many other Americans as well. Here’s how the candidates responded to this crucial question that rarely receives the attention it deserves.

Openly gay South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg took a leading role at the debate in advocating structural reform to the Court. Buttigieg is “committed to establishing a commission on day one” of his presidency to “propose reforms to depoliticize” the Court. “We can’t go on like this, where every single time there is a vacancy, we have this apocalyptic ideological firefight over what to do next.”

Buttigieg offered a proposal “to have a 15-member court where five of the members can only be appointed by unanimous agreement of the other 10.” But he emphasized that he was “not wedded to a particular solution” and would also consider possibilities such as term limits or rotating justices to the Supreme Court from the federal appellate bench.

Buttigieg asserted that when he first proposed Court reform, “some folks said that was too bold to even contemplate.” But in urging nonpartisanship, Buttigieg did not call out Republican presidents for being far more ideological and partisan in their Supreme Court nominations (such as Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch) than Democratic presidents. And he did not explicitly denounce the extraordinary measures Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell undertook to block President Obama’s 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland to the Court and McConnell’s changing the Senate rules to install Trump’s pick Gorsuch.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren was noncommittal, responding: “I think there are a number of options. I think, as Mayor Buttigieg said, there are many different ways. People are talking about different options, and I think we may have to talk about them.”

Warren, not one to shy away from proposing major policy changes, did not explain whether she would make Court reform a priority. After her initial statement, she quickly pivoted to talk about the substantive issue of abortion, advocating that Congress should enact legislation codifying Roe v. Wade, a position that all four candidates took.

Warren’s response did not address the myriad other issues in which the Court plays a decisive role and the problem that a conservative Supreme Court might rule that Congress lacks the power to guarantee access to abortion nationwide in the face of state laws severely restricting or forbidding it.

Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro opposed adding additional justices to the Court, making the provocatively worded declaration: “I wouldn’t pack the Court.” Castro acknowledged that Buttigieg’s 15-member Court idea was “interesting,” but opined that “if” he were choosing from one of Buttigieg’s proposals, he would favor term limits for Justices or having justices rotate from the appellate courts. Castro, like all of the candidates, made clear that he would nominate justices “who respect the precedent of Roe v. Wade.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden also employed the term “court packing” in firmly opposing adding additional justices to the Court. He reasoned that the Democrats’ adding justices when they had the power to do so would result in Republicans doing the same and further undermine the “credibility” of the Court.

In an attempt to appear assertive, Biden promised that if next year one of the justices left the Court as happened during the 2016 election year, “I would make sure that we would do exactly what McConnell did last time out. We would not allow any hearing to be held for a new justice.”

But how could Biden possibly ensure that McConnell and the Republican majority in the Senate would not get such a justice confirmed as they did with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh? Biden presently holds no political office, and if he could stop McConnell, why didn’t he do so back in 2016 when he was Vice President and thus the titular “president of the Senate”?

Taking a long-term view of the possible ramifications of changing the structure of the Supreme Court is a legitimate and perhaps persuasive argument. The Court has had nine Justices for the last 150 years, although the number of Justices before that varied from 6 to 10. But the argument fails to respond to the immediate threat to the well being of millions of Americans, including LGBTIQ people, that the current Supreme Court poses and the nakedly partisan strategy that the Republicans have pursued over the past 50 years to shape the ideological stance of the Court.

None of the other eight candidates on stage interrupted to assert their position on the question. In addition, Harris, Klobuchar, Booker. and Gabbard all chose not to advocate reforming the Court when asked what they would do if recent state laws severely restricting abortion were upheld in the courts.

Stay tuned. We will continue to report on this critical issue as the campaign unfolds.

Supreme Court Faces the Reality of Anti-LGBT Discrimination
October 16, 2019

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court faced the reality of the vast diversity of human experience when it comes to gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity in a way it had never done before. The Court held oral arguments in cases regarding whether anti-LGBT employment discrimination violates Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

As we explained in the last edition, resolution of the cases should be straightforward. As Justice Kagan put it during the argument, Title VII provides an “extremely simple test”; that is, “would the same thing would have happened to you if you were of a different sex?”

Kagan made clear that the employer in the case before the Court violated Title VII because it fired a highly valued, long-term employee simply because he “was a man who loved other men.” The employer wouldn’t have done so if the employee were a woman who loved men.

Similarly, counsel for Aimee Stephens, whose employer fired her because she was transgender, explained that her employer fired her based on the “ultimate sex stereotype” that a person should be cisgender. Counsel explained that Stephen’s employer fired her “because she had a male sex assigned at birth” and would not have done so had she been designated female at birth.

The cases strikingly illuminate a central root of modern anti-LGBT discrimination: queer people transgress deeply engrained, rigid gender norms that remain widespread. A primary reason that LGBTIQ people suffer discrimination is that we are living proof that all people are, in fact, not straight, cisgender men or women who live on a strict gender binary. People are much more beautifully nuanced, complex, and dynamic than those confinements.

We don’t know if a majority of the Court will recognize this substantive underpinning of the cases, but the language of Title VII is clear, something that Trump’s arch conservative Court appointee Neil Gorsuch even seemed to acknowledge. Indeed, the outcome of these cases appears to hinge on whether Gorsuch possesses the moral and intellectual integrity to stay true to his long professed conviction that when the actual words of a statute are unambiguous, the court must follow those words rather than attempt to glean the subjective intentions of the legislators who enacted the law.

Gorsuch, however, seemed to despair during oral argument that enforcing the plain words of the statute could lead to “massive social upheaval.” And questions regarding the use of bathrooms (and, to a lesser extent, workplace dress codes) took center stage during significant parts of the argument. Even Justice Sotomayor, who seemed clearly in favor of the LGBT plaintiffs, identified the bathroom question as a “difficult issue.”

She recognized a transgender person’s “genuine” need to use the bathroom that comports with their gender identity, but asserted that “there are other women who are made uncomfortable, and not merely uncomfortable, but who would feel intruded upon if someone who still had male characteristics walked into their bathroom.”

The extensive discussion of bathroom access is based on ignorance. Americans have been sharing bathrooms with transgender people without incident for a long time and weren’t even aware they were doing it. Anti-LGBTIQ conservatives recently created transgender bathroom panic as a political scare tactic to fight civil rights legislation protecting transgender people, most prominently Houston’s Proposition 1 in 2015.

Separate bathrooms for blacks and whites was a prominent aspect of racist Jim Crow laws, because many white people felt not just “uncomfortable” but “intruded upon,” to say the least, by sharing bathrooms with blacks. The fears and prejudices of many white people were not a legitimate justification for such laws that were eventually struck down as discriminatory. A right-wing political scare tactic should not be a basis today for denying LGBTIQ people their basic civil rights that federal law mandates.

The outcome of the cases may ultimately depend on whether Justice Kagan can successfully use her coalition-building skills to convince Gorsuch, and possibly Kavanaugh (who said too little during the arguments to discern where he stood on the cases), to come together to create a favorable majority. Kagan was lauded for her ability to unify people when she was nominated for the Court nearly a decade ago.

For instance, on the question of statutory interpretation, Kagan declared a few years ago that “we are all textualists now” because of the influence of Gorsuch’s predecessor Antonin Scalia, whom Gorsuch greatly admired. For years, Gorsuch has declared that judges should interpret statutes based on “what ‘the words on the paper say’” and not their personal “views of optimal social policy or what the statute ‘should be.’” Now he has a chance to join Kagan and to stand by his principles.

And Kagan has known Kavanaugh for years since she hired him to teach at Harvard Law School when she was the school’s dean. When Kavanaugh was nominated for the Court, he thanked her for the opportunity to teach at the law school, and the two of them were seen laughing together on Kavanaugh’s first day at the Court.

The Justices’ words at oral argument provide only a glimpse at what they may be thinking about a case, and do not serve as an accurate predictor of how they may rule. We know that if the Justices abide by the creed engraved atop the edifice of the Supreme Court, “Equal Justice Under Law,” LGBTIQ people across the nation will soon be protected from employment discrimination.

Our Civil Rights Go Before the Supreme Court on October 8
October 3, 2019 

On Tuesday, October 8, the U.S. Supreme Court will hold oral arguments in pivotal cases addressing whether discrimination against LGBT people constitutes unlawful sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Title VII prohibits an employer from firing or otherwise treating adversely “any individual because of such individual’s … sex.” Long established Supreme Court precedent makes clear that an employer’s actions occurred “because of” an individual’s sex if the employer would not have so treated the individual “but for” their sex.

Our community’s arguments are straightforward. With respect to sexual orientation, if an employer fires a lesbian or bisexual woman because she is attracted to another woman, but would not have fired her if she were a man attracted to the same woman, the employer fired her because of her sex, plain and simple. The same would hold true for a gay or bisexual man attracted to another man. “But for” the LGB person’s sex, the employer would not have fired them.

With respect to gender identity, if a transgender woman, such as plaintiff Aimee Stephens, had been born anatomically female and lived openly as a woman, she would not have been fired. However, because Stephens was born anatomically male and now lives openly as a woman, she was fired. “But for” her anatomical sex at birth, Stephens would not have been fired.

Stephens analogizes her case to religious discrimination. Just as “firing an employee for intending to change her religion is religious discrimination” outlawed by Title VII, so too firing an employee because she sought “to change her sex is sex discrimination,” prohibited by the Act.

The Supreme Court has also recognized that an employer’s taking adverse actions against an employee because the individual diverges from sex stereotypes or generalizations about how the different sexes should look or act is unlawful sex discrimination under the Act. As Stephens explains, “even ‘unquestionably true’ generalizations about women and men as classes cannot be used to discriminate against ‘individuals.’”

With respect to sexual orientation, the assumption that men are romantically and sexually attracted only to women and women only to men is an entrenched sex stereotype and generalization. An employer who fires an LGB individual because they fail to meet this expectation violates Title VII. Even though the majority of men and women are attracted to people of a different sex, Title VII prohibits an employer from discriminating against an LGB individual when they are not.

The Supreme Court has held that an employer’s discriminating against an individual because they date or marry someone of a different race violates Title VII. So too, an employer violates Title VII when it discriminates against an individual who dates or marries someone of the same sex. Indeed, if Title VII were not so interpreted, an LGB individual could exercise their constitutional right to marry a person of the same sex on Saturday, and their employer could fire them Monday morning for exercising that right, instead of marrying someone of a different sex. It’s sex discrimination plain and simple.

Regarding gender identity, the stereotype and generalization that people “throughout their entire lives” will “identify, appear, and behave in ways seen as typical” of their anatomical sex at birth is one of the most pernicious stereotypes in American life. Although this generalization is true for many people, an employer who discriminates against a transgender person for failing to conform to this sex stereotype violates Title VII.

Opponents contend that Title VII does not forbid an employer from discriminating against LGBT people as long as it discriminates against both male and female LGBT people. They assert that only when an employer, for example, fires male LGBT people, but not female LGBT people (what plaintiffs term “double discrimination”), does it engage in sex discrimination. Firing them all is not sex discrimination.

Ridiculous as this argument may seem, the key legal reason that the opponent’s argument fails is because Title VII protects every individual employee against discrimination based on their sex, and does not require an employee to make a group claim. As plaintiff Stephens explains: “An employer who discriminates against a female employee because of her sex cannot insulate itself from liability by also discriminating against a male employee because of his sex … . Two wrongs do not make a right.”

Similarly, an employer who, for example, fired an employee for converting from Christianity to Judaism could not justify such firing by claiming that it would fire any employee who converted from one religion to another. The argument is nonsensical.

The opponents also argue that Congress did not envision Title VII applying to anti-LGBT discrimination back in 1964 when it passed the Civil Rights Act. However, the U.S. Supreme Court has established unequivocally that when a statute’s plain text is clear—as is Title VII’s proscription of any form of sex discrimination—the Court should simply follow the plain words of the statute and not look into the subjective expectations of the legislators who enacted it.

Indeed, the Court has repeatedly held that sexual harassment, including same-sex sexual harassment, violates Title VII—something that seems obvious today, but that members of Congress would never have imagined when they passed the law 55 years ago.

Opponents also claim that the myriad efforts to include sexual orientation and gender identity explicitly in Title VII show that Title VII does not encompass such discrimination now. But nothing about these efforts means that LGBT discrimination isn’t also sex discrimination prohibited by current law. Congress has never enacted legislation to exclude discrimination against LGBT people from sex discrimination that Title VII prohibits.

Opponents also throw up red herring arguments about workplace dress codes and, of course, bathrooms, but these distractions are irrelevant to the critical issue of workplace discrimination against LGBT individuals that is before the Court.

We’ll be paying close attention next Tuesday and will share our impressions in the next edition.

Forgetting History at Our Peril: The Foundation George W. Bush Laid for Donald Trump
September 5, 2019

A few days ago, a friend who is very active in the LGBTIQ rights movement quipped that things were so bad with Trump he almost wished for the “good ole days” when George W. Bush was president. Our friend’s not alone in this type of misplaced nostalgia.

Two years ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accidentally substituted Bush’s name for Trump’s in criticizing the president in a nationwide television interview. She quickly caught herself, exclaiming, “I’m sorry, President Bush,” and adding: “I never thought I’d pray for the day when George W. Bush was president again!”

But Pelosi was closer to the truth when she accidentally conflated Bush and Trump. Her 2008 assessment of Bush when he was still president summed things up more correctly. After wishing Bush well personally, Pelosi explained that, as president, he was “a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject.” Among many subjects we could add to that list are LGBTIQ rights, dignity, and equality.

We’ll never forget the evening when Bush attacked LGBTIQ people in front of the entire nation in his 2004 State of the Union address. After first saying that all Americans “must work together to counter the negative influence of the culture and to send the right messages to our children,” he laid into lesbian and gay people, without every saying the L or G word.

Referring to the Massachusetts decision finding marriage discrimination unconstitutional, Bush declared: “If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process. Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage.”

It felt like a dagger to the heart.

Weeks later, he went full-bore, announcing his support for a federal constitutional amendment “defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and woman as husband and wife.” He warned that “there is no assurance that the Defense of Marriage Act will not itself be struck down by activist courts,” and if they did, “every state would be forced to recognize any relationship that judges in Boston or officials in San Francisco choose to call a marriage.” Not just sex-same relationships—any relationship.

Bush and his key political advisor, the notorious Karl Rove whose own father was gay, devised a 2004 presidential campaign that exploited homophobia in order to divide and conquer. When Bush declared his support for the federal anti-gay amendment, a John Kerry spokesperson warned that Bush was using “wedge issues and the politics of fear to divide the nation.” She was right.

During Bush’s tenure as president, anti-marriage equality campaigns in 31 of the 50 states took their cue from Bush and used his anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric to deprive same-sex couples and their families of our basic human rights.

And Bush nominated Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, whom many consider to the right of Clarence Thomas, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Once on the Court, Roberts and Alito both voted to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act and vigorously dissented from the Court’s landmark decision establishing nationwide marriage equality.

So far, Trump has been able to nominate two justices who together mirror Roberts and Alito: Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch. And who nominated Kavanaugh and Gorsuch to the federal appellate courts, positioning them for elevation to the high court? George W. Bush.

Further, thousands of LGBTIQ members of the military were discharged under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell during Bush’s presidency.

The same year that Pelosi made her comments about Bush, Ellen DeGeneres interviewed Bush on her hugely popular talk show and positively gushed over Bush, dancing with him and exclaiming, “I’m so excited to have you here!” She asked him nothing about his record, even as Bush himself in the interview declared that “the nation needs a free and independent press … to hold politicians to account, including me.”

DeGeneres mentioned nothing about all of the harm that Bush had caused to LGBTIQ people, including his opposition to her right to marry, thereby denying her access to the approximately 1,500 rights and protections that come with marriage. She never asked him to take responsibility for any of his actions as president.

The ways that Bush’s presidency could be seen as laying a foundation for Trump’s go far beyond attacks on LGBTIQ people and cynical exploitation of prejudice against minorities for political gain. Recall Bush’s starting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that resulted in over a million casualties at a price tag of $4-6 trillion; his administration’s torture and inhumane treatment of captives, some of whom were completely innocent bystanders; Bush’s manipulating facts and misleading the public as to the basis for the Iraq invasion; his callous treatment of Hurricane Katrina victims, who were disproportionately poor people of color; and irresponsible tax cuts that, along with other flawed fiscal and financial regulatory policies, resulted in a worldwide economic crisis and the so-called Great Recession.

It is noble not to hate those who cause us harm. But if we fail to hold them accountable for their actions and forget history, we do so at our own peril.

Is Anger Useless?
August 22, 2019

Anger is one of the most powerful and compelling emotions that humans experience. It can engulf a person completely and become blind rage, derailing a person’s capacity to think or act responsibly. Anger can simmer quietly for hours, days or years, and intertwine itself with a person’s psyche or identity.

Anger can be repressed and manifested in how a person thinks, feels and acts without their even being aware of its presence. Anger often obscures difficult emotions, such as fear, sadness or loneliness that a person may not want to acknowledge or feel.

Anger can obscure our ability to see clearly and prevent us from understanding something true about ourselves or the way things actually are in the world that we wish were not so. I went to a long meditation retreat years ago in which a student asked for a teacher’s help in addressing anger at a dear loved one that had consumed him for days. The student was particularly disconcerted because there was no way that he and his loved one could resolve the problem together after the retreat. His loved one was dead.

The teacher suggested that the student consider if he had a belief that he should think only one way—positively—about his lost loved one. “De mortuis nihil nisi bonum.”  “Never speak ill of the dead.” The teacher wondered if, in fact, the student’s relationship with his loved one was more complicated and complex. Was anger obscuring him from opening up to such a truth?

Many people embrace what they term “righteous anger” and attest that it motivates them to fight for change in the face of injustice or harm. In a 1967 speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., prophesied that “with righteous indignation” a “true revolution of values” will illuminate the West’s exploitation of developing nations “and say, ‘this is not just.’”

More recently, the San Francisco Bay Times featured a photo of a participant in the 2018 San Francisco Women’s March proudly displaying their homemade poster that read: “MY ANGER CANNOT FIT ON ONE SIGN.”

But news outlets reported that a witness to last month’s deadly mass shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival said he heard someone shout at the shooter: “Why are you doing this?” And the shooter answered: “Because I’m really angry.”

Did the Gilroy shooter and countless others who share his political and social ideology believe their anger is righteous? Do they take pride in how they use their indignation as a motivating force for their political engagement?

Regardless of whether a person believes their anger to be justified, how they express it and act upon it makes a huge difference.  Anger, including political anger, can be lethal. A parent or partner’s physically or emotionally violent expression of anger can cause lifelong trauma to its victims, especially children, and can help to perpetuate generations of anger and violence.

In the 2018 documentary RBG, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained how she incorporated the directive that her mother gave her as to how to be a “lady” into her approach to practicing law. Her mother’s advice: Do “not be overcome by useless emotions, like anger.” When Ginsburg’s granddaughter was in law school, she counseled her that “the way to win an argument is not to yell.”

Ginsburg (and her mother) considered anger to be “useless” and an emotion that would “just zap energy and waste time.” As both a lawyer at the forefront of the movement for legal gender equality and a woman arguing numerous precedent-setting cases before countless male judges, Ginsburg had plenty of cause for “righteous anger.”

It’s noteworthy that Ginsburg’s mother did not tell her that she was wrong to ever experience anger; her advice was to recognize that anger was not useful and that people should not be “overcome” by it. Interestingly, Ginsburg is well known for her close personal friendship with the late Antonin Scalia, a man with whom she fundamentally disagreed on many things of vital importance to her.

Dr. King’s writings also articulate a perspective similar to Ginsburg: “You must not harbor anger… . You must be willing to suffer the anger of the opponent, and yet not return anger.” A person’s “destructive passion is harnessed by directing that same passion into constructive channels.”

Today’s world presents no shortage of injustices and harms to LGBTIQ and other oppressed people and all of those who are essentially powerless in the face of the impending climate crisis. Opportunities to fill oneself and the world with anger abound.  In the difficult days ahead, we must examine our anger when it arises, see for ourselves whether it is useful, and choose how to respond wisely.

The Kansas City Blues and Women’s Reproductive Freedom
August 8, 2019

When I was rummaging through old boxes from my childhood home recently, I came upon a decades-old newspaper that piqued my interest, not only because of its portrayal of an earlier time, but also because of its relevance today. It was the 1972 inaugural edition of The Symposium News, a free publication edited by Ken Kesey and published by the University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC) in conjunction with a student organized political symposium. I grew up in Kansas City, where both of my parents were college professors: my dad at UMKC, my mother at Rockhurst College. My dad had likely picked up the paper on campus.

As I flipped through the paper, I did a double-take when I came upon a poem written by Allen Ginsberg entitled “Troost Street Blues.” Troost Street?! That’s the location of Rockhurst, where my mother taught classical languages and history. I wondered what in the world Ginsberg could find poetic about Troost Street. I soon found out.

It seems that while my mother was drilling her students on Latin conjugations, Allen and his lover were enjoying conjugal delights of their own down the street.

However, the pair’s Troost Street lovemaking was a crime under state law. Missouri’s law criminalizing sex between two people of the same gender was overturned only in 2003 when the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated all such laws across the country.

I recently learned that upon orders from a university administrator, UMKC police had confiscated the paper from newsstands shortly after its publication because of Ginsberg’s explicit description of illicit homoerotic activities. It turns out that my dad had been very lucky to have grabbed a copy before the papers were whisked away.

Something else was illegal in Missouri in 1972: a woman’s right to make her own decisions regarding reproduction. Missouri banned all abortions; the U.S. Supreme Court did not overturn such bans until the next year, 1973.

Indeed, the newspaper devoted a 3-page spread to coverage of feminist activist and writer Robin Morgan’s participation in the conference. As Morgan aptly put it: “ … going one step further than the old Marxist dictum that workers must seize the means of production, we say women must seize the means of reproduction.”

She observed that “[t]he history books tend to be written by white, straight males,” and that women “have been oppressed longer than any oppressed group and, dig it, we are not the minority—we are the majority of the entire species.”

I was appalled to learn recently that today there’s nowhere in my hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, where a woman can legally have an abortion—46 years after it became legal. Indeed, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services is trying to shut down the state’s lone abortion clinic, located in St. Louis, as part of what Planned Parenthood considers a broader effort led by Missouri’s Republican Governor Mike Parson to restrict abortion.

Missouri is one of 6 states with only one clinic where women can fully exercise their reproductive freedom. In May of this year, Governor Parson signed legislation outlawing abortion in Missouri after the eighth week of pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest and an exception for medical emergencies only when a physician can prove that such an emergency existed.

Ginsberg’s poem “Troost Street Blues” is actually a lament because it, in fact, describes a return trip he made to Kansas City, this time after his lover had died—his beloved “belly’s in an ash urn.” Ginsberg is “back in Kansas City … Alone with my Alone.”

Ginsberg’s vocabulary in the poem often invokes his love of Kansas City’s rich African American musical heritage, which he had experienced in some of the community’s local jazz clubs. And he also observes that “[t]here’s frightened deafed white folks in Kansas City” and analogizes his personal loss to political ones, assessing: “Kansas City got the blues.”

Kansas City certainly has got the blues today when it comes to women’s reproductive freedom. Too many women find themselves “alone with their alone.”

But last month, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU sued to block Missouri’s new abortion law, which has not yet gone into effect. The St. Louis clinic is fighting to stay open.

The masthead of the 1972 symposium newspaper reads, “Press On. … Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

Forty-seven years later, we must continue to press on in the face of huge challenges that confront us now. When I return to Kansas City next, I hope to come back to place where women have more freedom than they do today. I hope to be singing a happier tune than the Troost Street Blues.

Marriage Equality Breakthroughs from Ecuador to Northern Ireland
July 24, 2019

Last week, Michelle Avilés and Alexandra Chávez tied the knot in the Ecuadorian coastal city of Guayaquil, becoming the first same-sex couple to marry in that South American nation. The pair was able to wed because the Ecuador Supreme Court in a 5–4 decision last month did the right thing and held that the nation was bound to follow the sweeping 2018 decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights requiring all 23 signatory nations to the American Convention on Human Rights to establish marriage equality.

The Ecuador decision is hugely significant because, although the holding of the Inter-American Human Rights Court was crystal clear, neither that Court nor any other body has the legal authority to compel member nations to comply with the order. Each nation must individually change its laws through its own legislatures or courts.

The Costa Rican judiciary had already mandated that this Central American nation must comply with the Human Rights Court order, but delayed implementation of its decision until May 2020, unless the national legislature acts earlier, which is considered unlikely in the generally conservative country. Nevertheless, over 100,000 Costa Ricans celebrated LGBTIQ Pride last month, with one activist observing that the massive attendance was unthinkable a decade ago when just 20 courageous queer activists marched and were harassed by opponents.

We hope that the victory in Ecuador spurs other Latin American nations to follow suit.

The other major marriage equality breakthrough came over 5,000 miles away earlier this month in the United Kingdom. As of 2014, three of the four constituent countries of the U.K. (England, Wales and Scotland) had all achieved marriage equality, but Northern Ireland, the fourth country, has not yet. But that might change soon.

A years-long, immensely complex political quagmire has so far prevented same-sex marriage from coming to Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland Assembly, the legislative body with the responsibility to govern Northern Ireland, has essentially been nonfunctional since early 2017 because member political parties cannot agree on a power sharing arrangement.

Northern Irish support for marriage equality appears strong. According to Amnesty International, 55 of the 90 members of the Assembly have publicly announced that they are in favor of the freedom to marry. A 2018 public opinion poll showed that 76 percent of the Northern Irish support marriage equality with only 18 percent opposed. The neighboring Republic of Ireland in 2015 became the first nation to pass marriage equality by popular vote, with 62 percent of voters in favor.

A few weeks ago, the U.K. Parliament said that, with respect to marriage equality, it had had enough with the delay in Northern Ireland caused by the political stalemate. By a 383 to 73 margin, Parliament voted that unless the Northern Ireland Assembly is restored and functioning by October 21, 2019, marriage equality will become the law of Northern Ireland as of January 2020, with the proviso that a later Northern Ireland Assembly could reverse or amend the law.

As we noted above, the political and procedural aspects of this process are enormously complex. They involve not only internal Northern Irish politics and the relationship between the U.K. Parliament and Northern Ireland governance, but also political maneuvering regarding Brexit. We must wait to see how the events unfold.

But Lord Hayward, who is leading marriage equality efforts in the House of Lords, believes that “equal marriage for Northern Ireland is now within touching distance” and Amnesty International’s Patrick Corrigan is “looking forward to New Year wedding bells in Northern Ireland.”

Hatred Does Not Cease by Hatred
July 11, 2019

As many readers may know, queer demonstrators protesting among other things police presence and corporate participation in this year’s San Francisco Pride Parade delayed the march for 50 minutes, one minute for each year after Stonewall. We were marching with the LGBT Asylum Project, a nonprofit organization that provides legal services to LGBTIQ immigrants fleeing persecution in their home countries and seeking asylum in the United States. The delay in the parade actually gave us the opportunity to have in-depth conversations with the queer asylees. Indeed, we learned of a most extraordinary attempt not by queer activists, but by far-right anti-LGBTIQ extremists to disrupt this June’s Pride March of Equality in Kiev, Ukraine.

As the asylees explained to us and we later confirmed on the website of Bellingcat (an organization that monitors right-wing movements in Ukraine, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan), anti-LGBTIQ extremists had hatched a depraved and despicable plot “to literally throw feces at Pride participants.” On the morning of the Pride march, the Kiev Police Chief announced that they had thwarted the plot, arresting nine people whom they accused of setting up what police called a “s–t-laboratory.”

According to the police, the extremists—whom many now refer to as “excremists”—“admitted that they had stolen four portable toilets filled with feces, set up a laboratory and stuffed approximately 200 condoms full of feces to throw at Kiev Pride marchers and police.” Police say they caught the extremists, who purportedly are associates of a “fiercely anti-LGBT Pentecostal pastor,” as they were driving toward the march in their van.

According to Bellingcat, another news source reported that not only had the right-wing fanatics “poured the feces” from the toilets into barrels “without respirators,” while being swarmed by flies, but also “[a]t times, apparently, the men themselves were covered in the filth from the toilets when some of the stuffed condoms burst.”

We and Ukrainians who immediately took to the internet to mock the extremists could think of no more fitting outcome for their efforts. The Kiev Pride March itself appears to have been a great success with only “a few minor incidents,” according to Bellingcat.

On both a political and personal level, the image of the hate-filled extremists covered in their own filth that they had stolen to hurl at others is a powerful metaphor for the destructiveness of anger and hatred not only on its innocent victims who are its intended object but also on the perpetrators themselves.

In the words of the Buddhist adage, “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but by not hating. This is the eternal truth.” Or in the words of Richard Nixon the morning that he was forced to resign the presidency: “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” And who can forget the “angel activists,” who spread their wings wide to shield Matthew Sheppard’s family from the vitriolic anti-gay messages of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church at the trial of Sheppard’s killers?

Not being consumed by hatred does not foreclose bold, passionate and timely action to stop harm. The Ukrainian LGBTIQ community is doubtlessly grateful to the police for foiling the plot in the nick of time and protecting the marchers. Indeed, in researching this topic further, we were horrified to learn that far-right protestors at a Baltic Pride event in Riga, Latvia, in the early 2000s successfully carried out a similar plot.

San Francisco ignited the marriage equality movement 15 years ago by boldly opening the doors of City Hall for LGBTIQ couples to marry, revealing queer love to the nation unlike ever before. We remember how some of the prominent anti-LGBTIQ opponents acknowledged that their words and actions had given the public the impression that they were mean. Indeed, they were—even as they professed not to be.

One of the great joys and reasons for the success of the marriage equality movement was that its primary focus was on what’s right about LGBTIQ people and our love, and not what’s wrong with someone else, as the other side argued over and over. Indeed, upon victory we were showered with love … far better than the alternative!

Celebrating Saying No to the Normal: Stonewall 50
June 26, 2019

In the NPR podcast White Lies exploring the civil rights movement in Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, African American activists recount the importance to the movement of awakening from an internalized belief that living in poverty and being deprived of basic human rights under the threat of violence was simply normal. Charles Mauldin, then a Selma high school student, describes how “we had been terrorized into staying inside of the box,” but then an organizer “began to ask [us] questions that we had never dared ask ourselves because it was just too threatening.” Maudlin describes how it “takes electricity to somehow shock you” out of “the normalcy of white supremacy … poverty … and lack of distribution of wealth.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his speech at the conclusion of the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, put it famously: “The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that recognizes the dignity and worth of all of God’s children.”

Fifty years ago, queer patrons of the Stonewall Inn also chose no longer to accept what was then perceived as “normal,” i.e., police raids on LGBT bars and other establishments and queer people living under a cloud of fear and repression. They too demanded a new normal based on their dignity and worth. The symbolic lightning bolt of the Stonewall riots electrified a burgeoning gay liberation movement that changed the world.

Recent Victories Around the Globe

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall at Pride this year, we look to recent victories around the globe: marriage equality coming to Ecuador, the first marriages of LGBTIQ couples ever in Asia taking place in Taiwan, a court in the southern African nation of Botswana striking down that country’s law criminalizing same-sex sexual activity that dated back to British colonial rule, and Bhutan’s national legislature voting to repeal a similar law in that Himalayan kingdom.

The court in Botswana proclaimed that anti-LGBTIQ laws “deserve a place in the museum or archives and not in the world” and that “[s]exual orientation is not a fashion statement. It is an important attribute of one’s personality.” Last year, Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi stated that “many people of same sex relationships in this country … have been violated and have also suffered in silence for fear of being discriminated. Just like other citizens, they deserve to have their rights protected.”

In Bhutan, the influential Buddhist teacher Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche explained that “if your meditation is not making you see the truth, you are basically rotting your butt,” and that “sexual orientation has nothing to do with understanding or not understanding the truth.” He continued that “you could be gay, you could be lesbian, you could be straight, we never know which one will get enlightened first.”

Refusing to Accept a ‘Normal’ of Discrimination and Repression

In the White Lies podcast, Bernard Lafayette, a young activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, recalls: “You had to have a great imagination [to believe] that any change was going to happen in Selma, Alabama.”

The queer people who fought back at Stonewall 50 years ago could hardly have imagined that the LGBTIQ rights movement would be fighting back and making gains over 7,000 miles away in Botswana and Bhutan today. Yet that is exactly what is happening today because people continue to awaken and refuse to accept a “normal” of discrimination and repression, and imagine a new normal of freedom and equality—just as activists did in the 1960s.

Today, we also reflect on how earlier this month as many as 2 million Hong Kong residents—possibly up to a quarter of the entire Hong Kong population—took to the streets in defiance of the Chinese government to protest a proposed new law that greatly threatened personal liberty. They refused to accept a new repressive “normal” that the Beijing government has been slowly trying to impose on Hong Kong through a series of measures. And as of now, the attempt to enact the new law has been suspended.

This week millions of Americans from New York to San Francisco will take to the streets to celebrate Stonewall 50, but we must do much more. We must stand up and refuse to accept any “normal” not grounded in the “dignity and worth of all”—and we must do so by the millions. Happy Pride!

Keeping the Pulse Alive
June 12, 2019

As we waited in line at Newark Airport to board our flight home to San Francisco after a recent trip back east, we struck up a conversation with a delightful and outgoing African American woman, who lives in New York but was returning home to East Oakland, where she grew up.

We soon noticed, however, that tears were welling up in her eyes.

Without hesitation, she revealed to us that she was coming home to bury her lifelong best friend, who ten days before had been murdered in East Oakland—shot in the head near her house by a stray bullet intended for someone else. “She didn’t deserve this,” said our fellow traveler over and over again.

She then told us how her friend’s adolescent son had dashed out of their house as soon as he heard the shot. The killer made a speedy escape, and minutes later, the son cradled his mom’s bleeding head in his arms as she breathed her last breath and he felt her pulse stop. The family waited a week to tell his 8-year-old sister that her mom had been murdered. They understood that the young girl would not immediately be able to comprehend that her beloved mother would not be coming home again.

Our new friend showed us a beautiful photo of her lost friend whose name was Hadiyah, and talked about their years growing up together. She then divulged that she had been unable to eat or sleep since she had learned of Hadiyah’s murder. She explained that, as soon as she got to Oakland and saw the children, she would simply embrace them, hold them tight and comfort them.  She had no words to console them in the face of their unspeakable loss.

Pulse—a mom’s pulse ceasing to beat as her young son held her in his arms. Pulse—a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where 49 mostly Latinx members of the LGBTIQ community were shot and killed, and 53 others wounded, three years ago in the wee hours of June 12, 2016.

It is staggering to consider the thousands of Americans killed or wounded by gun violence in the three years since the Pulse nightclub massacre. These include the headline-grabbing mass shootings, such as at Las Vegas, Parkland, Pittsburgh and Virginia Beach; police shootings, like Stephon Clark in Sacramento; and the murders of trans and other queer people, like Anthony “Bubbles” Torres, who was shot in the Tenderloin. There are thousands of people, like Hadiyah, whose names don’t make the headlines, but whose loss is felt keenly by their friends, families and communities.

A Japanese friend of ours visited us last week from Tokyo. Her visit reminded us that it doesn’t have to be this way. In all of Japan, with its strict gun control regulations, only three people were murdered and five others were wounded in gun violence in 2017.

We must not relent in making gun control in America a political priority and in remaining mindful of the harm that gun violence inflicts on Americans daily. Our fellow traveler reminded us of that reality as we waited together to board a plane together at Newark Airport two weeks ago. She spoke the truth about gun violence spontaneously and from the heart.

Every year, on the anniversary of the Pulse nightclub massacre, we recall the entreaties Christine Leinonen made in a live television interview as she desperately searched for her son Drew, whom she later learned was killed in the shootings: “We’re on this Earth for such a short time. Let’s try to get rid of the hatred and the violence, please … . [P]lease could we do something with the assault weapons … . I beg all of you, please.”

The heartbeat must become a drumbeat. We must keep the Pulse alive.

Rainbows Over Taiwan
May 30, 2019

The rain poured down from the sky on Taiwan’s national legislature building on the morning of May 17, 2019, as lawmakers inside debated whether to enact legislation to make Taiwan the first country in Asia with marriage equality. The past two years had been filled with enormous hope and joy, as well as great frustration and challenge for Taiwan’s LGBTIQ community. Tens of thousands of queer activists stood tall outside the legislature under the deluge that morning.

Nearly two years ago to the day, the LGBTIQ community led by attorney Victoria Hsu of the Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights (TAPCPR) won a stunning and sweeping victory at Taiwan’s Constitutional Court with a landmark decision mandating nationwide marriage equality and rendering anti-gay discrimination presumptively unconstitutional. The decision catapulted Taiwan ahead of the U.S. when it came to our constitutional rights. The LGBTIQ community was euphoric, and Taipei Pride 2017, which we were honored to attend as guests, was the largest gathering of LGBTIQ people in Asia ever. It was truly inspiring.

But there was a catch. The Court gave the national legislature two years to enact legislation to implement the decision. If the government did not act, LGBTIQ couples could begin marrying in late May 2019 under existing law.

Unfortunately, sympathetic legislators and Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, a marriage equality supporter, seemed frozen with fear and uncertainty as to how to respond to the Court’s powerful ruling. They equivocated and failed to act. Their delay enabled opponents to organize.

With massive support from notorious American anti-LGBTIQ groups, such as the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), opponents placed anti-marriage equality and anti-LGBTIQ referenda on the November 2018 national election ballot and ran a negative campaign that employed smear tactics and false and degrading messages akin to those of California’s Proposition 8 and many other anti-gay campaigns.

And they were successful. Seventy-two percent of the Taiwanese electorate voted to forbid the legislature from amending the Civil Code to permit same-sex couples to marry, although 61 percent supported same-sex couples’ rights being protected in some way other than amending the Civil Code.

The election results emboldened opponents, who used them to claim mass popular disapproval of marriage equality. The challenges facing the devastated LGBTIQ community and its supporters suddenly became much greater. But unlike Prop 8, the Taiwanese referenda did not reverse the Constitutional Court decision. That decision mandated the right to marry, not just some form of legal recognition. The community did not give up. TAPCR’s Hsu told us for the San Francisco Bay Times, “We won’t compromise on equal rights.”

After six more months of legislative wrangling and attempts to water down equality, such as considering civil unions for same-sex couples, the national legislature on the rainy morning of May 17 finally had to decide what it was going to do.

A friend of ours from the Weiming Taoist temple in Taipei, a temple dedicated to the centuries-old Taoist God Tu‘er Shen who protects LGBTIQ people, emailed us what happened next: The rain slowed, “the sun” began to “show,” and then “rainbows flooded in.” We “basked [in] the outcome of glory.” The legislature voted in favor of marriage equality, and on May 24, Taiwan would become the first country in Asia with marriage equality.

Longtime LGBTIQ activist leader Jay Lin described it as “a cliff-hanger thriller-drama down to the last vote.”

The legislation was not perfect. For example, some limits on adoption rights for same-sex couples remain. Some binational couples may face challenges, and pursuant to the referendum, same-sex marriage is in a separate legislative code, not the Civil Code. Hsu, in words echoed by other leaders, told us that they would not relent until “true marriage equality” was achieved.

But it is hard to overstate the significance of the marriage equality victory in Taiwan, years in the making. Our friend from the temple shared with us his “thrills” and “happiness.” Lin called it a “miraculous day” and now looks forward to marrying his long-term partner, with whom he is raising two children.

Upon the vote, President Tsai tweeted: “#LoveWon,” and, “We took a big step towards true equality, and made Taiwan a better country.” TAPCR described the victory as a “new page in history” not just for Taiwan, but also for Asia, and expressed its gratitude for the vote. The victory creates new momentum in Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand and other places in Asia for the freedom to marry and LGBTIQ rights.

It is traditional at a Taoist temple to write your wishes and aspirations on special paper to submit to the god to whom the temple is dedicated. We had completely forgotten that 18 months ago we had written something at the gay Taoist temple. But our friend had not, and he reminded us of our words: “LGBT FREEDOM LOVE EQUALITY RESPECT.”

As in the U.S., the path to complete LGBTIQ equality and dignity in Taiwan continues to unfold and the struggle is ongoing. But Taiwan has taken a huge step toward fulfilling this goal. The hope and inspiration that the victory engenders will propel us forward. Tu‘er Shen is smiling and there are rainbows in the sky above Taiwan.

Turning to Each Other and White Plum Blossoms
May 16, 2019

As I type, Stuart’s 95-year-old mom is approaching the end of life.

Stuart’s mom was always ahead of her time. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago and Marquette University, and was a professor of cross-cultural education and women’s studies at a time when teaching those subjects meant breaking down barriers. Stuart’s mom, who is Chinese American, and his dad, who is European American, were an interracial couple who married in the early 1950s when such marriages were illegal in much of the country.

Stuart’s mom has long been a big supporter of LGBTIQ equality, from joining with us in the Pride Parade to campaigning against Prop 8. As she sensed that Stuart might be gay when he was a teenager in the 1980s, she coaxed him on more than one occasion to come out to her, offering: “If there’s anything you want to tell me, I just want to let you know I will be very open and understanding … .”

Perhaps most strikingly, Stuart’s mom never really thought of herself as old. Several years ago, when I told my mother, who was a contemporary of Stuart’s mom, some of the things Stuart’s mom was doing, my mother was aghast. She exclaimed to me, “Doesn’t she understand that she’s old and should be preparing for the end of her life?” I can imagine Stuart’s mom responding, “Says who? And why?”

In spending time with Stuart’s mom and in coming to terms with turning 60 this year myself, I realized that we really don’t have 95-year-old or 60-year-old moments—or 30-year-old or 3-year-old moments, for that matter. We all just have the present moment, which we share together with each other right here and right now. And then comes the next present moment immediately following, whether we like it or not.

In life, we often really want something to happen and try very hard to make it happen in a given moment, or the next moment or even the next year. But ultimately, we don’t know what will come next and may not be able to control it despite all of our efforts and wishes. This is especially true when a cherished loved one is ill and is also true in our lives as activists.

Indeed, for all of us an ever-present process of change is taking place both in our external circumstances and in our subjective personal experience as we live our lives trying to make the world a better place.

The 18th century Japanese haiku poet Buson evokes this notion in a final haiku he composed from his deathbed. It’s entitled “Early Spring.” The haiku describes the flowers in his garden the very moment the dawn light first illuminates them:

In the white plum blossoms
night to next day
just turning.

Plum blossoms are the first flowers to bloom in the new year, actually coming out amidst the snow in the waning days of winter.  As such, they symbolize perseverance and beauty under adversity, as well as hope, renewal and transition. In Japanese, Buson’s words evoke the continuing nature of the process. Indeed, as the white plum blossoms give way to fresh green leaves, the early morning light will reveal continually changing images at slightly different times as the year unfolds and then repeats itself again and again. Importantly, how one attends to the garden can greatly influence what the dawn light unveils.

When a cherished loved one is in the final days of life, nothing is more valuable to all involved than the support of other loved ones near and far.

A favorite haiku of mine, written by the most revered Japanese haiku master of all, Basho—who was also queer—evokes the value of our recognizing the commonality of our experience. Long ago, a person living in Kyoto had painted a self-portrait depicting themselves with their face turned away, and asked Basho to compose a haiku to accompany the painting. Basho wrote:

You could turn this way,
I am also lonely
This autumn evening.

Basho’s verse suggests a way to relate to each other in times of need, not only as we are in the final days of Stuart’s mom’s life, but also more generally and as a community as we face social and political adversity. Perhaps Basho’s words also speak of a way to undermine the ignorance, hatred and greed that engender discrimination and other unnecessary suffering in the first place.  Stuart’s mom devoted her life to ending such suffering.

(English translations of the haikus come from Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson & Issa.)

Sticking Out and Standing Up in Japan
April 18, 2019

There’s a well-known adage in Japan: “The wood post that sticks out from the ground will get pounded down.” Its meaning:  Sticking out and standing up as different from the perceived norm is enormously challenging in Japan.

No one knows this better than the LGBTIQ Japanese. A few years ago, we were talking to a queer Japanese law professor friend about our experiences giving marriage equality talks and meeting with LGBTIQ activists in Japan. We told him how we as Americans marveled that Japan had no anti-LGBTIQ conservative Christian political movement. Our friend replied incisively, “Conformity and the need for harmony is a more powerful religion than conservative Christianity.”

His clarity pierced the air. We remembered his words earlier this month when the Japanese government announced that the forthcoming new Imperial era would be called “beautiful harmony,” whose Japanese characters could also imply “command” or “order.”

The last time we gave talks in Japan, we visited the Manshu-in temple in Kyoto. The temple features a stunning rock garden with a 400-year-old pine tree as it centerpiece. As we immersed ourselves in the garden, we saw on a wall of the temple the adage about the post that sticks out getting pounded down. But underneath it, we saw a striking rejoinder:

“The post that does not stick out will eventually rot in the ground.”

On Valentine’s Day this year, 13 same-sex couples across Japan decided to stick out, stand up and not let themselves “rot in the ground.” They filed historic coordinated lawsuits for nationwide marriage equality. They did so nearly 15 years to the day when over 4,000 LGBTIQ couples began flooding into San Francisco City Hall to marry after then-Mayor Gavin Newsom kicked opened the door for marriage equality here. Every time we have spoken to activists and audiences in Japan, we have told our story of how profound and life-changing participating in San Francisco’s Winter of Love was for us.

The Japanese lawsuit follows years of Japanese LGBTIQ people becoming increasingly vocal and visible in society in the face of significant social and familial pressures. The plaintiff couples represent a diverse cross-section of Japanese same-sex couples and provide lived examples of the need for equal protections and rights for LGBTIQ couples.

They also intend the lawsuit to help all LGBTIQ Japanese. Plaintiff Kenji Aiba told the Japan Times that the lawsuit “will let us share the hardships of sexual minorities with all people in Japan,” and his partner Ken Kozumi proclaimed they would “fight this war together with sexual minorities all around Japan,” the Associated Press reported.

Kozumi also stressed that “progress in Japan has been too slow.”

Japanese LGBTIQ activists have been using the facts that the world’s eyes will turn to Japan during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and that Japan is the only member of the G7 without marriage equality or civil unions to pressure for faster change. Two years ago, grassroots activist Kanako Otsuji became the first openly LGBTIQ elected member of the Diet (Japanese Congress). The LGBTIQ community has made much progress in Japanese businesses. Eleven locales, including major cities such as Osaka, Sapporo and parts of Tokyo, issue same-sex partnership certificates of largely symbolic value.

Plaintiffs in their lawsuit rely on sweeping human rights guarantees in the Japanese Constitution, drafted in 1946 during American occupation and, in part, by a Western feminist who had lived in Japan. The Japanese Constitution declares: “All of the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination … because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin.”  Further: “All of the people shall be respected as individuals. Their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness shall … be the supreme consideration in legislation and in other governmental affairs.”

The pivotal issue in the lawsuit will be how these guarantees shape present-day interpretation of the Constitution’s marriage provisions, enacted in 1946 to give women equality, autonomy and dignity in marriage for the first time. In particular, one provision ensures: “Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights of husband and wife as a basis.”

When this women’s rights breakthrough was drafted in 1946, no one was thinking about same-sex marriage. Neither this provision nor any other provision of Japanese law explicitly bans same-sex marriage. But no government entity has ever issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and the government has maintained that the Constitution prohibits it. Interestingly, the 1946 Japanese Constitution contains words in another marriage provision that seem almost prophetic today: “With regard to choice of spouse … laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes.”

Support for marriage equality is growing in Japan with recent polling showing 70 percent of people in their 20s and 30s in favor.  However, the road ahead for same-sex couples in the lawsuit is formidable. For example, Human Rights Watch reports that the Japanese Supreme Court has struck down only 10 laws as unconstitutional in over 70 years. It recently upheld an outdated and medically debunked law regarding transgender people.

We bow to the same-sex couples who are bringing this lawsuit and to all of the Japanese LGBTIQ people and their supporters who are taking the risk to be posts that stick out despite the fear of being pounded down.

The Struggle for a Room with a View
April 4, 2019

The views of the Pacific Ocean and Koko Head from the Queen Bedroom at Honolulu’s Aloha Bed and Breakfast were said to be breathtaking. But there was a catch: they were available only to heterosexual married couples, not LGBTIQ couples like us. Diane Cervelli and Taeko Bufford, a lesbian couple, learned that the hard way.

Several years ago, Cervelli and Bufford were looking for a place to stay near a friend they were coming to visit in Honolulu. As Cervelli was booking a room over the phone at Aloha B&B, the owner Phyllis Young asked if she and Bufford were lesbians. A shocked Cervelli answered truthfully. The owner then suddenly refused to rent them the room “stating she was very uncomfortable having lesbians in her house” and then hung up on Cervelli.

In ensuing legal proceedings, Young stated that “her religious belief is that same-sex relationships are ‘detestable in [her] eyes’ and ‘defile [our] land’” and that homosexuality “must be seen as an objective disorder.”

The Hawai’i Intermediate Court of Appeals rejected all of Aloha B&B’s justifications for denying Cevelli and Bufford the room, and in a victory for LGBTIQ rights the United States Supreme Court last month let that ruling stand.

The Hawai’i court’s decision was remarkably clear. It acknowledged that people are free to have their religious beliefs and generally have a right to be left alone in their homes. However, Young chose “to operate Aloha B&B from her home … for commercial purposes, [and] has opened up her home to over one hundred customers per year, charging them money for access to her home.”

As such, “she has voluntarily given up the right to be left alone.” When a person engages the public in a business enterprise to make money, that business must abide by laws prohibiting discrimination. Quoting the U.S. Supreme Court, the Hawai’i court stated that discrimination in public accommodation “deprives persons of their individual dignity” and injures their “sense of self-worth and personal integrity.”

Apparently, Aloha B&B had two single rooms without views that perhaps may have been available individually to LGBTIQ people. We can only imagine how disturbing it would be to be consigned to those second-class single rooms, while a straight couple upstairs relaxed in the “heterosexuals only” shared bedroom with its fantastic views. Indeed, the devastating personal and practical harms that second-class treatment wreak on LGBTIQ couples form the basis for the Supreme Court’s nationwide marriage equality decisions.

We hope that the Supreme Court’s declining to consider Aloha B&B’s appeal signals that it will not tolerate such overt anti-LGBTIQ discrimination as it claimed it would not in last year’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision. But we are cautious not to infer too much about the direction the current 9-member Court may ultimately be heading in cases pertaining to such discrimination. Another wedding cake case is already on the list of cases the Court is deciding whether or not to hear.

The Court’s declining to hear the Hawai’i case must be seen in the context of the overall strategy Chief Justice John Roberts appears to be pursuing at the Court. The New York Times Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak recently explained on The Daily podcast that Roberts likely has the power to win very conservative victories on many issues right now, but he also “wants to protect the Court’s reputation.” Roberts has “four conservative allies raring to go and his job is to kind of tap the brakes.”

Roberts appears to want to proceed somewhat slowly to “achieve conservative outcomes without doing harm to the Court’s prestige.” But Liptak believes that Roberts wants the Court to “dramatically lean right.” To say the least, what the long-term future holds for LGBTIQ equality and many other issues at the Court is uncertain.

We take heart that presidential candidates Beto O’Rourke, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand have followed Pete Buttigieg’s lead in voicing interest in possible institutional changes to the Court to reverse the recent partisan Republican politicization of the Court. Institutional change at the Court may be critical to protecting the civil and constitutional rights of countless millions of Americans, not just LGBTIQ people.

We were heartened to see new polling data last month from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) showing that majorities of every major religious group in the U.S. “support laws protecting LGBT people from discrimination in housing, public accommodations and the workplace.” That includes 70% or more of Catholics and Mormons, 54 % of white evangelical Protestants, and 53 % of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

PRRI has previously reported that only a slim plurality of the public believes that “wedding-based businesses” should be required to serve same-sex couples if doing so contravenes their owners’ stated religious beliefs. But despite that polling result, the public may be weighing in with its dollars. According to Newsweek, Masterpiece Cakeshop, the store that pressed the issue at the Supreme Court last year, has lost 40 percent of its business and has reduced its workforce by 60%.

We do not know how Aloha B&B will proceed in light of the Supreme Court’s actions. We hope that it will come to recognize our common humanity and remain open with a room with a view available to all.

Gay Presidential Candidate Takes Center Stage
March 21, 2019

By all accounts, openly gay Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg dazzled a national audience with his performance at a CNN town hall on March 10.

As marriage equality advocates, we were struck—and gratified—from the very start. Moderator Jake Tapper in a completely unsensational manner offered Buttigieg the opportunity to talk about his husband, Chasten Glezman. Tapper playfully asked Buttigieg about the slightly different ways that he and his husband guide their Twitter followers on the pronunciation of the family name Buttigieg (we like the ease of Glezman’s suggestion: “Buddha Judge”).

Tapper conversed with Buttigieg no differently than he would a straight person, beginning: “I don’t want to get in the middle of a marital squabble … .” And after bantering with the candidate for a few moments, Tapper applauded Buttigieg’s answer to the question as “very diplomatic. I feel like you said your way was right but then you did not throw your husband under the bus, which is—I guarantee you that is the right path.”

More seriously, Tapper gave Buttigeig the opportunity to talk about the support his father, who passed away recently after a long illness, gave to him personally and to his candidacy. Buttigeig described speaking to his dad when he was hospitalized and intubated: “So I said, you know, I hope I’ll make you proud. And he mouthed around the tube, ‘You will.’”

Buttigieg spoke eloquently at the town hall about the importance of LGBTIQ rights and what’s at stake personally for queer people. “I think the whole point of politics is everyday life. And part of how I understand that is that the most important thing in my life—my marriage to my husband—exists by the grace of a single vote on the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Crucially, Buttigieg discussed “policy options” to “stop the Supreme Court from sliding toward being viewed as a nakedly political institution.” Buttigieg described the “radical … shattering of norms that Senate Republicans have gone through in order to get the court to where it is today.”

One proposal “of many” that Buttigeig highlighted as deserving consideration was restructuring the Supreme Court by expanding the number of justices from 9 to 15, with 10 of the justices appointed under current procedures and the other 5 “seated by unanimous consent” of the other 10. According to Buttigeig, “those five by necessity will be those who command the respect of the other 10 across the ideological spectrum and can be counted on to think for themselves.”

We cannot overstate the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court to all aspects of LGBTIQ rights, and Buttigeig’s articulation of innovative ways to address the current crisis at the Court stood out to us.  His words gave us renewed hope for the future of the high court.

Buttigeig also made clear the “need [for] a federal equality act that would say that you cannot be fired just because of who you are or just because of who you love.”

And he condemned Trump’s attacks on transgender people. Buttigeig, himself an Iraq War veteran, pointed to Trump’s “picking on [transgender] troops, people willing to lay down their lives for this country” and transgender high school students. He was appalled at the message a vulnerable “transgender teen” gets when “the highest officials in the land can’t tell the difference between her and a predator and make it harder for her to go to the bathroom.”

Buttigeig further called out Vice President Pence on his hypocrisy in using religion to further his political goals. Buttigeig named the so-called “religious freedom” act that Pence championed as governor of Indiana for what it is: “really a license to discriminate,” using “your religion as an excuse for discriminating.”

More generally, Buttigeig wondered how Pence, who claims to be such a devoted Christian, could “allow himself to become the cheerleader of the porn star presidency?” He asked if Pence had “stopped believing in scripture when he started believing in Donald Trump?”

In describing the broad and bipartisan coalition that came together to oppose Pence’s discriminatory actions in Indiana several years ago, Buttigieg pointed to a shared belief in “just decency” as what brought people together to stand against discrimination.  We like the unintended double meaning of the phase “just decency”:  simple human decency and decency founded in justice.

Buttigeig credited that type of decency for his re-election as mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Buttigeig came out during the campaign and acknowledged that he was unsure how it would play “in a socially conservative community.” And to much applause from the town hall audience, he revealed: “I wound up getting re-elected with 80 percent of the vote.”

We have not yet decided which candidate we will support in the upcoming presidential election. But who knows? If Buttigeig’s entry on the national stage last week is a harbinger of what’s to come and “just decency” has a role to play, our nation could be inaugurating its first openly gay president in January 2021.

Standing with the Kenyan LGBTIQ Community
March 7, 2019

“To say we are disappointed would be an understatement.” So read the tweet from a leading Kenyan LGBTIQ rights group minutes after a Kenyan court announced last week that it was delaying until late May issuance of its much-anticipated ruling about the constitutionality of Kenya’s law criminalizing same-sex sexual activity.

Expectations for a favorable ruling in February had been high prior to the announcement. The Nairobi News reported that many LGBTIQ people turned out to be present in the courtroom when the hoped-for ruling was to have been announced. They “were all dolled up with makeup and wigs as dapper partners suited up and wore bow ties for the occasion.” People hugged each other, and couples held hands as they entered the courtroom. Author and activist Denis Nzioka tweeted: “Splash of color, fierceness, and beauty as LGBTIQ members showed up” for court.

At issue in the case is the constitutionality of Sections 162 and 165 of the Kenyan Penal Code, which subject LGBTIQ Kenyans to a 14-year prison term for penetrative sexual activity and gay men to 5 years in prison for other sexual activity—even in the privacy of their own homes.

According to Reuters, the Kenyan government arrested 534 LGBTIQ people under these laws from 2013 to 2017. The effect of the law’s sanctioning discrimination, hostility and violence against LGBTIQ Kenyans is far wider. One person described on Twitter: “What irks me is that homophobes will threaten my life and still get to go home to their families. Meanwhile my family & friends will worry for days that something bad will happen to me … .”

Kenyan LGBTIQ activists emphasize how the British government originally imposed the law on Kenya in 1930 during its colonial rule of the country. Author Shailja Patel tweeted before she entered the courtroom last week: “We’re here. Ready to overturn 89 years of colonial homophobia.” The British modeled the Kenyan law on a similar law it enacted in India back in 1860. Similar British colonial era criminal statutes became law in many of its colonies, including the present day African countries of Botswana, The Gambia, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Nigeria, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Swaziland, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The post-colonial Kenyan government has retained the law, and President Uhuru Kenyatta last year stated that homosexuality was currently “not acceptable” to “the people of Kenya” and “not an issue of human rights.” But the Kenyan LGBITQ community continues to fight back, by underscoring the law’s colonial roots. Writer Magunga JaKaruoth tweeted to the law’s proponents: “You inherited cruel laws from colonialists who went back to their country and changed them, yet you still cling on to them.”

In the face of such adversity, many LGBTIQ Kenyans have forcefully and eloquently stood up for love, equality and personal dignity and security. One activist explained on television: “I am someone’s daughter; I am loved from where I come from as a Lesbian, and I would want my fellow Kenyans to love us as we are because (we are) just like any other Kenyan.” Another person tweeted: “I am queer. I am femme. I am Kenyan. I am everything and yet I am made to feel like nothing. My love is not a phase. My love is not a sin. My love does not make me less of a human.”

Another activist spoke of the hypocrisy he perceived on the part of some Christians: “Whenever gay rights are brought up, every [C]hristian that drinks, smokes, fornicates, steals, covets, curses and uses God’s name in vain, is suddenly concerned with what the Bible says and permits.” Other advocates spoke of how sections 162 and 165 interfere with “providing healthcare services to the LGBTIQ community” and the country’s “achievement (of) global health targets outlined” by the government.

The personal toll that Sections 162 and 165 exact on all LGBTIQ Kenyans cannot be overstated. As one person put it: “[W]e are tired of the stigma, the blackmail, the threats, the struggle to live.” Sections 162 and 165 mean “you’re either out and scared for your life” or you’re “quiet and suffocating.”

Last year, the Indian Supreme Court overturned that nation’s anti-gay criminal statute dating back to 1860, holding that criminalizing a person’s “right to love” is “profoundly cruel and inhumane.” This month, a court in Botswana will hear a challenge to its similar law. The forthcoming ruling from the Kenyan court in May will be subject to appeal to an intermediate appellate court and the Kenyan Supreme Court, but its impact may ultimately be felt across the continent. As these cases unfold and activism and public education continue, activist writer Giramata wrote on Twitter:

“To my queer Kenyan friends,
Whose work I will never take for granted
Whose organizing will never go unnoticed
Whose love for community fuels me
Whose love of self holds me
I stand with you,
today and always!”

So do we.

Southern Baptist Church Abuse: From Anita Bryant to Today
February 21, 2019

The Houston Chronicle’s Feb 10, 2019, headline is unambiguous: “Abuse of Faith, 20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms.” Behind the headline are mug shots of some of the 220 Southern Baptist pastors, church workers and volunteers who were convicted of, or pleaded guilty to, sex crimes.

The paper reports that the sexual abuse victims included many adolescents and younger children as well: “Some victims as young as 3 were molested or raped inside pastors’ studies and Sunday school classrooms.”

The Southern Baptist church’s mistreatment of others is not confined to the Houston Chronicle’s recent revelations. The Southern Baptist Church’s abuse of LGBTIQ people in its preaching, theology and political organizing began decades ago. The now notorious Anita Bryant launched her anti-gay “Save the Children” campaign from her local Southern Baptist church back in 1977.

Bryant accused gay people not just of “recruitment” of children to “freshen their ranks” but also of child molestation—“outright seduction and molestation.” The Southern Baptist Convention praised Bryant’s “courageous stand against the evils inherent in homosexuality” to protect children from “devastating consequences.”

Over forty years later, we learn that the real danger of seduction and molestation children faced came from Baptist church leaders themselves. And we know that LGBTIQ young people being forced to sit in pews and listen to ministers condemn who they are and whom they love has devastating consequences on them.

In 2014, transgender youth Leelah Alcorn killed herself, in part, based on the callous treatment she experienced in her conservative Christian church community, according to the public suicide note she left. Alcorn recounted how “[I] go to church each week and feel like s–t because everyone there is against everything I live for.” Upon coming out to her mother, Alcorn said her mother replied, “God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong.” In her suicide note, Alcorn implored parents: “Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate themself. That’s exactly what it did to me.”

With respect to sexual abuse, the Houston Chronicle reports that “[i]n 2008 Southern Baptist Convention leaders rejected reforms to curb sexual abuse.” Meanwhile, the church’s anti-gay attacks continued unabated. That year, the Southern Baptist Convention passed an explosive resolution “wholeheartedly” supporting backers of Proposition 8 in California, “encourag[ing] all Christian pastors in California and in every other state to speak strongly, prophetically, and redemptively concerning the sinful nature of homosexuality and the urgent need to protect biblical marriage.”

All the while, the Convention’s leaders ignored urgent pleas to try to stop the “sinful”—indeed criminal—acts of some of its leaders. Former Pastor Hezekiah Stallworth, now serving “a 20-year sentence for aggravated assault of a child and indecency with a child” told the Houston Chronicle: “It doesn’t matter how much spirituality we have or that I have or any other minister has. But we are still human flesh. Flesh will do what flesh will do.”

Ten years ago, former President Jimmy Carter decided after 60 years he had finally had enough with the Southern Baptist Convention. In his 2009 essay, “Losing My Religion for Equality,” Carter severed his ties with the Convention over its second-class treatment of women. The subtitle for his essay declared that: “Women and girls have been discriminated against for too long in a twisted interpretation of the word of God.”

And now the Southern Baptist Convention, along with other conservative religious organizations, is engaged in a twisted campaign in the courts and legislatures to justify unlawful discrimination against LGBTIQ people and women under the guise of what they call “religious liberty.” In a recent legal brief pertaining to the matter, they state that not living “true” to one’s faith is “hypocritical and misleading” and “risks eternal consequences.” They quote a warning from the Old Testament God in the book of Ezekiel: “When … you do not speak out to dissuade them from their ways, that wicked person will die for their sin, and I will hold you accountable for their blood.”

Southern Baptist pastors, church workers and volunteers perpetrating sexual abuse against hundreds of people and the Convention’s perpetuating the abuse through their inaction is hypocritical and misleading. Abiding by laws that protect the public against discrimination is not. It seems that the Southern Baptists should pay more attention to the teachings they cite in their own legal brief. Indeed, the Houston Chronicle’s revelations and the church’s past and present anti-LGBTIQ actions lead us to wonder: Exactly what “religious liberty” does the Southern Baptist Convention seek to protect?

Happy 15th Anniversary of San Francisco’s ‘Winter of Love’
February 7, 2019

We awakened the morning of February 12, 2004, like any other morning. Stuart had a busy day ahead at his office. John had nothing unusual on tap, except for attending a midday rally on the steps of San Francisco City Hall to mark national Freedom to Marry Day. We had recently decided to get involved in the burgeoning marriage equality movement, and to begin, John would go to the rally and report back to Stuart that evening.

At that time 15 years ago, no same-sex couple had yet been able to marry legally in the United States. When John arrived at the rally and asked co-organizer Molly McKay what the plan for the rally was, she responded in the most extraordinary and unexpected way: “You can go into City Hall right now and get married!”

“What?!” John exclaimed. “We could get married, right now, today?!” McKay then described how San Francisco Mayor (and now California Governor) Gavin Newsom and the city had decided to open the doors of City Hall to same-sex couples to be able to marry.

After hearing President George Bush’s attack on same-sex couples in the State of the Union Address three weeks before, Newsom had decided to take action of his own. But he had to keep his plans quiet because he knew opponents would try to stop the marriages. Lesbian rights icons Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin became the first couple to marry, just minutes before John arrived at the rally.

But John had a problem—a big problem. He was by himself. And he feared that the opposition could be in court that very minute, trying to stop the marriages. He didn’t own a cell phone, and neither did Stuart. And Stuart quite possibly had already left his office for lunch. As he was starting to panic, a reporter noticed his demeanor, took pity on him and lent him his phone. John frantically punched in Stuart’s number.

Stuart was fortunately still at his desk and will never forget hearing John shouting into the phone: “GET HERE NOW!!! WE CAN GET MARRIED!”—perhaps the most urgent marriage proposal ever. Stuart dropped everything and bolted to City Hall.

When he arrived, we entered City Hall and got married—newlyweds after 17 years together. When we heard the words, “By virtue of the power in me vested by the State of California, I now pronounce you spouses for life,” we felt something transform within us. John felt chills go up and down his body. He felt those parts of him where he had unknowingly been holding the idea that he would always be “less than equal” as a gay person and that our love would always be “less than equal” dissolve and fall away.

We realized that this moment was the first time in our lives that we had experienced our government treating us as equal human beings as gay people and fully embracing and celebrating our bond of love. We kissed for what a San Francisco Chronicle reporter described as “for a long time,” and we held each other tightly.

During the next month, San Francisco’s “Winter of Love,” over 8,000 LGBTIQ people, their friends and families came to City Hall from across the country and around the world to get married. Many camped out in the rain and waited in long lines to marry.

Eventually, the California Supreme Court halted the marriages, and six months later invalidated them because the city had not gone to the high court first. It would take 11 years for marriage equality to become the law of the land nationwide.

Why should we still celebrate the Winter of Love now fifteen years later?

For one, because it was a magical, spontaneous celebration of love, joy and equality. It instilled in those who participated the tangible hope that “dreams that you dare to dream” really do come true. It was a unique manifestation of the adage: “be the change you want to see in the world.” It was righteous, political “direct action,” bathed in contagious happiness, love, generosity, friendship and family.

County Recorder Mabel Teng described San Francisco as the “happiest place on Earth.” We felt so euphoric that a friend had to remind us: “remember, homophobia has not come to an end.” But it kind of felt like it had; for that month, San Francisco was over the rainbow.

During the Winter of Love, things were just as they should be at San Francisco City Hall. All that LGBTIQ couples had to do was to walk through the doors of City Hall and we’d be treated equally. We didn’t have to file a lawsuit, lobby for legislation, appeal to voters or otherwise prove ourselves worthy. We just had to be ourselves.

We and others who joined the marriage equality movement at that time experienced something rare in a civil rights movement: a taste of the victory, the end goal, at the very beginning, for us the very first hour. For us, it meant our personal advocacy that lay ahead focused on how we wanted the world to be, not what was wrong with those in opposition.

We know that not all people experienced such joy during the Winter of Love—for example, couples denied the ability to marry when the California Supreme Court stopped the marriages and people who rejected marriage for any number of reasons. Years later, as we had told our wedding story at a public forum in Palo Alto, a crusty, elder French person in the audience responded: “I was married years ago, and I can tell you that marriage is for the birds.”

Ironically, the French person’s response underscored for us the most important aspect of the Winter of Love—our experience of equal dignity under the law as gay people. That heterosexual French person, who now rejected marriage, had had the freedom to get married and to decide for themselves, something long denied LGBTIQ people.

For us, the Winter of Love and the marriage equality movement was, and is, first and foremost about our dignity as LGBTIQ people, our common humanity, and the love, joy and self-realization that we all should be able to experience in our lives.

Happy 15th Anniversary of the Winter of Love, San Francisco. Happy anniversary to all.

Could a Gay Phoenix Rise from the Ashes in Poland?
January 24, 2019

On January 14, the nation of Poland was rocked by the horrific stabbing to death of Gdansk Mayor Pawel Adamowicz—on stage in front of thousands of people participating in the “Light to the Sky” ceremony, celebrating the culmination of an incredibly popular national charity event to raise funds for sick children.

The assassination shook Poles from all walks of life, but in particular the LGBTIQ community, immigrants, other minorities and their supporters. Adamowicz was an outspoken advocate for minorities, in the face of the rise of the far-right Law & Justice Party of President Andrzej Duda, who narrowly won election in 2015.

We traveled in Poland just months after Duda come to power, and we remember how LGBTIQ Poles feared his ascension. After the assassination, a Polish journalist friend of ours told us that the ruling Law & Justice Party has “brought the warmongering, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, homophobic, anti-EU narrative to a level Poland has not witnessed in this century.” In the face of such hostility, Adamowicz, who was not gay, boldly supported marriage equality and LGBTIQ rights and took the public step of marching in last year’s Pride Parade in Gdansk.

Although publicly available evidence to date suggests the assassin’s motives were not overtly political (media reports claim he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia), many believe the ruling party’s hate-filled rhetoric could have inspired the assassin’s violence. The day after the killing, thousands marched in cities across the country, urging an end to hate.

Poland, like America, the United Kingdom and a number of other countries, may be at a crossroads. Our journalist friend observed how some Poles believe the assassination sadly may signal a new level of violence in Polish society, while some “think it is high time for politicians to wake up and stop warmongering—that the assassination is a tragic wake up call.”

In the wake of these horrific events in heavily Catholic Poland, we learned of a seemingly unimaginable ray of hope that could lead the country out of this darkness: Robert Biedron, the first openly gay member of the Polish Parliament and then popular progressive mayor of the city of Slupsk, Poland. Many consider him to be a formidable potential candidate in the 2020 Polish presidential elections.

What? A gay president of Poland?!

Our journalist friend, who has interviewed the 42-year-old Biedron for her work, told us she thinks Biedron “absolutely has a chance” to become president. Former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski has urged Biedron to run, and a 2018 public opinion poll shows him third and within striking distance of President Duda. Our friend said Biedron could be the strong favorite of the relatively weak political left but also has “the capacity to win over the general electorate, too.” When Biedron won the Slupsk mayoral election, the “whole of Poland was stunned, except for Slupsk, where citizens stressed (that) he was the best candidate and he did his job.”

In our friend’s words, Biedron “has done a marvelous job coming from an activist background to become a nationally recognized politician.” She described how in the early 2000s, Biedron founded and led the LGBTIQ organization the Campaign Against Homophobia. The Campaign tracked anti-LGBTIQ hate crimes and initiated the “Let Them See Us!” campaign, which placed pictures of same-sex couples holding hands on billboards. Biedron marched in the first Polish Pride Parade as well as subsequent parades, one of which was banned by the mayor of Warsaw.

Biedron is credited with helping reduce homophobia in heavily Catholic Poland. Biedron has often recounted how several years ago, as an openly gay Member of Parliament, he was beaten up a number of times in public. He told Politico two years ago that he took this risk to raise the visibility of gay people in Poland to help change people’s minds.

Together with his partner for 16 years, Biedron is a strong marriage equality supporter. Last year he told the BBC: “It’s not fair that in 2018 two adults cannot get married if they love each other and are committed to each other.” And when Biedron conducts weddings for heterosexual couples, something he does often as a local mayor, “I’m extremely jealous because I see their happiness.” We and many other same-sex couples know that feeling as well, having gone to San Francisco City Hall with Marriage Equality USA for years to ask for marriage licenses only to be turned down.

Our journalist friend described the handsome Biedron as “charismatic, natural, and authentic. He walks to work and chats with people on the way.” And he is also very “professional” and strategic, while still exuding his earlier “activist enthusiasm and energy.” Some have likened his appeal to that which propelled French President Emmanuel Macron’s election. Biedron chose not to run for re-election as Slupsk Mayor to devote himself to building a national movement. He is currently on a national tour to solicit people’s input on their priorities. As mayor, Biedron sometimes took a red sofa out on the street to sit and listen to constituents.

Biedron’s rise to popularity to a level another Polish journalist describes as a “prophet” to some is testament to the power of “coming out.” His popularity in such a seemingly unexpected place as Poland illuminates the subtle, complex and seemingly contradictory ways the LGBTIQ movement progresses in different cultures—never giving up and always looking to rise from the ashes.

2019: An Historic Year for Marriage Equality Worldwide?
January 10. 2019

Nicole Kopaunik and Daniela Paier of southern Austria sure knew how to kick off the new year right when they became the first same-sex couple ever to marry in that country, tying the knot just minutes after the clock struck midnight on the 1st. As of 2019, the hills are alive with marriage equality in Austria, making it the 16th nation in Europe and 26th in the world with the freedom to marry. We look to 2019 to bring marriage equality or significant progress toward that goal to additional countries throughout the world.

Just over the border in the Czech Republic, activists hope their country will soon become the first former Soviet-bloc country to gain marriage equality. The Czech Republic has provided same-sex couples registered partnerships with substantial rights since 2006, and public opinion polling consistently shows substantial support for marriage equality.

Last year, 46 members of the Czech Parliament from a range of political parties introduced marriage equality legislation supported by the government, and Parliament had scheduled debate on the marriage equality legislation for October 31. The debate was postponed, however, with a vote possible early this year. If the bill passes Parliament, the more conservative Czech Senate must approve it and Czech President Milos Zerman, who has not publicly taken a position, must sign it.

LGBTIQ leader Czeslaw Walek told Human Rights Watch last summer: “The path is long and curvy, but we are hopeful” with the possibility “we will celebrate marriage equality in the Czech Republic during the Pride March of August 2019.”

On the other side of the world, Taiwan in May 2019 will in all likelihood become the first country in Asia with the freedom to marry by virtue of a 2017 Constitutional Court decision that provided two years for implementation. As we reported extensively in the December 6, 2018, edition of the San Francisco Bay Times, anti-LGBTIQ referenda passed late last year create uncertainty and possible challenges for achieving immediate, full marriage equality in Taiwan. Marriages will begin in May, though, and the breakthrough may have a huge impact throughout the rest of Asia.

The Philippines could beat Taiwan to the punch if its Supreme Court rules in favor of the freedom to marry in a potentially landmark case that is now fully briefed and argued. During the June 2018 oral argument, Justice Samuel Martires pointedly questioned the government’s attorney: “Why do we have to discriminate against same-sex marriage? … Are not gay couple(s), lesbians capable of loving like the heterosexuals? … Why are we allowing marriage between criminals, between a felon, murderer (but not same-sex couples)? … Why is the state still sleeping and not facing this reality that nowadays, there are individuals who would like to be happy like the gay people, lesbians, the transwoman, transmen? Why is the state so indifferent to the happiness of these people?”

And Justice Marvic Leonen asked: “Why do we interpret our laws and our constitution that we impose something on the freedoms and happiness of others, without showing a very viable reason except tradition? … Are we free to choose a portion in the past and make it tradition and exclude the other portions of the past?”

We do not know how representative these questions are of the views of the majority of the currently 14-member Philippine Supreme Court. Controversial Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte at times has even expressed support for marriage equality. If the Court rules in favor of equality, same-sex couples could possibly be able to marry in the Philippines later this year.

In Japan, LGBTIQ couples are also taking to the courts, with ten couples from different parts of the country announcing that on Valentine’s Day, they will jointly file a lawsuit for the right to marry under the “fundamental human rights” and equality guarantees of the Japanese Constitution. Lawsuits asserting same-sex partners’ inheritance and immigration rights are already pending.

The progressive Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP), the opposition party in the Diet (Japan’s national legislature), will also introduce marriage equality legislation early this year. Unfortunately, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe and the governing conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) will oppose both the lawsuit and the legislation, creating obstacles to immediate success. LGBTIQ leaders, however, are using the upcoming 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the fact that five of the G-7 countries have marriage equality and Italy has same-sex partnerships—but Japan has neither—to pressure for change now.

And in Thailand, the current military government announced its support late last year for civil partnership legislation that would provide same-sex couples substantial rights, but not full marriage equality. With elections for the lower house of the Thai Parliament anticipated in 2019, a vote and further action on the legislation may likely take place after the election. If successful, partnership recognition could come to Thailand this year as well.

In the Americas, we await Costa Rica very likely becoming the first Central American country with marriage equality in 2020 when a 2018 court decision takes effect. In Cuba, a vote will be held this year on a new constitution that leaves open the possibility of marriage equality in the future, but does not include the explicit guarantee that LGBTIQ activists, including Mariela Castro, daughter of Communist Party head and former President Raul Castro, had sought.

In Bermuda, the government of that British territory late last year filed with the Privy Council in London its final possible appeal attempting to roll back marriage equality in the territory. If the Council chooses to take the case and rules in favor of equality, the decision could have precedential effect not just in Bermuda, but also in other British territories.

Stay tuned—and engaged—for what we hope is an historic year for marriage equality progress worldwide.

‘Oy’ or ‘Joy’ to the World in 2019?
December 20, 2018

The end of one year and the beginning of the next provides us the opportunity—if we choose to take it—to reflect on how we relate to some of the most cherished human qualities and values: gratitude, generosity, connection, self-reflection, intentionality, justice, equality and nonviolence. As we bid farewell (or good riddance) to 2018 and welcome 2019, the two of us find ourselves both discovering “joy”—and exclaiming, “Oy!”

One dictionary definition of the word “oy” (short for “oy vey”) is: “a Yiddish exclamation used when someone is upset, shocked, disappointed, worried, etc.” For many of us, reasons to say “oy” on a political and global (and perhaps a personal) level are plentiful: the Trump Presidency, Brett Kavanaugh’s joining Neil Gorsuch on the U.S. Supreme Court, the California wildfires raging as the Trump administration continues to backtrack on efforts to address climate change—just to name a few.

And some joys easily come to mind: a progressive San Franciscan, Nancy Pelosi, set to resume her historic position as the first woman Speaker of the House; and the election of the nation’s first openly gay governor, Jared Polis, who along with his partner Marlon Reis, “Colorado’s first man,” will move into the Governor’s Mansion in January.

We experienced a personal and political “oy” moment last fall when, out of the blue, we received an email from a teenager who had apparently attended a talk we had given in China the year before. The email read:

“It’s Andrew—I’m an 18-year-old high school student. Yesterday I came out to my family, but it seemed like a disaster. With pieces of broken glass on the floor, I was forced to see a doctor whom I’ve not met. My mom wants to stop giving me money and interrupt my applying for colleges. I was insulted by my mom for 2 days. I’m sitting on the street, cuz I’m afraid to come back home. My mom will keep insulting me. I’m a Chinese, as u know, it’s not a ‘equal’ country, I’m not allowed to be an gay. But I want to be who I’m supposed to be.

I really don’t know what to do.

Thanks for listening.”

Sadly, that email—or much worse—could have come from anywhere in America or around the world, and our hearts go out to all facing such distress. We remember our own internal stress and the less dramatic challenges we faced as we came out.

From thousands of miles away, we responded to Andrew’s email with love, empathy, affirmation and support. We reminded Andrew that he was “a beautiful, loving person just the way you are” and offered practical suggestions as well. Months later, we heard back from Andrew:

“After struggling for a long time, the argu[ing] finally stopped, but I don’t know if my family is supportive … . I think it’ll take time. I’m fine now, and I hope my family will understand me someday. Thank you so much!!!”

We hope things will continue to get better for Andrew, but we really don’t know if they will. And for many people, living conditions and circumstances do not improve.

At the National AIDS Memorial Grove’s annual “Light in the Grove” event in December, outgoing Board Chair and Lifetime of Commitment Honoree Mike Shriver reminded those gathered that in our community’s long struggle with HIV/AIDS and in the experiences of those who lived with the disease in the bleakest times, it was not about death; it was all about life. Those of us who have taken part have had the chance to receive agonizing, bittersweet, intimate and inspiring gifts when we joined and witnessed people with AIDS living even as their tragic deaths approached. In Mike’s words that evening: “L’Chaim”—to life.

The first Buddhist practice precept is to abstain from intentionally killing any animate life. Those who find inspiration in this commitment may spend inordinate amounts of time and effort trying to rid their homes of such things as visiting flies, ants and spiders without swatting or smushing them. Ultimately, the idea is to do so, not pedantically, but to appreciate the vitality and vibrancy of life and to cultivate a heart that wishes no harm to anyone or anything.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner M.S. Merwin’s poem “Thanks” comes to mind:

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

“Oy” and “Joy”—and thanks—to the World and to all of the San Francisco Bay Times readers as we say goodbye to 2018, and hello, 2019!

Taiwan’s Prop 8
December 6, 2018

The Taiwanese LGBTIQ community on November 24 experienced the trauma of their own version of Prop 8 when conservative Christian political forces succeeded in passing anti-marriage and anti-LGBTIQ equality referenda. Having lived through Prop 8 a decade ago, we experienced the Taiwan election results like a bad case of déjà vu and PTSD as well.

As background, Taiwan’s Constitutional Court in May 2017 issued a landmark decision in favor of marriage equality, putting Taiwan on the path to become the first country in Asia with the freedom to marry. The only catch was the Court gave the government two years to enact legislation to implement the decision. If the government did not act, LGBTIQ couples could begin marrying in May 2019 under existing law. The government dawdled, allowing anti-LGBTIQ opponents time to organize petition drives to place the discriminatory referenda on the November 24 election ballot.

And the referenda passed by large margins. The first, stating that the Civil Code should exclude same-sex couples from marriage, garnered 72 percent of the vote. A second, urging the government not to enforce the nation’s comprehensive Gender Equity Education Act, which includes LGBTIQ curriculum in elementary and middle schools, passed with 67 percent of the vote. A third, stating that same-sex couples’ rights should be protected in some way other than amending the Civil Code, also passed with 61 percent of the vote.

The echoes of Prop 8 are unmistakable. The Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights (TAPCPR), lead counsel in the marriage equality litigation, explained how the LGBTIQ community faced “a monster with a war chest” (estimated at over U.S. $30 million) to finance “brainwashing campaigns to promote bias, fear and even hatred towards LGBTIQ people in Taiwan.”

Multiple news outlets report that support or funding came from notorious American anti-LGBTIQ groups, such as the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a significant supporter and funder of the Prop 8 campaign, and MassResistance.

Jennifer Lu, chair of the Taiwan Marriage Equality Coalition, told the Human Rights Campaign: “The National Organization for Marriage instigated the three anti-LGBTQ measures,” using “materials [that] are often carbon copies of the same messaging and scare tactics” employed in the U.S. and other countries.

Akin to the Prop 8 campaign’s reliance on manufactured fears about the well-being of school children and freedom of religion, the Taiwan campaign “tried every possible and scurrilous means” including “creating fake news” and “establishing ‘fake’ opponents … to exclude the real opponents from … public debates,” according to TAPCPR. Lu and other activists described how anti-LGBTIQ “smear messages” included “baseless claims,” such as that marriage equality will lead to Taiwan becoming “an island of AIDS.”

As during Prop 8, the hostile campaign messages and divisive atmosphere they created took a toll on the well-being of LGBTIQ people. In Prop 8, some children of same-sex parents feared Prop 8 would cause their families to be separated, and all LGBTIQ people faced the indignity of having millions of strangers vote on their basic human rights. In Taiwan, increased anxiety and depression, as well as two suicides of LGBTIQ people, were reported during the campaign. TAPCPR stated that the campaign subjected LGBTIQ people to “humiliation.”

However, Prop 8 and the Taiwanese referenda differ crucially in their actual legal effect. Prop 8 took away LGBTIQ Californians’ state constitutional right to marry. The Taiwanese referenda, malicious as they are, do not—and indeed cannot—reverse the Constitutional Court’s decision in favor of marriage equality, the highest law of the land.

Passage of the Taiwanese referenda brings uncertainty and potential challenges to achieving full equality. TAPCPR’s Hsu explained to The Guardian that the referenda will likely lead the legislature to create a separate legislative code for same-sex marriage apart from the existing Civil Code marriage provisions, with anti-LGBTIQ forces pushing for a “lightweight” version of same-sex relationship recognition.

But the sweeping Constitutional Court decision, mandating marriage equality and rendering anti-gay discrimination presumptively unconstitutional, gives Hsu and the LGBTIQ community powerful legal tools to demand full equality; we know they will use them.

Hsu told us for the San Francisco Bay Times, “We won’t compromise on equal rights.”

Perhaps the most destructive element of political campaigns such as Prop 8 and the Taiwan referenda is that, if they prevail, everyone loses—even the purported “winners.” The type of exploitation of fear the campaigns employ creates needless polarization, division and hatred. The sacrifice of integrity and the severance of human connection diminish everyone’s lives.  As with Prop 8, masses of Taiwanese people were not clamoring to take away marriage equality from LGBTIQ people; they only responded when a self-interested, manipulative political campaign was able to put the question on the ballot.

After Prop 8 passed, we asked ourselves the counter-intuitive question: “What’s the best thing that happened?” We believed the answer would likely point the way forward. Our answer: 6.4 million people, more than ever before, voted for love and LGBTIQ equality.

On election night in Taiwan, legendary activist Chi Chia-wei, who has been fighting for LGBTIQ and marriage equality for over 30 years, struck a similar tone: “Vote counts today are still inspiring to me. In the past, the LGBTIQ movement and political mobilization were unimaginable. Today, however, more than 2 million voters, including many heterosexuals, really understand and respect LGBTQ communities.” In the final vote, well over 3 million Taiwanese voters supported marriage equality.

Prop 8’s passage awakened the LGBTIQ community and its allies, and engendered an unprecedented outpouring of support against hate and bigotry in favor of love. On election night, Hsu and other LGBTIQ leaders maintained their dignity and their resolve. In the words of TAPCPR: “We pledge to use love to counter hate, use wisdom to shatter lies and to continue courageously making strides towards marriage equality, until it is fully realized.” We know they will.

Will We Be Celebrating with Michelle and Malia Next June?
November 29, 2018

We could not help but smile when we learned a few weeks ago that Michelle Obama and her daughter Malia snuck into the crowd of thousands of Americans cheering at the gates of the White House on the day the U.S. Supreme Court issued its nationwide marriage equality decision three years ago.

As the former First Lady told Ellen DeGeneres while promoting her new memoir Becoming, she became aware from inside the presidential residence that “thousands of people were gathering in front of the White House at that time to celebrate, and my staff was calling me, everybody was celebrating, and people were crying, and I thought, ‘I want to be in that.’”

Obama recounts in her book how she made it happen: “Malia and I just busted past the agents on duty, neither one of us making eye contact … . We made our way down a marble staircase and over red carpets, around the busts of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and past the kitchen until suddenly we were outdoors.”

As she told Ellen: “We stood along with all the cheering crowd—off to the side, mind you, so no one would see us” and “we just took it in. I held [Malia] tight, and my feeling was—we are moving forward. Change is happening.”

A few days after Michelle Obama made her revelation, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued an unusual pronouncement of his own concerning the current occupant of the White House. Recently, President Trump publicly derided Northern California District Judge John Tigar as “an Obama judge” as part of his criticism of Judge Tigar’s temporary stay of a new Trump policy restricting access to asylum for immigrants, including some fleeing anti-LGBTIQ discrimination.

The following day, Roberts fired back: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

We join in Roberts’ rebuke of Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric. More importantly, Roberts, Kavanaugh (the Court’s newest member), and the rest of the Republican-appointed Court majority must demonstrate that Roberts’ words are not merely empty rhetoric themselves. The Court majority must prove through actual legal rulings that we do, in fact, have an “independent judiciary” that provides “equal right to those appearing before them.”

Earlier this fall at a speech at the University of Minnesota, Roberts described the role of the Supreme Court: “We do not speak for the people, but we speak for the Constitution. Our role is very clear: We are to interpret the Constitution and laws of the United States and ensure that the political branches act within them. That job obviously requires independence from the political branches.” Roberts proclaimed: “Without independence, there is no Brown v. Board of Education,” the 1954 decision, declaring racially segregated public schools unconstitutional. “Without independence, there is no West Virginia v. Barnette, where the court held that the government could not compel school children to salute the flag.”

But Roberts omitted the fact that “without judicial independence,” there would be no Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark marriage equality decision that Michelle and Malia Obama had rushed outside the White House to celebrate three years ago. Indeed, the Obamas were celebrating the Supreme Court’s acting independently to enforce the freedom and equality guarantees of the Constitution over the discriminatory actions of elected legislatures and voter-enacted initiatives.

Roberts voted against same-sex couples’ constitutional right to marry in Obergefell. If Roberts had had his way, the Court would not have acted independently, would have ignored the Constitution’s Bill of Rights and deferred to the political branches. Millions of LGBTIQ people would have been deprived of full marriage equality for years.

Furthermore, Trump and the Republican Senate have been rushing to stack the federal judiciary with conservative ideologues. They have jettisoned the longstanding practice of negotiating with home state senators of the other party to agree on nominees. And Trump would never even have had the opportunity to appoint conservative Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court if Senate Republicans had not brazenly denied Obama his right to name Scalia’s replacement back in 2016.

On November 30, the Supreme Court is scheduled to confer on whether to decide key cases pertaining to workplace discrimination against LGBTIQ people. If they do, Roberts and his colleagues will be put to the test, and we will see if the Chief Justice means what he recently said. If there truly is “Equal Justice Under Law,” as the words engraved atop the Supreme Court read, we will have cause to celebrate with Michelle, Malia and millions of other Americans again next June.

‘Toto, We’re in Kansas and a Lesbian Will Be Representing Us in Congress!’
November 15, 2018

Who would have thought that of all places, Kansas would elect an openly LGBTIQ person to Congress before San Francisco did?  Certainly not I—having grown up in Kansas City, Missouri, in the 1960s and 70s, just a stone’s throw from the Kansas state line.

But that is exactly what happened with last week’s election of Sharice Davids, a Native American lesbian attorney (and also former professional mixed martial arts fighter), to represent Kansas’ 3rd Congressional District, which includes Kansas City, Kansas and the Kansas suburbs of Kansas City.

How ironic. I met Stuart 31 years ago at a house party here in San Francisco when openly gay Supervisor Harry Britt ran for an open seat in Congress against then newcomer Nancy Pelosi, who, of course, made history herself as the first woman Speaker of the House. But during Pelosi’s tenure, San Francisco has not had the opportunity to elect an LGBTIQ person to Congress for over three decades.

From early on growing up, I knew I wanted to venture out from Kansas City. But many of my high school friends have deep family roots in the Kansas City area and stayed—many, in fact, moving to the Kansas suburbs that elected Davids. One of them is my friend Alex, a gay man who lives in Overland Park, cares for his elderly parents and regularly gets together with his numerous local extended family members spanning multiple generations.

I was particularly repulsed back in 2012 when Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach declared, after four states voted in favor of marriage equality: “If a person wants to live in a San Francisco lifestyle, they can go there … . If they want to live a Kansas lifestyle, they can come here.” How dare he tell LGBTIQ friends like Alex that they weren’t welcome in their own home?

Last week, Kansas voters sent Kobach a message when they embraced a classic San Francisco value—judging people by the quality of their character, not their sexual orientation—and elected Davids to Congress and rejected Kobach’s bid to become Governor. Indeed, Governor-elect Laura Kelly defeated Kobach by over 20 percentage points in Davids’ Congressional district.  When I texted with Alex on election night, he exclaimed: “I’m ecstatic and beyond thrilled.”

Kelly’s election will have a direct positive impact on LGBTIQ Kansans. Back in 2007, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius signed a critical executive order prohibiting discrimination against LGBT state employees. But in early 2015, Governor Sam Brownback rescinded the order, just three months after same-sex couples began marrying in the state—in the words of a Kansas City Staropinion piece “for no good reason other than spite and pandering.” Out LGBT state employees, who had just celebrated their new-found freedom to marry, suddenly feared for their jobs and livelihood.

Two days after winning the election, Kelly announced she would reinstate the executive order immediately upon taking office, and if possible under state law, direct adoption agencies with state contracts not to discriminate against prospective LGBT parents.

Davids faced attacks based on her sexual orientation and race during the campaign. An elected Republican precinct committeeman wrote on Facebook to a Davids supporter: “Your radical socialist kick boxing lesbian Indian will be sent back packing to the reservation.”

Davids set a very different tone in her campaign, and the electorate embraced it. On election night, she declared: “There are so many of us who welcome everyone, who see everyone and know that everyone should have the opportunity to succeed … . The core of this campaign has been about trying to figure out ways to make sure that as many voices and experiences as possible … are being heard by our elected representatives.” Earlier this year, Davids told The New York Times, “I think it’s important that the lived experiences and the point of view of LGBT folks be included in conversations that affect all of us.”

The Kansas City Star reported that, during the campaign, Davids met with LGBT youth at a local queer space, where she shared her coming out story, listened to the young people’s stories of bullying and comforted them. Davids herself faced housing discrimination because of her sexual orientation when she worked in South Dakota several years ago. Cassandra Peters, the youth program’s director, told the Star: “She took time to hug each and every one of them and take a picture with them … . And it was just so comforting for them to think this person is a politician and cares about them.”

And Kansas elected its first two LGBTIQ representatives to the state legislature last week as well.

Davids’ election demonstrates how far we have come as a community nationally and quite possibly points to the way forward for advancing LGBTIQ equality in an era when many fear the federal courts will become less friendly with multiple Trump appointees. As we wait to learn if the Supreme Court will decide whether federal law forbids employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identity as unlawful sex discrimination, Davids will now a have vote in Congress to make such protections explicit.

On election night, Davids told her cheering supporters, “I’m so excited about the fact that we have the opportunity to reset expectations about what people think when they look at Kansas.” I’m feeling a lot of hometown pride myself. It’s profound to me to have this degree of acceptance in my hometown, a place where I never imaged being openly LGBTIQ growing up. Kudos to Davids and Kansas for this victory.

An Attack on One Is an Attack on All
November 1, 2018

We, like many others in the LGBTIQ community, were outraged when we learned of the Trump administration’s most recent shameless attack on transgender and gender non-binary people. As reported by The New York Times in late October, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services is leading an effort in essence to deny the very existence of transgender, intersex and genderqueer people and to enshrine discrimination against those who so identify into law.

According to the Times, the administration wants the following definition of sex to apply to enforcement of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination in educational programs that receive federal financial assistance: “Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth … . The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

This latest development comes on the heels of the Trump administration last year reversing the Obama administration’s protections for transgender students to be able to use the bathroom that matches their gender, and the Trump administration’s attempt to institute a ban on transgender Americans participating in the military.

Last month, the Trump administration also announced revocation of visas to unmarried partners of foreign LGBTIQ staff of diplomatic missions, the United Nations and other international organizations—even though these LGBTIQ people in many instances face horrific discrimination in their countries of origin. And Trump’s first appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court has already sided twice with opponents of LGBTIQ rights.

These actions not only further the destructive and divisive policy priorities of Trump, Pence, and other administration officials, but they also appear to be calculated political ploys to appeal to conservative evangelical voters and moneyed interests, essential to Trump and Pence’s political power. With the midterm elections just days away, the latest moves mirror the Bush administration’s 2004 efforts to energize their base through inflammatory attacks on marriage equality.

Most disturbingly, Yale Professor Jason Stanley has pointed to Trump’s efforts to rollback LGBTIQ rights as an example of what Stanley describes as fascist political tactics in his new book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

In recent interviews with Democracy Now and other news outlets, Stanley describes how “fascism is an ideology based on power and loyalty” to one “hypernationalist” group, creating “divisions between ‘us and ‘them’” and “fear of the other.” By contrast, “liberal democracy is based on liberty and equality” that “require truth.” Stanley explains that “to attack liberal democracy and replace it with power, you need to smash truth,” and require loyalty to a single “hypermasculine and hyperpatriarchal” leader, who “represents that group.” As such, fascist tactics are “harshly homophobic.”

Stanley identifies ten pillars of fascist political tactics: 1) an appeal to a “mythic past”; 2) propaganda where actual news is “fake news”; 3) “anti-intellectualism,”; 4) “unreality” that leaves only “loyalty”; 5) hierarchy; 6) “victimhood,” where “the dominant group are the greatest victims”; 7) “law and order” where the “out group” are criminals; 8) “fomenting fear about sexuality” and creating “panic around the threat of rape perpetrated by out-group men against in-group women”; 9) “Sodom and Gomorrah,” where “the real values come from the heartland” and the urban dwellers are “decadent”; 10) a social-Darwinian notion that the out group is “lazy” and inferior. In sum: “It’s all about winning” and “power is more important than the truth.”

Applying Stanley’s analysis, the latest Trump administration effort to define transgender people out of existence under Title IX is a naked effort to “smash truth” and persecute “the other,” whom Trump’s followers could easily see as “decadent” city dwellers, but in reality, of course, pose no threat to anyone. The Trump administration’s effort appears to appeal to a “mythic past,” where LGBTIQ people were neither seen nor heard. It denies scientific fact, reality and the humanity of transgender and gender non-binary people, reinforcing the notion of the asserted superiority of the “hypermasculine” leader, Trump.

Trump’s actions are part and parcel of decades-long efforts to portray opponents of LGBTIQ dignity and equality as “victims”—be it Anita Bryant’s efforts to “Save the Children” from gay people “recruiting” them; the Prop. 8 campaign’s scaring voters into thinking that their children would be “forced” to learn about “gay marriage” in public school; conservatives’ current attempts to foment panic that transgender people using the restroom that matches their gender will result in attacks on children; or current attempts to characterize people who refuse services to LGBTIQ people under the guise of religion as “victims.”

Many Republican and other conservative leaders have laid the groundwork for Trump’s current words and deeds. Indeed, nothing describes Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s political approach better than Professor Stanley’s insights: “It’s all about winning” and “power is more important than the truth.”

But perhaps the gravest danger Stanley warns against is the normalization of fascist political tactics, writing that normalization “transform(s) the morally extraordinary into the ordinary.” Now is the time to continue naming and speaking up in every way against every element of Trump’s fascist political tactics to amass power and authority.

Which LGBTIQ Case Will Reach Brett Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court First?
October 18, 2018

We, like millions of Americans, were deeply disturbed and disillusioned by the U.S. Senate’s confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. And as we’ve previously discussed in this column, the fear that Kavanaugh—who replaced Justice Kennedy, author of all the Court’s landmark gay rights decisions—could undermine LGBTIQ rights for a generation is unsettling, to say the least.

Kavanaugh may be put to the test very soon. Indeed, in the current 2018–2019 term, three cases the Court could hear concern an issue of enormous nationwide importance: whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identity as unlawful sex discrimination covered by the Act.

The first case the Court could take is Bostock v. Clayton County and pertains to Gerald Bostock, the former Child Welfare Services Coordinator for the Clayton County Georgia Juvenile Court System. Bostock claims that he was fired on trumped up charges when the County learned he was gay. Bostock’s Supreme Court petition describes him as “a dedicated social services professional who has for many years been committed to ensuring that abused and neglected children have safe homes in which to live and grow.” A three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals threw out his case because it held that Title VII does not prohibit employers from terminating employees because they’re gay. Bostock asked the high court to hear his case.

The second case, Altitude Express v. Zarda, raises the same issue and was filed on behalf of Donald Zarda, a now-deceased New York skydiving teacher who alleged that he was fired from his job for being openly gay. Last year, the Second Circuit en banc (meaning all judges of that appellate court, not just a typical 3-judge panel) reached the opposite conclusion to the Eleventh Circuit, allowing Zarda’s case to go forward and holding that Title VII prohibits dismissing an employee based on sexual orientation. (Last year, the Seventh Circuit en banc reached the same conclusion.)

The Supreme Court was scheduled to discuss whether or not to take the Bostock and/or Zarda cases at its September 24 internal conference, but postponed the question probably, in part, because of the vacancy on the Court and possibly because of a third pending case, briefing of which should be completed this fall.

The third case, Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC, was brought by Aimee Stephens, a funeral director at Harris Funeral Homes, who was fired after she informed her employer that she was transgender and would be transitioning. The Sixth Circuit held that Title VII proscription on sex discrimination prohibited Stephens from being fired based on her gender identity. The funeral home seeks Supreme Court review of the decision.

The federal circuit courts have diverged significantly as to the scope of Title VII’s application to sexual orientation and gender identity, two related but different issues. We don’t know whether the Court will take up either or both issues or leave them for another day, giving time for other circuit courts to issue additional opinions or for Congress to amend Title VII to include sexual orientation and gender identity explicitly.

In dissenting from the Eleventh Circuit’s refusal to reconsider the Bostock case en banc, Judge Robin Rosenbaum termed earlier circuit court cases holding that Title VII did not apply to sexual orientation as having “the precedential equivalent of an Edsel with a missing engine”—referring to the late 1950s monumental flop of a car sold by the Ford Motor Company.

At Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, Senator Cory Booker asked him whether it would be wrong to fire someone because they’re gay. Kavanaugh volunteered only, “In my workplace, I hire people because of their talents and abilities. All Americans.”

Booker pressed: “There are a lot of folks who have concerns that if you get on the court—folks who are married right now really have a fear that they will not be able to continue those marital bonds. We still have a country where, if you post your Facebook pictures up of your marriage to someone of the same sex, we still have a majority of the states where if that employer of yours finds out that you’ve got a gay marriage and that you’re gay, in the majority of America states, you can fire somebody because they’re gay.”

Kavanaugh refused to respond to the concerns directly, citing the pending cases that he might be in a position to decide.

In response to questioning from Senator Kamala Harris as to whether he believed Obergefell, the Court’s nationwide marriage equality decision, was correctly decided, Kavanaugh refused to answer, but declared that the Court had decided that “the days of discriminating against gay and lesbian Americans, or treating gay and lesbian Americans as inferior in dignity and worth, are over … . That’s a very important statement.”

Many are skeptical of Kavanaugh’s commitment to that statement when it comes to specifics—and more fundamentally agree with former Justice John Paul Stevens that Kavanaugh should not even be on the Supreme Court. But like it or not, Kavanaugh likely holds the deciding vote on whether Title VII protects LGBTIQ people from being fired because of their sexual orientation or gender identity if the Court takes up the issue. Now is the time to do everything we can to hold him to his words.

The Historic Indian Supreme Court Ruling: Embracing ‘Infinite Shades of Love and Longing’
October 4, 2018

On September 6, 2018, India, the world’s largest democracy, finally shed the British colonial-era law that for over a century and a half has been used to criminalize and denigrate the lives of LGBTIQ Indians. In a 495-page ruling that included four separate opinions, the Supreme Court of India declared the law, known as Section 377, unconstitutional. The 1.3 billion citizens of India no longer live in a country where for LGBTIQ people “the physical manifestation of their love is criminal.” Instead, love may manifest itself “unhindered.”

Many passages of the Justices’ opinions sing both in their eloquence and their insight. We are not Indian law experts, and the Indian Supreme Court differs significantly in structure from the U.S. Supreme Court, e.g. panels of 3 to 5 or more Justices out of 31 total Justices hear different cases. Instead of in-depth legal analysis, we share with you highlights from the opinions that stood out for us. As we read the words of the Indian Supreme Court, we couldn’t help but reflect on the current confirmation hearings for the U.S. Supreme Court, and ways in which the words of supreme courts can either affirm or deny the truth of our very lives:

The Indian Constitution is an “organic and breathing document with senses which are very much alive to its surroundings”—“a living, integrated organism having a soul and consciousness of its own and its pulse beats … can be felt all over its body.”

“Section 377 (the ’unnatural offences’ statute), is based on a moral notion that intercourse which is lustful is to be frowned upon. It finds the sole purpose of intercourse in procreation. In doing so, it imposes criminal sanctions upon basic human urges, by targeting some of them as against the order of nature.”

“The natural identity of an individual should be treated to be absolutely essential to his being. What nature gives is natural.”

“Homosexuality has been documented in almost 1500 species,” and a recent article “notes that ‘no species has been found in which homosexual behavior has not been shown to exist, with the exception of species that never have sex at all, such as sea urchins … .’”

“‘What makes life meaningful is love. The right that makes us human is the right to love. To criminalize the expression of that right is profoundly cruel and inhumane.’”

Quoting queer poet Vikram Seth:
“To sneer at love, and wrench apart
The bonds of body, mind and heart
With specious reason and no rhyme:
This is the true unnatural crime.”

“Denial of self-expression is inviting death … . Identity is equivalent to divinity.”

“[O]nly when each and every individual is liberated from the shackles of … bondage and is able to work towards full development of his/her personality that we can call ourselves a truly free society.”

“We have to bid adieu to the perceptions, stereotypes and prejudices deeply ingrained in the societal mindset so as to usher in inclusivity in all spheres and empower all citizens alike without any kind of alienation and discrimination.”

Section 377 has turned LGBT people into social “pariahs” and “has become an odious weapon for the harassment of the LGBT community by subjecting them to discrimination and unequal treatment.”

A person may choose to live alone, “but no one, and we mean, no one, should impose solitude on him/her.”

Section 377 has “subjugated” LGBT people “to a culture of silence and into leading their lives in closeted invisibility.”

This forced “closeting” produces “the ‘hegemonic heterosexual’—the ideological construction of a particular alignment of sex, gender and desire that posits itself as natural, inevitable and eternal.”

“What links LGBT individuals to couples who love across caste and community lines is the fact that both are exercising their right to love at enormous personal risk and in the process disrupting existing lines of social authority.” The struggle to overcome “limits imposed by structures such as gender, caste, class, religion and community makes the right to love not just a separate battle for LGBT individuals, but a battle for all.”

“By attacking … gender roles,” LGBT people “build communities and relationships premised on care and reciprocity” and thus challenge “the idea that relationships, and by extension society, must be divided along hierarchical sexual roles in order to function.”

“The choice of sexuality is at the core of privacy. But equally … the public assertion of identity founded in sexual orientation is crucial to the exercise of freedoms.” “If one accepts the proposition that public places are heteronormative, and same-sex sexual acts partially closeted, relegating ‘homosexual’ acts into the private sphere, would in effect reiterate the ‘ambient heterosexism of the public space.’”

“The right to privacy may be construed to signify that not only are certain acts no longer immoral, but that there also exists an affirmative moral right to do them.”

“An individual’s sexuality cannot be put into boxes or compartmentalized; it should rather be viewed as fluid, granting the individual the freedom to ascertain her own desires and proclivities.”

“The Constitution protects the fluidities of sexual experience. It leaves it to consenting adults to find fulfillment in their relationships … in infinite shades of love and longing.”

“For people to attain the highest standard of health, they must also have the right to exercise choice in their sexual lives and feel safe in expressing their sexual identity.”

“The right to health is not simply the right not to be unwell, but rather the right to be well.”

“The LGBT persons deserve to live a life unshackled from the shadow of being ‘unapprehended felons.’”

“History owes an apology to the members of this community and their families, for the delay in providing redressal for the ignominy and ostracism that they have suffered through the centuries.”

“For those who have been oppressed, justice … committed to human freedom, has the power to transform lives.”

At this pivotal time in American jurisprudence, we hope that the members of the U.S. Supreme Court read and heed the wisdom of the Indian Supreme Court.

At Stake in the Kavanaugh Nomination: Exclusion and Separation
September 6, 2018

Few matters could be more important to the lives of LGBTIQ Americans than defeating the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. Today we look at one issue: businesses attempting to deny service to LGBTIQ people in the name of religion—most often conservative Christianity.

When people choose to open businesses to make profit off of the public, the law requires them to put aside personal religious or other views that would exclude members of the public whom anti-discrimination laws protect. The ability to be served just like anybody else at businesses ranging from overnight accommodations to food establishments to myriad service providers is crucial to the dignity, health and wellbeing of LGBTIQ people, other groups that face discrimination and our society at large.

Pandering to his evangelical Christian political base, President Trump, who nominated Kavanaugh, would like to have it otherwise—declaring on “Religious Freedom Day” that no business “should be forced to choose between the tenets of faith or adherence to the law.” And last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced creation of the so-called “Religious Liberty Task Force,” in the face of what he claims is “a dangerous movement, undetected by many” that “is now challenging and eroding … religious freedom.”

There’s a reason the movement is “undetected”—there’s actually no such movement at all. The rhetoric is part of a years-long campaign to instill fear, particularly in conservative Christians, as a means to raise money from them and to get them to vote for conservative candidates and measures, thereby furthering the political power of particular conservative organizations, leaders and officeholders. Indeed, Trump, in an August 27 closed door meeting, told evangelical Christian leaders that the midterm elections are a “referendum on your religion” and that opponents “will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently.”

These types of tactics, used in many different forms for decades to oppose LGBTIQ rights along with women’s rights and other civil liberties, have recently gained prominence again in relation to LGBTIQ issues because of successes such as marriage equality. The U.S. Supreme Court will play a critical role in determining the degree to which these conservative efforts affect public policy, and thus people’s lives.

The Supreme Court largely sidestepped the issue in this June’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision regarding a baker’s refusal to bake a custom wedding cake for Charlie Craig and David Mullins, a same-sex couple engaged to be married. However, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, joined by conservatives Roberts, Alito, and Gorsuch, included significant language in support of LGBTIQ rights.

Observing that “[o]ur society has come to the recognition that gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth,” Kennedy stated that personal “religious or philosophical objections” do not generally “allow business owners and other actors in the economy and in society to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services.” With respect to marriage equality, any such objections must be “sufficiently constrained, lest all purveyors of goods and services who object to gay marriages for moral and religious reasons in effect be allowed to put up signs saying ‘no goods or services will be sold if they will be used for gay marriages,’ something that would impose a serious stigma on gay persons.”

Yet Kennedy also opined that disputes regarding LGBTIQ people’s right to receive services in the face of religious opposition also “must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs.” And although we take some encouragement that three conservative justices signed on to the majority’s LGBTIQ supportive language, concurrences from Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch suggest that they might support sweeping exceptions to laws that protect LGBTIQ people from discrimination.

Justice Roberts characteristically held his cards close to his vest and was the only justice other than Kennedy who merely signed on to the majority decision without expressing his views further. However, in his strongly worded dissent from the 2015 nationwide marriage equality decision, Roberts stated that the decision “creates serious questions about religious liberty.” That’s why the person who replaces Kennedy on the Court could likely have a crucial fifth vote on the issue.

Cases raising issues similar to Craig and Mullin’s are percolating in lower courts or commissions around the country and could someday reach the high court. They include similar refusals to provide custom wedding cakes: a florist refusing to provide custom designed flower arrangements; and a stationery and calligraphy store, graphic design company, videography business and wedding venue all attempting to exempt themselves from state and local anti-discrimination laws.
Other cases include a Hawaii bed and breakfast’s refusal to provide a room to a lesbian couple, a transgender person’s right to have a custom designed cake to celebrate their transgender birthday, and a screen printer’s refusal to make t-shirts for an LGBTQ Pride celebration—again all in violation of state or local anti-discrimination measures.

Out of curiosity, we looked at online reviews of the Hawaii bed and breakfast involved in one of the cases. One reviewer described how one of the bedrooms “looked right out on the ocean and Koko Head.” Another reviewer described the hosts as “truly gracious, friendly and unobtrusive.” We were particularly disturbed by the idea that the two of us would not be permitted to enjoy the amazing views from the B&B that heterosexual couples could and that the hosts described as so welcoming would not welcome us.

The marriage equality movement has enjoyed enormous success because of the personal connections LGBTIQ Americans have made with other Americans. It seems tragic that religious views or ideology would stand in the way of that human connection. We want a Supreme Court that does not endorse such exclusion and separation.

Marriage Equality Delayed Is Marriage Equality Denied
August 23, 2018

Six months ago, we reported on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ groundbreaking decision in favor of marriage equality. That court has jurisdiction over the 23 Latin American and Caribbean countries who are currently active parties to the American Convention on Human Rights. The ruling was unambiguous: only marriage equality, not a lesser alternative such as civil unions, suffices.

The ruling, however, did not produce marriage equality overnight throughout Latin America and the Caribbean as the U.S. Supreme Court decision did across this country three years ago. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights lacks the enforcement power to compel member states to comply, although those countries are still bound by the court’s interpretation of the human rights treaty to which they are signatories. The bottom line is that each member nation must change its laws through its own legislatures or courts to abide by its treaty obligations, and they face no binding timeline to do so.

This month Costa Rica, the country that requested the Human Rights Court opinion, became the first country to take a major step toward meeting its commitments when its Supreme Court ruled that excluding LGBTIQ couples from marriage was discriminatory and unconstitutional. But, unfortunately, that court gave the national legislature 18 months to implement its decision. If the legislature fails to act, the court’s order will take effect and marriages for same-sex couples will begin in early 2020.

We believe that 2020 is too long to wait. We remember that during the California Supreme Court’s hearing 14 years ago on the legality of the San Francisco marriages of February 2004, Justice Joyce Kennard of the California Supreme Court asked the city: “What’s the rush?” We immediately thought of Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, both over 80 years old and together for over 50 years, the first couple to marry in San Francisco. They and many thousands of other couples like ourselves had waited long enough. Indeed, every day that goes by in which an LGBTIQ person is denied equality is a day lost, leaving them vulnerable to harmful discrimination and denying them their dignity under the law.

In Costa Rica, not one but two courts with jurisdiction have found that the law violates LGBTIQ people’s constitutional rights, allowing an 18-month delay in implementation that appears untenable. Costa Rican activist Margarita Salas told the Tico Times, Costa Rica’s leading English-language newspaper: “It’s a judicial aberration for a state entity to recognize that discrimination exists, and at the same time allow that discrimination to continue for 18 months more.”

Such waiting periods do not appear to result in a country’s becoming more accepting of a final, binding judicial decision or in opposition subsiding. They seem to have the opposite effect. Opponents have time to devise strategies to undermine the decision, confuse it, or to delay it further, thereby denying citizens their rights and diminishing respect for the court in the eyes of the lawmakers and the public.

Indeed, the Constitutional Court in Taiwan ruled in favor of full marriage equality 15 months ago, but instead of giving its decision immediate effect, it allowed the government two years to implement. If the government fails to act, marriages will begin in May 2019. The legislature has so far not acted, and the delay has given opponents of equality time to organize petition drives for referenda seeking to undermine the court’s decision on the November 24, 2018, national election ballot.

As of press time, the referenda have yet to have been certified for the ballot and what, if any, legal effect they might have given the primacy of the Constitutional Court’s decision is unclear. The possible referenda and resulting confusion, however, may give the Taiwanese public the impression that LGBTIQ’s people’s constitutional rights are still up for grabs. And if passed, the referenda could weaken resolve to enforce the 2017 decision or further embolden opponents. No one knows better than we Californians the horror of having our fundamental constitutional rights and our marriages put up for a popular vote. This November marks the 10-year anniversary of the passage of Proposition 8, which took 5 years in the courts to overturn.

We are thankful that the U.S. Supreme Court did not give individual states across the country 18 months or 2 years to implement its 2015 marriage equality ruling. Local communities all across the country, from Maine to Hawaii, Alaska to Florida, witnessing happy LGBTIQ couples tying the knot has increased support for marriage equality nationwide, and not sown division. A July 2018 PRRI poll showed nationwide support for marriage equality at a record 64 percent, up a whopping 9 percentage points from 3 years ago when the Supreme Court issued its decision.

Opposition has fallen to 28 percent. Significantly, a May 2018 PRRI poll showed that majorities in 44 states now support marriage equality, with Alabama the lone state with majority opposition. Still, 41 percent of Alabama residents support equality, and support is near majority in North Carolina (49%), Louisiana (48%) and West Virginia (48%), with 46% support in Tennessee and 42% support in Mississippi.

We salute the Costa Rica Supreme Court for ruling in favor of marriage equality, but LGBTIQ couples should not have to wait another year and half to marry. High courts and legislatures in other signatory countries in Latin America and the Caribbean should cease delay as well.

Homeless Gay Valedictorian Helps to Make the ‘Impossible Possible’ for LGBTIQ Youth
August 12, 2018

We, like many other LGBTIQ people, were heartened to learn of the outpouring of financial support from the community for the Jacksonville, Florida, high school valedictorian Seth Owen that will enable him to attend Georgetown University after his parents kicked him out of the house and refused to support him because he was gay. As Owen’s struggle received extensive national media coverage, nearly 2,500 donors contributed over $135,000 on the GoFundMe page that his high school biology teacher and mentor Jane Martin, other teachers and his fellow students organized—far surpassing the initial goal of $20,000.

On the site, Martin described the struggle Owen faced:

“Earlier this year (after a year of attempted conversion therapy), Seth’s parents gave him an ultimatum. He would either continue to attend the church that outwardly attacked him and his sexual orientation or he would need to leave home. For his own well-being and safety, Seth chose the latter. He’s been living with friends and working to sustain himself since financially. His parents have refused to support him emotionally or financially because they deem his sexual orientation inconsistent with their religious beliefs. Throughout this all, Seth held his head high and continued to work almost full-time while finishing high school at the top of his class as the co-valedictorian.”

In an NBC News video, Owen, who was also his high school’s swim team captain and leader of its gay-straight alliance his junior and senior years, described how his father told him that “biblically, we have the right to stone you” for being gay and forced him to go to a Christian conversion therapy counselor to “fix” him.

Martin explained on GoFundMe that Owen was admitted to Georgetown for college, but the university based his financial aid on the erroneous assumption that his parents would support him. Even after Owen appealed the decision with extensive accompanying documentation, Georgetown refused to alter its decision, leaving Owen $20,000 short. As they continued to try to convince Georgetown to change its decision and policies, Martin and others initiated the GoFundMe fundraising appeal.

Owen told NBC News: “I can truly say I felt unconditional love” from his teachers and fellow students—something his parents seemed unable to provide.

As support poured in, Owen responded to his supporters with immense gratitude: “I simply cannot say thank you to you all enough … . I am forever grateful to you all for making my lifelong dream of attending college possible.”

And Owen revealed how he understood it was about much more than just him: “Since this story became public, I have had numerous people reach out to me and say that they are going through similar situations.” While Owen found that the “passionate response” to his plight “reassure[d]’ him that “Jacksonville (and our country) will not tolerate injustices towards the LGBTQ+ community,” he pleaded for all of his supporters to “continue to be allies in whatever capacity, not just for the LGBTQ+ community, but for all marginalized groups.”

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the California Supreme Court’s historic May 15, 2008, ruling establishing marriage equality in California before Proposition 8. As one of the plaintiff couples in the case, we remember joining the other plaintiffs and hundreds of LGBTIQ supporters on the steps of the California Supreme Court that morning when at 10 am—the hour state Supreme Court opinions are announced—Kate Kendall, Esq., of the National Center for Lesbian Rights bounded out the doors of the Court proclaiming that justice had prevailed.

Cries of joy rang out and carried all the way to the top floor of the Supreme Court building, where the opinion’s author Chief Justice Ronald George could even hear them as he recalled in an interview later. As we hugged each other and all of those around us, Stuart’s cell phone suddenly rang. It was his mother, and she had just one question: “When’s the wedding?!”

That night, as we made our way home through the Castro, we joined thousands of people, celebrating in the streets until the wee hours.

The victory for the dignity of all LGBTIQ people when it comes to marriage was huge. Thanks to that ruling, all Californians enjoyed a fundamental state constitutional right to marry the person they loved—regardless of their race, religion, creed, national origin, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity. A person’s fundamental right to marry and to have the highest state recognition and protection for their relationship depended upon their humanity—and their humanity alone—and not on any external factor as to the class of people to which they could be categorized.

Every LGBTIQ person, regardless of which initial described them, could marry the person they chose because the state was not in the business of excluding couples from marriage based on who they are or whom they love. The state did not even ask marriage license applicants their gender. All LGBTIQ Americans now have this fundamental right by virtue of the United States Supreme Court’s 2015 decision. The California Supreme Court led the way.

As if that weren’t enough, those celebrating on May 15, 2008, had something of even broader importance to cheer in the Supreme Court’s opinion. The California Supreme Court did not just make a narrow ruling as to marriage equality (as the Massachusetts Supreme Court had done four years before). It made a sweeping declaration that lesbian, gay and bisexual people, just like other groups who have historically faced discrimination, are entitled to the highest degree of protection under the state constitution. State and local laws that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation are presumptively unconstitutional and can stand only if the state demonstrates a most compelling reason, narrowly tailored, for the law—just like laws that discriminate on the basis of race, religion or gender.

This ruling applies to every way in which California state and local governments and their officials and employees relate to lesbian, gay and bisexual people, and the Court recognized that marriage was just the particular example of discrimination before it. The Court held that, under state law, excluding same-sex couples from marriage “marks” lesbian, gay, and bisexual people as “second-class citizens.” The same would be true of any law that unjustifiably treats lesbian, gay, and bisexual people differently from everyone else. This aspect of the Court’s ruling protects lesbian and gay people if a public school, police department, or any other California state or local governmental entity discriminates against them.

The status of being a protected class under the state constitution is an invaluable protection—something for which the community had fought for decades. Just as the California Supreme Court ten years ago became the first state supreme court to declare that LGBTIQ people had a fundamental right to marry, it was the first to recognize sexual orientation as a protected class. Establishing this status at a federal level for all LGBTIQ people is a top legal priority. The United States Supreme Court in its 2015 marriage equality decision laid the groundwork for such a future decision, but it did not go that far.

In reflecting on the decade since the California decision, we realized we have become accustomed to having our state constitutional rights, and it feels good. It affects the way we are able to live our lives, and it feels natural to embody that dignity.

We are not complacent. We know there are ongoing threats to our rights, and much more remains to be done in California, across the nation and around the world.

The California Supreme Court wrote ten years ago that every Californian should have the “opportunity to live a happy, meaningful, and satisfying life as a full member of society” and the state constitution “guarantee[s] this basic civil right to all individuals and couples, without regard to their sexual orientation.” Everyone everywhere should be able to live their lives with this dignity and hope. The Supreme Court’s decision will remain an important legal precedent and continue to inspire us as we move forward together to realize that dream.

‘Chinese Stuart’ and ‘Chinese Tom’: Every Label Tells a Story
May 3, 2018

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and this year I’ve been reflecting on what it was like to attend summer camp in Wisconsin in the early 1970s. A friend and I were the only two kids of color at camp, and the other kids began calling me “Chinese Stuart” and my friend “Chinese Tom.”

Singling us out in this way was strange and alienating, but it was particularly confusing for Tom. I am mixed race Chinese and English/Irish, but Tom wasn’t Chinese at all. He was Mexican American.

Although I was not a very “cool” kid, the other kids decided after a while that I was OK when I won the camp knot-tying contest. They stopped calling me “Chinese Stuart”—they started simply calling me Stuart. But Tom, who never gained acceptance, remained “Chinese Tom” to the bitter end—much to his bewilderment.

It was at that point I realized that, to the other kids at camp, the word “Chinese” just meant we were outsiders, that as kids of color we were “other”—which is how Tom could remain “Chinese” without regard to his actual racial or ethnic identity. The camp counselors and adults did nothing to intervene when the other kids started calling us “Chinese.” Ironically, this all took place at a camp where we were often asked to pretend we were “Indians,” even though there were no Native Americans among us.

Fast forward 40 years, and my husband John and I decided to try a cozy little European restaurant near our neighborhood, which is heavily Asian American. As the owner welcomed us to his restaurant, he was particularly delighted when we told him we lived in the neighborhood nearby because he lived here too, just a few blocks away from us. He exclaimed, “It’s really great to meet neighbors who are not Chinese!”

As we greeted his excitement with silence and disturbed looks of surprise on our faces, he quickly added: “Nothing against the Chinese—I’m just excited to meet neighbors I can talk to.”

This caused me to think back on what it had been like growing up in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin—a Milwaukee suburb that was sometimes nicknamed “Whitefolks Bay.” I was only one of the three kids of color in elementary school, and even though I was mixed race, the other students thought I looked incredibly Asian. Later, when I moved to California during high school, our school was much more diverse, and to my surprise, the other students often did not realize I was half Chinese—just as the restaurant owner did not recognize that I was part Asian when he made his pronouncement.

As a boy, I think what I took from being labeled “Chinese Stuart” at camp was that I wanted to be just Stuart—with no labels or identifications. Being “other” hurt. But as an adult, I want to be just Stuart and I want people to know my story—my “labels”—so that they can understand and appreciate the many aspects of my background and experience that contribute to who I am. I want the restaurant owner to know that I am one of “them” after he makes a blanket statement against Chinese people.

When labels are not used to divide, they can be the means by which we learn each other’s stories so that we can find connection and community with others who share our experiences, as well as bring richness and diversity to the broader community.

I am delighted to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage month this May, and LGBTQ Pride next month in June. And this May, John and I salute the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance (GAPA) as it celebrates its 30th anniversary as a cornerstone of the community.

I am both simply Stuart, and am proudly gay Stuart and Chinese Stuart. Happy Asian Pacific American Heritage month!

A Fantastic New Exhibit and Book About Our Shared Humanity:
hapa.me – 15 years of the hapa project
April 19, 2018

How many times has a stranger on the street asked you the question, “What are you?”—as if you looked like you were from outer space? In fact, many people of mixed race like me are asked this question repeatedly throughout our lives—by friends, neighbors, classmates, and even strangers. Years ago, at a party, people thought it would be fun to play a guessing game regarding my racial identity. One person told me with conviction that I was an “Aleutian Eskimo.” In reality, I am mixed race Chinese and English/Irish—or Hapa—a broad term referring to people of mixed Asian ancestry.

For the last 15 years, I have been proud to be part of UC Santa Barbara Professor Kip Fulbeck’s The Hapa Project. In 2001, Fulbeck had the brilliant idea to reclaim the “What are you?” question and create a book and travelling art exhibit, entitled Part Asian, 100% Hapa. In the book and exhibit, Fulbeck displayed original photographs of many Hapa people and our handwritten responses to “What are you?” on our own terms.

A few weeks ago, a beautiful new art exhibition, entitled hapa.me – 15 years of the hapa project, opened at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibit and recently published book of the same name feature then and now portraits of many of the participants and new answers to the “What are you?” question alongside those of 15 years ago.

Fifteen years ago, I answered the question in two words in all caps: “QUEER EURASIAN.” I wanted anyone viewing the book or exhibit to know that both my race and my sexuality were queer and to be aware of the existence of queer Hapas. Indeed, when the exhibit went up at a university in Georgia, staff told Fulbeck that he would have to remove my portrait and words from the show at their school. To his great credit, Fulbeck told them that if my photo and words went, the entire exhibit would go. They relented, and my portrait and words remained proudly part of the show.

In 2018, I answered the question very differently. I talked about the parallels between my parents’ experience of being able to marry in California in the 1950s only because the California Supreme Court overturned the state ban on interracial marriage, and all that my husband John and I have experienced over the last 15 years as part of the marriage equality movement. I described how wonderful it was for my parents to walk me down the aisle when John and I married in 2008 after our community’s historic victory for marriage equality at the same California Supreme Court. This time I wrote in all caps: “LOVE IS LOVE!” and “EQUALITY♥.”

In our own way, queer people also have to answer the “What are you?” question over and over again. We do this when we come out. Of course, all too often politicians, preachers, our own family members, and many others have imposed their own ignorant or misguided answers on us and on society, to our great detriment. But the world is changing because millions of queer people and our supporters are answering the question on our own terms, articulating the truth of our lives from our hearts and living openly and honestly—just as The Hapa Project invites Hapa people to do.

Something else that queer people and Hapa people often have in common is that our parents do not share our experience—my parents weren’t queer or mixed race. We have to discover, investigate, and come to understand our identities for ourselves and in community with each other.

When I attended the opening of the hapa.me exhibit two weeks ago, I was struck by how happy, safe, and at home I felt surrounded by hundreds of other mixed-race folks, our friends and families. As the day went on, it became not only an opening of an art exhibit but also a festival of spontaneous storytelling as well. Seemingly everyone wanted to tell their story and to hear everyone else’s.

Indeed, the exhibit was bringing out the very best in people, as if everyone suddenly wanted to get to know everyone else in a celebration of all that we share as well as the ways we differ. We all have a story to tell. And as we have learned so profoundly through the marriage equality movement, our personal stories have the power to open hearts and to create change.

hapa.me – 15 years of the hapa project is on view at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles until October 28, 2018 (http://www.janm.org/exhibits/hapa-me/).

For more information or to participate in the project, please visit: http://hapa.me

The Untold Story of the Robert Kennedy Funeral Train
April 5, 2018

It was 8 am on the morning of June 5, 1968. I was 9 years old and sat at the kitchen table in our house in Kansas City, eating my breakfast before going to school. When my dad returned home from taking my older brother to school, he told my mother and me the news that he had just heard on the car radio: Robert Kennedy had been shot in the wee hours of the morning after winning the California presidential primary the night before. We were shocked. At age 9, I was already a political geek, following the presidential primaries and convention delegate counts, like some children memorize train or airplane schedules.

A few days later—on the evening of Saturday, June 8—I remember my dad making me my favorite food, a homemade chocolate milkshake with chocolate ice cream. Together, our family then watched on television Kennedy’s graveside service and burial, next to his brother at Arlington National Cemetery. The service had been delayed for hours because so many people had come to pay respects to Kennedy’s funeral train as it made its way from New York City to Washington, D.C.

Sitting on the floor in my favorite bean bag chair, I remember holding the straw, but unable to sip my beloved milk shake because I was so moved by what I was watching. I held back tears.

Last week, Stuart and I viewed a small but stunning new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, called The Train: RFK’s Last Journey. The exhibition features photographs that a renowned photographer took from the train that bring to life the faces of the multitudes of people who came to view the funeral train on its trip. The exhibition also includes a new film reenactment of the view from the train, and actual film footage and photos that spectators took 50 years ago.

While listening to a recent radio program about the exhibition, I learned something I had not known: two spectators had been killed during the train’s trek to Washington.

I was taken aback. Two people lost their lives while paying their respects to the slain Kennedy. I didn’t know their names or their stories. And after they died, they had neither funeral trains where over a million people turned out to mourn their deaths, nor burials on national television. Yet their lives were just as important to them and their families as that of Robert Kennedy.

I wanted to know who they were, and it took a bit of online searching to find out. They were Antoinette Severini and John Curia, both in their mid-50s and apparently a couple. They, like thousands of others, had come to the Elizabeth, New Jersey, train station to catch a glimpse of the funeral train. The crowd was so large that it spilled onto the nearby tracks.

Unbeknownst to them, the regular train from Chicago to New York was heading north as the Kennedy train was making its way south. The northbound train blew its whistle, slowed and tried to stop, but it couldn’t do so in time. As onlookers rushed to get out of the way, Curia tried to pull Severini, who was holding her 3-yr-old grandchild in her arms, out of harm’s way. But as Severini hurled her grandchild to strangers on the platform, she and Curia were dragged to their deaths under the wheels of the train.

Secret Service Agent Paul Levine, who witnessed the accident from the Kennedy train, described “shrieks of horror over screeching steel” and “the indescribable smell of death.” Those shrieks and smells had filled the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just three days before.

When Robert Kennedy’s widow Ethel, herself pregnant at the time with the couple’s last child, learned the news, she reached out to the families of those injured or killed, sending a stuffed animal to Severino’s granddaughter while the young girl was recovering in the hospital.

A few weeks ago, Naomi Wadler, an 11-year-old African-American student, and her classmate Carter Anderson organized a walk-out from their elementary school to honor those shot and killed in Parkland, Florida—and to honor Courtlin Arrington, an African American girl who was shot and killed March 7 at her high school in Alabama. Wadler gave an unforgettable speech at the March for Our Lives on the mall in Washington in which she proclaimed:

“I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper, whose stories don’t lead on the evening news. I represent the African American women who are victims of gun violence, who are simply statistics instead of vibrant, beautiful girls full of potential … . I urge everyone here, and everyone who hears my voice, to join me in telling the stories that aren’t told.”

Robert Kennedy would be 92 today if he had not been shot to death by a .22 caliber revolver. Antoinette Severini and John Curia would not have been killed in the train crash had Kennedy not lost his life to an assassin’s bullet.

I remember becoming choked up 50 years ago, not by the “what ifs” of the political implications of Kennedy’s untimely death, but by the human tragedy of a family losing two sons to gun violence in less than 5 years. I believe Robert Kennedy would have embraced Naomi Wadler’s call to action. In the words of Bobby’s famous older brother, “the torch has been passed to a new generation”—or rather, Wadler and her fellow activists have grabbed the torch and will not let go until we all cross the finish line of ending the scourge of gun violence.

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way: Marching for Our Lives
March 22, 2018

When I learned about the upcoming “March for Our Lives” to end gun violence and shootings in schools, I reflected back on when gun violence first affected me in any type of personal way. What came to mind was an evening in 1966 when I was 8 years old. My grandmother and my great aunt, who was like a second grandmother to me, were visiting our family in suburban Kansas City where I grew up. When my great aunt was out of earshot, my grandmother told my family about a letter she had recently received from her nephew Jack, my great aunt’s son, who was like a brother to my dad. At the time, Jack was a colonel in the U.S. Army combat forces in Vietnam.

Jack’s letter described how his roommate had left their barracks to go eat dinner when a Viet Cong soldier had appeared out of nowhere, shot him dead, and then quickly disappeared into the night. My grandmother wanted to share with my dad how much danger Jack was in, and I’ll never forget her admonishing us: “Don’t you ever tell your great aunt because she will become overcome with worry.”

The war in Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia and Laos resulted in the deaths of millions of civilians and military combatants. March 16 marked the 50th anniversary of the infamous My Lai massacre in which members of the American military murdered as many as 504 unarmed civilians in a village in South Vietnam.

The American military initially misreported and covered up this mass murder. Eventually, General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in the war in Vietnam from 1964–1968, admitted that it was, in fact, “the conscious massacre of defenseless babies, children, mothers, and old men in a kind of diabolical slow-motion nightmare that went on for the better part of a day, with a cold-blooded break for lunch.”

At the court martial of Lieutenant William Calley, the only person convicted for the massacre and who served only 3 and a half years under house arrest, Private Dennis Conti testified to part of what he witnessed. Private Conti described an incident in which Calley and another private “fired directly into” a group of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, who had been rounded up and pushed into a rice paddy. “There were bursts and single shots for two minutes,” he said. “It was automatic. The people screamed and yelled and fell. I guess they tried to get up, too. They couldn’t … . Lots of heads was (sic) shot off, pieces of heads and pieces of flesh flew off the sides and arms … . [The other private] fired a little bit and broke down. He was crying. He said he couldn’t do [it] anymore.”

The bloodbath only ended because three American soldiers not only refused to participate in it, but also stood up to stop it. Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson and his two crew members, Glenn Andreotta and Lawrence Colburn, discovered the ongoing massacre as they were flying a helicopter reconnaissance mission in the area. Most dramatically, they landed the helicopter next to where American soldiers appeared ready to murder ten Vietnamese civilians, and Thompson ordered his crew to shoot any American soldiers who fired upon the civilians while Thompson and his crew rescued the civilians to safety.

Thompson and his crew reported the massacre multiple times to officers in higher command. He tried to save as many people as he could and evacuated as many of the injured as possible to medical care.

My cousin Jack survived the war and returned home, but he witnessed so much carnage in Vietnam that, for the rest of his life, he could not bear to witness any living being, including a small animal, suffering in physical pain. In the early 1980s, I worked with Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees from the war and listened to numerous survivors tell of the violent deaths of their loved ones at the hands of guns and other weapons.

Of course, gun violence has destroyed countless lives on American soil as well. Varnado Simpson, who admitted to murdering Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, including a 2-year-old child, returned home to Jackson, Mississippi, after the war. In 1977, Simpson’s own 10-year-old son was killed in random gun violence while he was playing outside of his house. Simpson recalled, “He died in my arms. And when I looked at him, his face was like the same face of the child that I had killed.” Simpson shot himself to death 20 years later after suffering for years with PTSD. In my most recent personal connection to gun violence, a neighbor who lives a block and a half from us in San Francisco was shot in front of his house in the middle of the afternoon three weeks ago in a drive-by shooting.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In 2014, a total of 33,599 Americans died in gun violence. In Japan, the total for the entire year was just six. In the U.S., there are an estimated 101 guns per 100 residents; in Japan, the number is 0.6.

Hugh Thompson and his crew were initially vilified for their efforts to stop the mass murder at My Lai 50 years ago. It took 30 years for the American military to give Thompson and his crew (one posthumously) appropriate credit for their leadership in stopping the killing. Thompson later counseled, “Don’t do the right thing looking for a reward, because it might not come.”

Today, high school students are on the forefront of a movement to end gun violence. Like Thompson, they are doing the right thing, not for a reward, but to save lives. We look forward to joining them at the March 24 “March for Our Lives” and beyond.

The Power of Being Extraordinarily Ordinary
March 8, 2018

On my first day of law school 35 years ago, each member of my small group section of twenty students was asked as part of an ice-breaker exercise to share something interesting about themselves. The first person to speak, a young man named Mark, replied in the most friendly, matter-of-fact, and unselfconscious manner: “I’m a gay rights advocate.”

Mark’s saying those words changed my life. I had not yet come to relate to my own sexuality in an authentic way, but I remember thinking to myself: “I want to get to know him.” I now realize that what I was really thinking was: “I want to get to know myself.”

Mark was the first gay person I met who articulated his experience openly. He offered himself to his classmates as a way to get to know a gay person as a peer in a welcoming way—something that was not that common 35 years ago.

We soon became close friends, as we remain to this day, and Mark was the first person to whom I came out. Mark’s quiet confidence and willingness to take a risk—indeed, the very ordinariness with which he presented himself and his activism—made all the difference to me.

Ironically, as I watched new gay superstars Adam Rippon and Gus Kenworthy take the world by storm at the Olympics, I found myself thinking about what Mark did 35 years ago. Amidst the wild media frenzy and their extraordinary athletic performances, and even Rippon’s oversized personality, what struck me most about Rippon and Kenworthy was how ordinary—and quintessentially fabulous—they were as gay men.

Rippon and Kenworthy seem like people I could imagine hanging out or sassing it up with at a bar or at a party. In addition to Kenworthy’s wonderful, televised kiss with his boyfriend at the end of his ski competition, Kenworthy and Rippon did not shy away from hugging each other and physically demonstrating their affection for each other as gay friends. They didn’t try to control their gestures, intonation, playful joking, or choice of words. In a Washington Post interview, Kenworthy responded to something Rippon had just said, “Aw, good, the Whitney’s on!” invoking gay icon Whitney Houston, assuming (and seemingly not caring) whether the non-gay component of the audience would get the joke.

I loved how Rippon quipped to reporters that he didn’t want to be just “America’s gay sweetheart,” but “America’s sweetheart,” pure and simple. Rippon’s performance on the ice was gender bending as well with his signature “layback spin,” the most recognizable image of women’s figure skating.

The first time I heard Rippon interviewed shortly before the Olympics, I remember saying to Stuart, “Wow—he’s the real thing.  He’s not trying to fake it or pretend at all.” On NBC’s Today show, Rippon explained, “I came here being authentically myself and sharing my story and being gay is part of that.”

But Rippon and Kenworthy didn’t just joke around in their interviews. They articulated the struggles they faced as a result of being gay. In particular, Kenworthy described how, four years ago at the Sochi Olympics, “I was very much in the closet and very much ashamed of who I was, and I actually didn’t get to appreciate the medal that I won because of that.”

Both men spoke of the pressure they felt to be at their very best when they came out, perhaps reflecting the enduring relevance of the “Best Little Boy in the World” hypothesis, which posits that some gay men compete to achieve extremely high external success in response to their lacking healthy internal self-worth because of societal homophobia.

Kenworthy told The Washington Post: “When I came out, I felt like I needed to be the best, because that was what I thought it would take to be accepted. No one can talk s— on you if you’re the No. 1 ranked in the world … so I made sure that the season before I came out, I was the No. 1-ranked guy in the world.” Rippon continued, “I actually feel exactly the same, where I made sure that when I came out, I was skating very well, so that I would be taken seriously.” Both men talked about the psychological pain, stress, and exhaustion of being in the closet and the power, joy, and ease they have felt now that they are out.

Perhaps most importantly, Rippon articulated on the Today show what I perceive both he and Kenworthy embody: “It’s important that if you are given the platform, to speak up for those who don’t have a voice.” As young, accomplished, attractive, charming, clever, and articulate white men, they have more of a voice than many others—and they appear to want to use it for everyone. Rippon was fearless when he told the Today show: “I feel that Mike Pence does not stand for anything I was taught when I grew up.”

Kenworthy, speaking of racial, gender, and all other types of diversity, told The Washington Post of his optimistic vision of an Olympics, twenty years from now, where “anyone can be exactly who they want to be … like a complete rainbow.” Rippon told reporters, “I want to inspire other young kids, no matter what their background is or where they’re from or anything like that.”

In coming out and unapologetically being themselves for their own well-being and the betterment of others, Rippon and Kenworthy are partaking of the LGBTIQ movement at its best. I was the beneficiary of such ordinary activism 35 years ago. I am confident that many others will be beneficiaries of Rippon and Kenwothy’s extraordinary ordinariness.

Time for “Me Too” in Women’s Healthcare
February 22, 2018

It’s Lunar New Year, and every year at this time our thoughts turn to our cousin Jackie, one of Stuart’s cousins on the Chinese side of the family. Jackie was a strong, independent woman and a maverick, given that she became a successful Chinese American female dentist decades ago, at a time when the profession had few women.

And Jackie was a matchmaker of sorts for us. Stuart was living in Jackie’s extra basement bedroom in her Diamond Heights home, when Stuart and I met 31 years ago. I met Jackie shortly after Stuart and I started dating, and the next time I saw Stuart he told me: “Jackie has decided she likes you.” After Stuart and I had been together for nine months, Jackie told Stuart he needed to move out of her spare bedroom because her elderly parents were coming for an extended visit. I always thought she had actually decided it was time for us to move in together.

Jackie was an amazing dentist and a great older sister too, inviting her younger brother to join her practice after he finished dental school. Our trips to the dentist were a family affair and an opportunity to share and catch up on family news, all while we got our teeth cleaned or cavities filled. One visit 24 years ago was particularly memorable because Jackie, her dad, Stuart and I had decided we should start an annual family Chinese New Year party with all the many relatives, where we savored the family’s traditional New Year recipes, passed on from generation to generation.

Jackie and I decided we would cook the dinner together. I’ll never forget how—with my mouth wide open in the dental chair and Jackie poking at my teeth and gums with her instruments—Jackie explained many elaborate New Year recipes with myriad ingredients, such as ginkgo nuts, wood-ear fungus, dried oysters, lotus root, and two types of fermented tofu. These were recipes that Stuart’s grandmother had passed on to Jackie’s mom, then to Jackie, and now to me. Our 24th annual family gathering will be this weekend.

But unfortunately Jackie will be there only in spirit. Several years ago, Jackie began having persistent digestive problems that responded to none of the treatments her physicians prescribed. Jackie’s physicians told her she had irritable bowel syndrome, explaining that she worried too much. Many months passed and Jackie’s symptoms continued to increase. As Jackie continued to urge her physicians to investigate her symptoms more fully, they finally discovered the truth. Jackie had late stage ovarian cancer that had metastasized to surrounding tissues. The cancerous tumors were putting pressure on her digestive system and causing the symptoms.

When I learned the news, I realized that Jackie was not the first of our women friends to have unexplained digestive symptoms that physicians dismissed and misdiagnosed, but in fact were serious ovarian medical problems. A middle-aged friend complained of digestive problems to her physicians for months, and as with Jackie, her physicians dismissed her concerns, telling her she fretted too much. Eventually, they discovered a non-malignant ovarian tumor “the size of a grapefruit” was causing the problems. Fortunately, after it was removed, she was fine.

The teenage daughter of another friend had severe abdominal pain with nausea, and when she went to the emergency room, physicians repeatedly asked her, among other things, if she were pregnant (which she was not). Much later, she finally got the correct diagnosis: one of her fallopian tubes was twisted, causing the severe pain and damaging an ovary.

In all three cases, physicians marginalized or dismissed the concerns of women, aged 14 to 70, who all ended up having serious ovarian-related medical problems. As an LGBTIQ person, I could empathize from my own personal experience, having had physicians not understanding or taking my health concerns seriously.

After Jackie got the diagnosis, she asked me to be her health care power of attorney, attend doctor appointments along with her brother, and be with her during the final stages of the disease. Jackie was a very strong person. Indeed, she took no pain medication during her disease (except after surgery) until the last hours of her life. She lived each day to the most. I learned a lot from her.

One time during the later stage of the disease, Jackie, who also held a degree in public health, lamented to me that ovarian cancer is not a subject of sufficient public education and does not get enough media exposure. This is because of the fact that too many women are diagnosed with the disease in its late stages and do not have the time and energy to organize and advocate for better awareness, treatment, and diagnosis.

We agree. Because of Jackie, whenever I meet physicians, I urge them to investigate ovarian issues when women patients report digestive or abdominal problems that evade easy diagnosis.

We can do much more, too. I recently heard a caller to a public radio show remark: “I was blown away by the power of women raising their voices together with ‘Me Too.’ Maybe we should keep calling out the patriarchy and say ‘Me Too’ to all of the other injustices we face as women. I would love to see a ‘Me Too’ movement about how women are mistreated by doctors.”

When I heard the remark, I immediately thought of Jackie and our other friends. In the words of the movement, “Time’s Up” for the medical profession marginalizing women’s health concerns and costing lives.

What Is the Sound of Two Hands Clapping?
February 8, 2018

Perhaps the most famous Zen koan (a seemingly nonsensical or paradoxical question that Zen students are instructed to contemplate) is the koan: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Zen students may spend countless hours turning the question back and forth in their minds, trying to find a logical explanation of how one hand could clap by itself. At some point, students may exhaust themselves trying to reason their way to an answer, and instead learn simply to “become” the koan, holding it and embodying it both in meditation and daily life.

The koan then points students to a more direct experience of life firsthand, unfiltered or distanced by personal conceptualization, abstractions, and judgments. In a famous old Zen story, a young student Toyo repeatedly tries to answer the koan to no avail by reporting to his teacher sounds he had heard during meditation. Finally, Toyo’s mind opens, and he reports, “I could collect no more” sounds, and then “I reached the soundless sound.” Toyo realized the answer to the koan through his direct experience.

A few weeks ago, Stuart’s step-mother Tish, his father’s second wife of many decades and mother of Stuart’s three half-siblings, passed away from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS after a four-year struggle with the affliction. This unforgiving disease rendered Tish—an outgoing, fun-loving, energetic, engaged, vibrant, and verbal person—severely limited in her ability to eat, breathe, move her body or utter sounds, much less speak. Throughout the disease, Tish maintained an indomitable spirit and ability to live with joy in the moment whenever possible. One of her favorite activities when she had energy was cranking her high-tech wheelchair to its fastest speed and racing her adult kids through the streets of the retirement community where she and Stuart’s dad lived.

I’ve played piano since I was a small child. For years, on weekend family visits before Tish became ill, I’d play piano for her in the living room while she and others chatted and prepared dinner in the kitchen. She loved hearing me play and looked forward to it whenever we visited.

After Tish became ill and she and Stuart’s dad moved to a retirement community, I brought my music with me when we visited, thinking it would be nice to play for her. Tish, however, had become very sensitive to sound, and each time I tried to play for her, she would gesture for me to stop. When we visited last fall, I almost didn’t even bother to bring the music with me, but at the last minute decided to do so, thinking I might have a chance to play if everyone were out of the house.

It was late on the last evening of our visit and time to say goodnight. As Stuart and I interacted with Tish seated in her wheelchair, she looked at me and suddenly gestured with her two hands as if she were playing the piano and a brightness and smile came over her face. We asked her if she’d like for me to play, and she nodded enthusiastically. Tish’s daughter, who was responsible that evening for the hours-long process of helping her mom get to bed, agreed to one song, and I dashed to get my music.

As I began to play, I began to hear joyful utterances coming from Tish, whose face was beaming with happiness. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw Tish moving her lower legs up and down, over and over to the music. Her black Labrador Zoe awoke from her slumber and lifted her head and began to bark playfully. And Tish did one of the few things that she could still do with her arms and hands. She started clapping. First to the beat of the music, and then as vigorously as possible after each song (we didn’t stop with just one). Everyone else joined in clapping, too.

We exchanged many hugs and kisses, and when I finally stopped playing, Zoe came up to me and licked my hands and arms without stopping for a long time. We all were alive, in the moment, without words—just music, hugs, kisses, barks, licks—and clapping. It was the last time we saw Tish alive.

As I went to bed that evening, my mind turned to the famous Zen koan, and I came up with a new one: What is the sound of two hands clapping? From subsequent researching I did, I learned that the full, proper translation of the famous koan is: “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?” And I wondered if the sound of one hand clapping and the sound of two hands clapping could actually be the same. Had we together that night touched the soundless sound that young Toyo heard centuries ago?

Major Advance for Marriage Equality and Gender Identity Rights in Latin America
January 25, 2018

Two weeks ago, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a path-breaking decision in favor of marriage equality and an individual’s right to self-determination of one’s gender identity under the law. LGBTIQ activists across the Americas were thrilled by the decision. Although the decision could ultimately bring full marriage equality to 19 additional countries throughout the Americas, if you were like us, you may have been a bit confused as to the decision’s exact meaning and impact and even as to what the Inter-American Court of Human Rights is.

In 1979, the Organization of American States (OAS), itself founded in 1948 to promote security and cooperation amongst the nations of the Americas, established the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to interpret and enforce the American Convention on Human Rights, which came into force in 1978. The Convention obliges all countries that ratified it to conform their domestic laws to its provisions, which guarantee essential human rights. The Court issues both adjudicatory decision and advisory opinions, in which signatory countries seek an interpretation as to how the Convention applies to particular legal issues in their countries. The Court has jurisdiction over the 23 Latin American and Caribbean countries that are currently active parties to the Convention. (Neither the United States nor Canada, for a variety of reasons, are parties to the Convention.)

In 2016, Costa Rica asked the Court for an advisory opinion as to how the Human Rights Convention applied to two issues: 1) determination of gender identity on government identification documents and 2) the economic rights of same-sex couples. And this month, the Court issued a sweeping opinion strongly in favor of LGBTIQ rights and freedom. The Court reiterated the Human Rights Convention’s protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and that debate about these issues within member countries did not permit the countries to perpetuate historical and structural discrimination against LGBTIQ people.

With respect to gender identity, the Court recognized that a person’s gender identity was an individual and internal experience that may not coincide with gender assigned at birth and that a person’s right to self-determination of their gender identity was essential to a person’s freedom and their right to give meaning to their existence. Respect for each person’s gender identity was critical to their access to health, education, employment, and housing and their ability to live free from violence, torture and other ill-treatment. Accordingly, the Court ruled that identity documents must reflect a person’s self-perceived gender identity, that governments could not require such things as surgery or medical certification of gender change as a prerequisite to changing documents, and that procedures for changing gender identity must be simple, confidential, and efficient.

The Court was equally unequivocal when it came to marriage equality. The Court recognized that same-sex couples may form a family bond just as heterosexual couples do, and that the Human Rights Convention did not prescribe any particular form of family. The Court opined that only the freedom to marry provided equality, and that lesser alternatives such as civil unions carried a stigma of inferiority, and thus were unlawful discrimination.

Addressing religious opposition to marriage equality, the Court articulated how—as the Convention proscribes—in democratic societies, religious and secular spheres must co-exist peacefully without one imposing itself on the other, and how religion cannot be used to perpetrate discrimination based on sexual orientation. Just as self-determination of a person’s gender identity is central to their humanity, the freedom of a person to choose with whom they form a marital bond is intrinsic to deeply intimate aspects of their life and to their essential human dignity. Far from devaluing the institution of marriage, providing equal rights and protections in marriage, regardless of sexual orientation, confers human dignity on people who had faced historic oppression and discrimination.

The Court made clear that the Convention binds all countries that are party to the Human Rights Convention to follow the Court’s decision both in their legislatures and courts. Four such countries (Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, and Uruguay) and parts of Mexico already have marriage equality. The decision is thus particularly critical to attaining full marriage equality throughout Mexico and in 18 other Latin American and Caribbean countries: Barbados, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Grenada, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Suriname.

However, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights does not have the same ability to order signatory countries to comply with an advisory opinion the same way that the United States Supreme Court and lower federal courts had the power to ensure compliance in all 50 states and U.S. territories with the Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage equality decision. Each member nation to the Human Rights Convention must still change its laws through its own legislatures or courts. Indeed, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in its opinion recognized that governments may encounter both institutional and political difficulties in changing laws and the process may take time, while recommending that countries issue temporary decrees to implement the opinion during the process of enacting permanent laws.

Embrace of the Court’s decision by leaders of two countries, Costa Rica (who brought the issue to the Court) and Panama, was swift, although as of press time, marriages of same-sex couples had not yet begun in those or any of the other additional signatory countries, and may require legislation or court decisions. Although the landmark decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights did not produce full marriage equality overnight in 19 countries, the decision stands as a compelling declaration of LGBTIQ rights, a testament to the extraordinary dedication and work of thousands of LGBTIQ people and human rights advocacy organizations, and a powerful tool for these activists to make marriage equality, transgender rights, and full LGBTIQ equality a reality throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Will Chile Be the First Nation to Win Marriage Equality in 2018?
January 11, 2018

As the new year begins, we look to Chile in hopes that the South American nation will become the first country to achieve marriage equality in 2018. If successful, Chile will join Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay and the territories of French Guiana and the Falkland Islands as the seventh country in South America with the freedom to marry.

It appears, however, that the national legislature must act quickly if marriage equality is to become the law in the most straightforward manner. Chile just held Presidential and national legislative elections in November and December. Former President Sebastián Piñera—who introduced Chile’s civil union bill in his prior term of office, but who opposes full marriage equality—defeated Alejandro Guillier, the pro-equality candidate whom outgoing President Michelle Bachelet, a marriage equality supporter, hoped would succeed her.

President-elect Piñera and the new legislature, a majority of whom support equality, will not take office until March 11, however, making it conceivable that the current legislature could pass and Bachelet could sign marriage equality legislation into law before she leaves office. The Bachelet administration is also pushing for immediate passage of gender identity legislation.

President Michelle Bachelet first announced her support for marriage equality in her successful 2013 campaign for president. In 2015, the nation adopted civil unions for same-sex couples. They provide many, but not all of, the rights and responsibilities of marriage. In 2016, the government agreed to drop its opposition to marriage equality and to introduce pro-equality legislation as part of an agreement pertaining to an ongoing lawsuit seeking marriage equality that LGBTIQ rights advocates had filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2012.

In August 2017, Bachelet finally introduced marriage equality legislation, saying: “We can’t let old prejudices be stronger than love. We do this with the certainty that it is not ethical or fair to put artificial limits on love, or to deny essential rights just because of the sex of those who make up a couple.” The legislation also provides equal adoption rights for same-sex couples. Public opinion polls have shown over 60 percent support for marriage equality. Legislative action on the measure began in November.  Over 100,000 people marched in Santiago in support of swift passage of marriage equality and transgender rights two days before the legislature began work on the bill.

According to the PanAm Post, President Bachelet’s spokeswoman Paula Narváez said that the administration would make marriage equality and gender identity legislation priorities in the remaining weeks before March 11. The Post quotes Narváez as saying, “In the case of marriage equality, we want to open a legislative body that will allow the debate to continue further” and “the Gender Identity bill is very urgent.”

If these bills do not become law before Bachelet leaves office, LGBTIQ supporters vow to continue pressure for passage when Piñera and the new legislature take office. Although The New York Times reports that President-elect Piñera promised in the campaign to prevent the marriage equality legislation from going forward in order to appeal to more conservative voters, pro-LGBTIQ equality legislators appear to hold majorities in the new legislature. In addition, LGBTIQ advocates argue that the new Chilean government would be obliged to abide by its prior international agreement to implement marriage equality legislation.

We—and the world—will keep our eyes on Chile. The time for full marriage and LGBTIQ equality is now.

Marriage Equality Triumphs Around the World
December 21, 2017

As we approach the end of the year, we are happy to report that 2017 brought major marriage equality victories in such diverse countries as Taiwan, Germany, Malta, Australia and Austria, with successes in the latter two nations coming just three weeks ago.  In these places, separated by thousands of miles and oceans, constitutional courts and national legislatures recognized a principle that transcends cultural differences and national boundaries: human respect and dignity mandate equality and freedom for LGBTIQ people.

Earlier this year, we reported extensively on the breakthroughs in Taiwan, Germany, and Malta. This week we focus on Australia and Austria. In our July column celebrating the German victory, we described how Chancellor Angela Merkel—under pressure from opposition parties—finally permitted a “free conscience” vote in Parliament after years of obstruction. We advised that “Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who claims to support marriage equality but is blocking a free conscience vote in the Australian Parliament despite clear public support for equality, would do well to follow Merkel’s example.” On December 7, Turnbull did exactly that, and the Australian Parliament passed full marriage equality legislation nearly unanimously with just four votes in opposition.

Turnbull for years had blocked such a vote because of internal political pressure from the most socially conservative members of his party. Still buckling under pressure, Turnbull this summer authorized putting marriage equality up to a popular vote through a non-binding national referendum to be held by mail in the fall. When the plebiscite showed over 60 percent of the public in favor, Turnbull quickly allowed the free conscience vote in Parliament. After the vote, Turnbull exclaimed, “What a day! What a day for love, for equality, for respect! Australia has done it! Today we’ve voted for love, for equality. It’s time for more marriages, more love, more respect. This belongs to us all. This is Australia.” He learned first-hand how much better it feels to be on the right side of history than on the wrong side.

The Australian referendum, however, eerily echoed some of the most disturbing elements of the 2008 Proposition 8 campaign in California—for one, having millions of people you don’t know vote on whether or not you should have your basic civil rights.  Out lesbian Senator Penny Wong told TheNew York Times: “It is a hard thing to have others judge whether you deserve to be equal. And it is an even harder thing to have your family and your children besmirched by those who want to perpetuate discrimination.” We in California know exactly what she’s talking about. Indeed, Australian equality opponents employed anti-LGBTIQ smears reminiscent of those of the “Yes on 8” campaign. “Our very identity [was] the subject of public scrutiny and public debate,” said Wong in her floor speech.

The Parliamentary victory gave LGBTIQ people the opportunity to experience the same sense of dignity and respect that the U.S. Supreme Court recognized as crucial in Obergefell.  The U.S. Supreme Court observed that denying LGBTIQ people the full freedom to marry “disparage[s] their choices and diminish[es] their personhood” and held that the Constitution guarantees us “equal dignity in the eyes of the law.” A 22-year-old Australian gay man who witnessed the Parliamentary vote live described to The New York Times how the victory “alleviated a life of shame and embarrassment of who I am” and “validated everyone’s love here and around Australia.”

In fact, during his floor speech, gay Parliament member Tim Wilson proposed to his longtime partner Ryan Bolger, who did not hesitate in responding “yes” from the public gallery. On the day of the victory, Wilson said that the vote sent “a strong message to every kid that is questioning their sexual orientation or gender identity that you do not need to be afraid.”

In our July column celebrating the German victory, we also wrote about how activists in neighboring Austria hoped that momentum from the victory would bring equality there. Just three days before the Australian Parliamentary victory, the Austrian Constitutional Court ruled that Austria’s current relegation of same-sex couples to unequal “registered partnerships” instead of marriage violated the nation’s constitution. Marriage equality will become the law on January 1, 2019, unless the legislature repeals the current exclusion earlier.

The Court held that the differential treatment “violates the (Austrian constitution’s) principle of equal treatment, which forbids any discrimination of individuals on grounds of personal characteristics, such as their sexual orientation.” The lawyer for the lesbian couple who brought the lawsuit noted that ruling made Austria the first European country to establish marriage equality through a court recognizing it as a “fundamental human right,” rather than through the political process. The Austrian Court seemed particularly concerned about the discriminatory message that the separate laws for same-sex and different-sex couples sent and the ongoing risk of discrimination that LGBTIQ Austrians face.

Not everywhere in the world saw marriage equality advances this year. The British territory of Bermuda may suffer a legal setback for marriage equality soon, and as we have discussed in previous columns, LGBTIQ people fear for their lives and physical safety in many places around the world. Our hope is that this year’s marriage equality victories will further the cause of LGBTIQ equality in all of its aspects, and that next December, we will report on more victories for dignity and equality around the world.

International Activist Hiker Chiu Helps to Lead the Way on Intersex Social Justice
December 7, 2017

When Taiwanese and international intersex activist Hiker Chiu as a teenager saw their childhood medical records for the first time, one question kept resounding in their mind: “Am I a monster?” It was Chiu’s reaction to reading the Chinese dictionary translation of the word “hermaphrodite” as “a female and male in the same body.” Chiu saw no hope for the future, and thought there must be no “other people like me in the world.” Chiu had an even more terrifying thought: “You are a person that nobody loves” because “you’re like a monster.”

But life had something different in store for Chiu. Chiu embarked on a years-long journey that brought them out of despair to become the first Taiwanese intersex person to “come out publicly and intentionally” and as an international LGBTIQ activist.  We had the great fortune to meet and interview Chiu at this year’s Taipei Pride celebration.

Chiu was raised as a girl, but as an adolescent felt as if something “kind of weird” was going on when they didn’t develop breasts or have a period and, in fact, grew “some moustache” and a male Adam’s apple. Not menstruating was particularly difficult because of Chinese cultural pressures on women to marry and have children, and Chiu again wondered, “If a woman cannot have children, could she be loved by someone else?”

As a young person, Chiu vowed simply to give up on love for self-protection, but something unexpected happened. “Cupid targeted me, and, yes, I was caught! If you intend not to believe in love, it doesn’t mean that love wouldn’t come to you.” Chiu fell in love with a young woman, and felt “all kinds of excitement.”

Chiu became part of the gay and lesbian community and initially found welcome and acceptance. But after a ten-year relationship, Chiu’s lesbian partner said she wanted to break up because, as she put it, “You are too much like a man.” Chiu felt “kicked out by the lesbian community” and asked if “I’m too much like a man” then “what can I do?”

Chiu might have wanted to become part of the gay male community, but horrific surgery performed on Chiu at age six—and without consent—foreclosed that possibility. “I was born with … ambiguous genitals,” Chiu said. “But I was a healthy baby. But people, doctors, think you have to be ‘either or.’ If you are a girl, you cannot have such a large clitoris, which looks like a penis.  No. So, they removed it without my consent.”

After the relationship breakup, Chiu felt isolated and alone. But in 2008, a friend told Chiu “there’s a word—intersex—that describes your situation.” Chiu saw the Argentinean movie XXY, which is about an intersex teenager. Chiu’s reaction was: “Oh my god, there’s someone else like me!”

Chiu then discovered Organization Intersex International (OII) online, and was shocked to learn that there was “not just one person like me; there are so many!” OII was very “empowering” for Chiu. They conversed with other intersex people through the organization and thought, “Maybe I am one of them. This is my community.”

Chiu “really wanted to communicate with other intersex people who speak Chinese,” and founded OII-Chinese, and translated the website into Chinese. They still had not met any other intersex people in person, however, and knew of no such person in Taiwan.

They decided to remedy that by traveling to San Francisco and other parts of the United States to meet intersex activists, including local activist David Cameron Strachan. The face-to-face meetings were transformative. “It was very powerful,” Chiu said. “Very powerful.” Chiu found them to be “all excellent people.” Perhaps most importantly, Chiu experienced their love. “I got so many hugs from them.”

The American activists taught Chiu that “you have to share your story to reach out,” both to enable other intersex people struggling with their identity to find community and to educate medical professionals about intersex people. Chiu returned home and decided to come out as intersex at the Taipei Pride parade as a way “to show my gratitude to those intersex activists in the U.S. who teach me and hug me and help me. I wanted to share their love.”

Chiu now feels they belong, not just to the intersex community, but also to the lesbian, gay, and “maybe” heterosexual, and other communities as well. Indeed, Chiu said, “Now I find my community in the world.” Chiu often gives talks and is co-chair of ILGA–Asia (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association). As one of the early Asian intersex people to come out, Chiu is “working on reaching out to people in Asia to make the voice in Asia heard.” When the ILGA-Asia regional conference was held in Taipei in 2015, Chiu “gathered for the first time in history six or seven intersex activists from Asia and we came out publicly in the Taipei Pride parade.” This December, Chiu will continue this work at the ILGA-Asia conference in Cambodia.

Reflecting back on adolescence, Chiu said, “I think my body insisted to be a naturally intersex person.” This describes who Chiu is. As we listened to Chiu’s story, we identified with much of it, even though we are not intersex. Meeting LGBTIQ people who confront formidable challenges and then use their lives to make the world better for others never fails to inspire us and give us joy.

Chiu’s story in a testament to the power of resilience, persistence, love, connection, international organizing, books, movies, the internet, cross-cultural understanding, empathy, gratitude, benevolence, and hugs. We feel lucky to have shared hugs and much more with Chiu, and in gratitude we share their story and love.

A Look at LGBTQ Life in Taiwan
November 30, 2017

Taipei Pride

It seems only fitting that San Francisco and Taipei, sister cities since the year of Stonewall, 1969, host the largest LGBTQ Pride marches and celebrations in North America and Asia. This year’s Taipei Pride was “the largest LGBTQ gathering of any kind ever in Asia,” explained Simon Tai, head of the organizing group.

In the last issue, we reported on the community’s efforts to make the Taiwan constitutional court’s promise of marriage equality a reality now. Today we report on Taipei Pride itself, and other wonderful aspects of Taiwan’s distinctive queer community.

Taipei Pride is a place where Taiwanese and other LGBTQ Asians can come together and be surrounded by love, support, and community. The joy is palpable—as is the community’s commitment to attaining full legal equality and social acceptance in Taiwan as well as in other Asian nations.

We personally met participants not just from Taiwan, but also from mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Thailand, and Myanmar (Burma). Just before the march was to begin, a huge LGBTQ flag made its way through the crowd like a rainbow dragon.

Taipei Pride is very down-to-earth and community-based. It is entirely volunteer run with over 500 volunteers taking part, according to head organizer Tai. We were struck how nearly everyone participated in the march rather than standing on the sidelines just to watch. While some organizations had floats or trucks, most of the 160 groups simply marched together as contingents on foot. Anyone could join in and hold a sign with whatever message they chose.

In addition to the push for full marriage equality, defending and expanding LGBTQ education is public schools was a major theme of Pride. In 2004, Taiwan enacted the groundbreaking national Gender Equity Education Act, mandating gender education in public schools from early ages through high school. Activists credit such education, which has included LGBTQ curriculum, as a significant factor in broadening public acceptance of queer people. They seek expansion of LGBTQ education under the act, whose implementation they view as having been too slow and too variable by region.

After losing the marriage equality court decision, however, anti-LGBTQ forces—particularly several conservative political Christian groups—are attempting to remove LGBTQ education from schools, thereby preventing students from learning about the true diversity of Taiwan’s population.

By contrast, Taipei Pride illuminated the beauty of our community’s diversity. LGBTQ Christians, people living with HIV, transgender people and many others proudly and exuberantly made their presence known to the broader society through the 75 media outlets present. They also felt the embrace and acceptance of the community. The Tongzhi Hotline, a prominent LGBTQ service and advocacy organization, distributed thousands of cards and stickers reading “HIV+ OK” as they have done at many other events.

Also experiencing embrace and acceptance were LGBTQ people from other parts of Asia who came to Taipei Pride to be completely openly queer because it may not be safe to do so in their home countries—be they Pakistan, Singapore or mainland China. Two months ago, we visited Destination Bar and community center in Beijing, China, where Pride marches and rallies are banned and living as an openly gay person can be very difficult.

Soon after we arrived at Taipei Pride, we were amazed and delighted to see that perhaps the biggest float in the entire parade was that of Destination Bar—topped with muscular gay dancers from Beijing, strutting their stuff to the great pleasure of the crowd—something they clearly could not do in a parade at home. It was a powerful image of oppression and freedom, frustration and hope, repression and joy.

Indeed, Taipei Pride is becoming a place for Asian LGBTQ activists and leaders from diverse parts of the continent to come together to meet, share ideas and experiences, strategize, and gain support and inspiration from each other that they take back to their own countries. Some aspects of Asian cultures—such as social conformity and the importance of family responsibility—overlap, while other elements diverge. Activists in some Asian countries face enormous barriers to building LGBTQ communities and making gains for LGBTQ legal rights, and it is easy for them to feel isolated. Coming together in Taipei with international activists enables everyone to feel connected and part of a worldwide LGBTQ movement and community.

Taiwan International Queer Film Festival

In the days leading up to Pride, the Taiwan International Queer Film Festival showcased an impressive lineup of queer films from across Asia and around the world. With the theme of “Queer and Camp,” this year’s 4th annual festival made good on its promise to provide audiences the opportunity to “unapologetically let their inner self shine through.”

The festival is also becoming a meeting place for international filmmakers and artists, just as Taipei Pride is for activists and the community at large. This year, the Asian Pacific Queer Film Festival Alliance, a consortium of 25 LGBT oriented film festivals in the region, held its first in-person meeting at the Festival, called the Asian-Pacific Film and Culture Forum.

Jay Lin and other founders of the Taipei queer film festival are bringing the best of the festival and much more to the world through their new platform: GagaOOLala (https://www.gagaoolala.com/en/home), which they have termed a “Gay Netflix” for Asia, if not the world. GagaOOlala boasts the largest collection of LGBTQ film in Asia, and features movies, short films, documentaries, series and original content.

Spectrosynthesis: A Groundbreaking LGBTQ Art Exhibition

In addition to queer film, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, this fall hosted the first-ever major LGBTQ-themed exhibition at a government museum in Asia. The path-breaking show featured artists from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore, as well as other places.

Patrick Sun, Executive Director of the Hong Kong-based Sunpride Foundation, co-host of the exhibition, expressed his pride at being “part of this beautiful, beautiful country” in which people are “very warm and accepting.” He said the museum was “totally behind” the exhibition from the beginning, and that the museum and the government gave them a “free hand” with “no censorship.”

We loved many pieces in the exhibition, and Sun explained that a “recurring” theme of the show is “acceptance and tolerance.” “The essence of what we are trying to say” is that “if we take apart all the external features … maybe we can have a better look at the essence of oneself. Who are we? And for me the message is that if we are not that different inside, why is there discrimination?”

“One of the most touching moments” for Sun happened when he was at the exhibition one day and he “saw a mother bringing her son who was 5 or 6 years old. And the mother was explaining to her son that in this world there’s man loving woman, woman loving woman, woman loving man, and man loving man. That’s just a fact of life. And the son just looked up and said, ‘Yes,’ and nodded. That to me makes it all worthwhile.”

The Only LGBTQ Taoist Temple in the World

With respect to queer spiritual and cultural life, Taiwan is also distinctive. Over two-thirds of Taiwan’s population identifies as Taoist or Buddhist, and Taiwan boasts as far as we know the only Taoist temple in the world specially dedicated to serving the LGBTQ community. According to founder Taoist Master Lu Wei-ming, thousands of LGBTQ people have come to the temple since its creation in 2006.

The temple, called Wei Ming Tong (Hall of Martial Brilliance), is dedicated to the centuries-old Taoist God Tu‘er Shen (Rabbit God), who originally oversaw gay “love and relationships,” but now protects LGBTQ people in all aspects of their lives. According to an account from the early Qing dynasty, a man named Hu Tianbao fell in love with an attractive male inspector and was caught peering at the inspector through a bathroom wall. Hu confessed his same-sex love and attraction to authorities, who then executed him by beating him to death. Thereafter, Hu became the God Tu’er Shen to compensate for the injustice of being killed for being gay. Master Lu explained that Tu’er Shen suffered because of who he was and whom he loved, and thus can empathize with challenges LGBTQ people face today.

Master Lu also described how queer people have been a part of Chinese history and culture, and how being LGBTQ is a natural part of Taoism. According to Master Lu, “in ancient China, the culture didn’t see gay people as much different from others. They were looked at equally as normal people.” Indeed, texts report instances of young male couples marrying and being recognized by each other’s families in the Ming and early Qing dynasties in Fujian Province of China, where many early Chinese Taiwanese came from.

As Master Lu explained, Yin and Yang—how seemingly opposite aspects of life are actually deeply interconnected to form a whole—is central to Taoism. In the famous circular symbol, a dot of Yin appears in Yang, and a dot of Yang is represented in Yin. In Master Lu’s words, nothing “exists alone,” and LGBTQ people “are natural in the world,” represented by the circle. “Woman is normal inside man, and man is normal inside woman.” In Chinese temples, Guan Yin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, is depicted as both male and female and neither male nor female—free of the constraints of gender—able to offer compassion for all.

Patrick Sun echoed these ideas in his vision of Spectrosynthesis: “In all of us, it’s not like black and white, binary gender. There’s a woman living in [a man, and] a man living in [a woman]. We have a masculine side and a feminine side, and probably many, many more sides that we have not explored yet.”

Coming Out in Taiwan

Taiwan is one of the safest countries in the world as far as street crime. Although anti-LGBTQ violence exists, we were struck by how comfortable some young people seemed to be expressing their sexuality. During our visit, we noticed young Taiwanese gay couples and trans people simply being themselves openly at such ordinary places as the subway station and Taiwan’s famous night food markets. Many people told us they did not have to hide amongst their friends and community.

This represents change. Arthur Chang, a long-time volunteer at the Tongzhi Hotline, told us that originally most callers were LGBTQ people in distress about their sexuality. Parents also called upset when their child had come out to them. Now, Chang says many callers are LGBTQ people wanting to talk about romantic or relationship problems.

Coming out is not easy for all, however, and perhaps especially for older adults. Chang told us of an annual weekend bus tour for older gay men that has enabled many closeted gay men who are married to women to have a few days to be who they really are. Despite the fact that employment discrimination is prohibited nationwide, coming out on the job can be risky. Although Chang noted significant changes in hotline calls, many activists told us that when it came to coming out to parents, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was the unspoken rule.

One person who is responsible for change and who passionately wants more children to come out to their parents and be accepted is the extraordinary woman known as Guo Mama, head of Loving Parents of LGBT, Taiwan. Guo Mama herself sets a powerful example for other parents of LGBTQ people. When she suspected that her own daughter was queer, she encouraged her to come out, and her daughter did as a lesbian. But Guo Mama thought that something else was going on and encouraged her daughter to consider whether she was transgender. Guo Mama’s daughter soon thereafter came out as her son. Her child’s grandparents were so supportive that they insisted that the genealogy engraved on their family gravestone be changed to identify that that they had a grandson and not a granddaughter.

Guo Mama told us that she has personally helped over 500 parents to accept their children’s coming out to them over the last 13 years, and she has devised practical steps for LGBTQ people and their parents in the coming out process. Her underlying message to parents of young people struggling with their sexuality and coming out: “Your child needs your help now more than ever.” Her message to LGBTQ Taiwanese about parents: “We don’t throw our kids away.” Through her work, she has found that parents are willing to do things for their children “beyond their children’s imagination.” Guo Mama’s dream is to bring families closer together and to remove the stress of “living double lives” and “telling lies.”

Final Evening at Taipei’s Natural Hot Springs

As we reflected on our experience of LGBTQ life in Taiwan, our last evening in Taipei seemed almost metaphorical. The city of Taipei boasts marvelous natural sulfur hot spring spas along the banks of a steaming river in the hills on the outskirts of town. On a Saturday evening, we went with friends to visit Emperor Hot Springs, a venue very popular with gay men.

The spa is gender segregated, and we soaked in the soothing waters with over two hundred others. The atmosphere was relaxed and casual with many folks hanging out and chatting with friends, while others soaked silently. In one pool, you could lie down with your head resting on a piece of wood made soft by the warm mineral waters. We felt as if we could float there forever.

Afterwards, bathers dress and join each other—gay and straight together, straight families with small children and groups of friends—to savor pots of warm rice soup and other delicious Taiwanese food. It doesn’t get much better than this.

Actually, it does get better, and it will—when the Constitutional Court’s promise of marriage equality and the dignity that comes with it become a reality—and as progress toward full LGBTQ equality and inclusion continues. Taiwan’s amazing LGBTQ community, with its inspiring activists, leaders and allies, is doing everything it can to make that dream come true. We hope to be planning a return visit soon.

Taiwan Activists Say Now Is the Time to Fulfill the Promise of Marriage Equality
November 9, 2017

This past October, we were thrilled to attend Taipei Pride, the largest annual gathering of LGBTQ people in Asia. We also then witnessed the extraordinary synergy taking place between the political, social, and cultural elements of the Taiwanese LGBTQ community.

This year’s Pride in Taipei was by far the biggest ever with over 123,000 attendees. Excitement and anticipation were sky high with May’s historic Constitutional Court victory promising marriage equality within two years and also granting broad constitutional protections for gay people that are even stronger than we have in the U.S. We loved Taiwan, and it was a great place to visit as an LGBTQ traveler. We’ll share our experiences and report on the status of the LGBTQ movement in Taiwan in this and upcoming issues.

Community leaders at Pride rallied the crowds with inspiring messages about the importance of making the Court’s promise of full marriage equality a reality now. The Constitutional Court gave the government two years to implement its decision and “discretion” as to “the formality” of how they do it. If the national legislature fails to act in two years, same-sex couples will be able to marry then under current procedures. So far, the legislature has not acted.

Activists are concerned that the legislature might duck the issue over the next 18 months, or pass a bill that deprives married same-sex couples of important rights such as adopting children, access to fertility clinics and other equal treatment with respect to parental rights, and equal access to immigration. Anti-equality political groups have been lobbying against full equality in implementing the Court’s decision.

“Don’t be so happy yet,” cautioned Jennifer Lu of the Tongzhi Hotline, a leading LGBTQ organization and one of the leaders of the Taiwan Marriage Equality Coalition, as she and other activists inspired marchers to urge legislators to finish the job by passing a full marriage equality bill as mandated by the Court decision by the end of the year.

In a Facebook message to attendees of Taipei Pride, President Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s first female president and a marriage and LGBTQ equality supporter, affirmed that the Constitutional Court’s ruling “is binding on all,” but did not address specifics, and noted that “we also have a responsibility to ensure social cohesion.” From the stage at Pride, Lu responded that she supported social cohesion, but made clear that there could be no unity when one group of people, namely LGBTQ people, continues to face discrimination under the law.

Among the crowd at Pride was Jay Lin, a Marriage Equality Coalition member; he and his partner are proud parents of two small children and want to get married. Lin’s wish for his family is simple, yet profound: “I hope that we will be able to get married with our boys as the flower boys. The wedding doesn’t need to be big or fancy, but it is significant for us to be able to show our commitment to each other, to our families, and to society at large.” We met many LGBTQ people who, even if they didn’t want to get married now, spoke of how important marriage equality was to their sense of dignity as LGBTQ Taiwanese.

Advocates are passionate in their quest to make Taiwan’s dream of full equality come true.

The night before Pride, we had the opportunity to meet legendary LGBTQ activist Chi Chia-wei, whom some call the “Harvey Milk” of the Taiwan LGBTQ movement. Chia-wei has been fighting for LGBTQ and marriage equality for over 30 years, and was a party to last May’s landmark lawsuit. Through a translator, Chia-wei told us that marriage is the only “true equality” and that no country has gone backwards from marriage equality to something less.

His attorney in the case, Victoria Hsu, co-founder of Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights and herself an icon of the Taiwanese LGBTQ rights movement, explained: “The government has the constitutional duty to fulfill the Constitutional Court’s ruling … . The government should pass a full, comprehensive bill.” Hsu vowed to go to court on behalf of deprived LGBTQ families to enforce the Court’s decision if the government did anything less. She emphasized that “waiting two years is simply too long. A lot of LGBT couples can’t wait that long,” referring to couples who “are suffering because of illness and accident.” Some members of couples have already passed away while they wait. “It is the government’s responsibility to repair this human rights violation as soon as possible,” said Hsu.

Some may ask: Why Taiwan? Why does Taiwan have some of the most progressive laws on LGBTQ rights in the world? For example, same-sex relations have never been illegal there, nationwide laws prohibit discrimination in employment and public accommodations, and LGB people have been able to serve in the military since 2002.

Jason Tsao of the Tongzhi Hotline and the Marriage Equality Coalition points to the fact that in the twenty years since the end of martial law in Taiwan, “people have learned to express their expectation for changes through elections.” This political engagement has enabled “the vigorous development of civil society and the political participation of the young generation.”  Community mobilization through public rallies and other events garners media attention. Tsao also pointed to the path-breaking 2004 national Gender Equity Education Act, which he says has enabled more young people to understand LGBTQ and gender issues, but is unfortunately under attack now from anti-LGBTQ political forces.

Taiwan appears to be a country in which democracy is growing and strengthening. The vibrant, engaged and ever-growing LGBTQ movement is truly inspiring. If as LGBTQ activists seek, the government enacts full marriage equality now and does not retreat on LGBTQ education in schools—Taiwan will unquestionably be a leader of the LGBTQ movement not just in Asia, but also in the world.

Justice and Desserts
October 26, 2017

Cousin Lisa and her fiancé Mike’s engagement party last month was a delightful affair. We’ve known Lisa since the day she was adopted 30 years ago, and she and Mike make a great couple. One of the joys of our participation in the marriage equality movement is that we now perform weddings for other couples. When Lisa and Mike slipped us a handwritten note at the party asking, “Will you and the love of your life help me marry mine?” we, of course, replied with an enthusiastic, “Yes!” And we marveled at the “save the date” cookies Lisa and Mike bought at a local bakery that were topped with an icing calendar showing their upcoming wedding day in July 2018.

As we admired the cookies, however, we found that our thoughts soon turned to another couple, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, who were engaged a few years ago and had gone to a bakery in suburban Denver, Colorado, with Charlie’s mom to order a wedding cake for their upcoming nuptials. The bakery told Charlie and David point blank that it would not bake them a wedding cake because they were gay. As reported in The Denver Post, the bakery owner simply told Charlie and David simply: “Sorry guys, I don’t make cakes for same-sex weddings.” They did not even discuss the design of the cake, and according to the bakery owner, the entire “conversation was just about 20 seconds long.”

Charlie and David were stunned. Colorado law prohibits businesses from discriminating against customers on the basis of disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry. The bakery’s denying Charlie and David service because of their sexual orientation was a clear violation of the law. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission and the Colorado Court of Appeals agreed, and the Colorado Supreme Court saw no need to review the case. But earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court took the case to decide whether the bakery could claim rights to freedom of speech and religion that could permit it to ignore the state’s anti-discrimination law when it comes to LGBT couples like Charlie and David. The Court will hear oral argument in the case on December 5, 2017, and will likely rule by the end of June 2018.

It then occurred to us that if the Supreme Court permits the Colorado bakery to discriminate, the local bakery that baked Lisa and Mike’s engagement cookies could conceivably refuse to provide services to us and other LGBT couples it if were our engagement party. We soon realized the bakery might also be able to refuse to make the same cookies or a wedding cake for Lisa and Mike themselves. Lisa is a person of color, and a bakery that wanted to discriminate against her on that basis could assert that the laws prohibiting race discrimination did not apply to them because of freedom of religion or speech. And further, Lisa was born overseas and adopted when she was a few weeks old, so the bakery could try to ignore the laws prohibiting national origin and ancestry discrimination.

It doesn’t stop there. Lisa and Mike are an interracial couple, and the bakery could try to deny them service on that ground as well. After all, if a business owner’s personal religious beliefs allow the business to ignore anti-discrimination laws, still more injustice is possible. Consider that the trial court judge in the U.S. Supreme Court case that struck down laws banning interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia, stated:  “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents … . The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

If the Supreme Court rules against LGBT people like Charlie and David, the decision could have implications for many businesses, and not just bakeries. The Denver Post reports that the bakery owner has often been asked, “What would Jesus do?” His response, “Well, you know, in my opinion—Jesus was a carpenter. I don’t think he would have made a bed for their wedding … .”

Putting aside the fact that the emphasis of Jesus’ teachings is love and that he never addressed homosexuality, much less marriage for LGBT people, the bakery owner’s answer illuminates how sweeping a negative decision from the U.S. Supreme Court could be. It could open the door not only for businesses to refuse to sell beds or, for that matter, anything else to LGBT couples, but also for restaurants to turn away LGBT diners. Myriad other businesses could refuse to serve LGBT people, and all based on claims that doing so violated the owners’ religious beliefs.

The marriage equality movement is about our common humanity, our common need for dignity and respect, and our common inclination to love. Discrimination demeans and stigmatizes those people who are its objects. But it ultimately harms those who practice it, too, because it deprives them and those around them of the opportunity to understand and appreciate diversity and to recognize our common humanity.

An unusually large number of high profile mass tragedies have taken place in our county over the last few months. Amidst the human suffering, stories emerge of people instinctively and spontaneously helping strangers—from rescuing them from flood waters to covering their bodies to protect them from bullets to helping them escape approaching flames—and all before their minds had a chance to categorize the stranger and to evaluate whether or not they wanted to help them.

Our laws against discrimination are a vehicle for people to act everyday with those highest intentions—for jobs, housing, and businesses to be open to everyone, regardless of who they are or whom they love. We look to the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2018 to affirm our laws against discrimination—just in time to celebrate at Lisa and Mike’s wedding.

LGBT Life in China:  Obstacles and Inspiration
October 5, 2017

We realized that things would be a bit different on our recent trip to China to talk about love, marriage, and LGBT equality when organizers of our first event told us that they would not be publicizing it on the internet for fear the government would shut it down.  Yet people came, and we talked honestly and openly about our lives and our hopes for the future – and the importance of our dignity as LGBT people.  Homosexuality was first documented in China over 2,600 years ago; yet today coming out is very difficult, and homosexuality is something that many Chinese do not know or talk about.  An extraordinary group of LGBT activists is working to change all of that and improving the lives of Chinese LGBT people in critical ways.

China decriminalized homosexuality 20 years ago, and in 2001 the country removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. There are gay bars and LGBT community organizations in larger cities, and Shanghai Pride held its 9^th annual celebration this year.  Victims of conversion therapy have won two recent lawsuits against the institutions that inflicted it upon them.  Last year, a gay couple brought an unsuccessful marriage equality lawsuit that garnered significant publicity.  The sixth annual AIDS Walk Great Wall (the only AIDS walk you can see from outer space) took place this fall.

However, China is currently undergoing a period of extensive repression in which those is power are attempting to exert more control over people’s lives and the internal workings of the government.  One activist even termed it a “second Cultural Revolution,” referring to the period from the 1966-1976 led by Mao Zedong in which millions of people were persecuted for failing to conform to party ideology.

A number of activists explained to us that the crackdown is not aimed particularly at LGBT people – it’s a broader effort to exert social and political control – but it’s hurting the LGBT community, especially given the current importance of public education, outreach, and building community.  The government in the past year has forbidden depictions of homosexuality among many other things in television, films, and online broadcast media.  New regulations severely hamper the work of foreign NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in China, including those who support local LGBT organizations.  Government security has interfered with public LGBT events.  One activist told us that they had to “play Tai Chi” with the government, referring to the centuries-old Chinese art of movement that involves sensing what’s going on around you and knowing how and when to assert and when to yield.

The Tai Chi metaphor may apply more generally to LGBT life in China given how queer people articulated to us the particular challenges with respect to family expectations and social conformity they had to negotiate.  Many people in telling their personal stories illuminated how difficult it was to come out because of the society’s lack of familiarity with what it means to be LGBT, limited means of getting information, and strong cultural and familial pressures to marry a person of the opposite sex and have children.  After all, as America in the 1960s and 70s was undergoing the sexual revolution and the Stonewall riots marked the symbolic beginning of the modern American LGBT movement, the repressive Cultural Revolution was taking place in China, and Chinese people have not had fully open access to media and information in the years since.

One person put it starkly, saying that he believed the majority of Chinese people simply fulfill expected roles in their lives – father, mother, son, daughter – and lacked the ability to exercise agency over their lives.  In one discussion group, a gay man who had once found love with a high school classmate until his parents cut off the relationship, seemed saddened and resigned as he talked about possibly giving up on coming out and instead entering into a heterosexual marriage to please his parents.  Many in the group seemed to understand exactly why he would do that. Coming out to parents seemed particularly formidable even for some leaders of LGBT organizations, and more than one person told us that if they came out to their parents, their parents might have a heart attack and die.  In this environment, coming out in the workplace in the face of possible stigma and discrimination can be very challenging as well.

One leader likened internalized homophobia to the severe air pollution for which many big Chinese cities are infamous. He exhorted the group:  “We must cleanse ourselves of the pollution of homophobia, just as we need to clean the air we breathe.” The facilitator of that meeting asked us to lead a simple call and response, repeating:  “It’s great to be gay.  It’s great to be just the way you are.”  The amazing Beijing LGBT Center and other organizations are working tirelessly to train counselors, therapists, and other health care professionals so that they can help LGBT clients rather than shun them.

Yet other LGBT people told very different stories, and people’s lives seemed to differ widely based on where they lived, their education and employment, and their access to international travel and media.  A middle-aged gay man who had been married to a lesbian for years to please their parents told us he had finally come out to his sibling and moved in together with his boyfriend.  Others described family coming out experiences that sounded very similar to successful American coming out stories.  Another man and his partner were anticipating the birth of their first child through a surrogate in America and would soon be traveling to the States to marry when the child was born, although China would not recognize the marriage.  His parents were looking forward to having a grandchild, and he seemed unconcerned about what his neighbors might think.  In fact, we met the founder of a Chinese business that arranges for couples, both gay and straight, to have children through surrogates living outside the country.

We also met with members of PFLAG China, a vibrant nationwide organization with active groups in big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu, as well as in more remote areas of the country.  Earlier this year, hundreds of LGBT people and their parents took part in the 10^th Annual PFLAG China National Conference held on a ocean cruise between China and Japan, that featured the marriage of nine LGBT couples and many other colorful and meaningful events. Eleven brave PFLAG moms earlier this year also came to Shanghai’s famous “marriage market,” where every weekend parents of heterosexual children gather in a famous park with photos and resumes in hand to matchmake. The PFLAG moms decided to come to try to find mates of the same sex for their gay children.  Other parents started a contentious argument, causing security to come and force the PFLAG moms to leave.  But it was an amazing act of bravery and LGBT visibility through the power of parental love and acceptance.  We met another activist who had been held by the police because he was a leading a public event where people were simply offered the opportunity to express love and support for LGBT people.  The stress of all of this can take an emotional toll on participants.

During our visit, a short film we made screened as part of a queer film series, and we got to know members of China’s film and arts scene, many of whom have created and run LGBT-themed film and arts organizations that bring much sought after queer content to LGBT audiences.   Many seemed to be living life full tilt and leading very international lives, coming and going as they attend overseas film festivals and at times living abroad for arts fellowships or higher education.  One person – far from fearing not conforming to his parents’ expectations – emancipated himself from them overseas.  Another spoke of the need to explode marriage and most other societal institutions, perhaps not surprisingly given how oppressive they currently can be to LGBT people in China.  Another artist had the guts to sue the government when his LGBT public education film had been removed from the internet a couple years ago.  The entire film program in which our film was screened needed to be reviewed by the government before it could be shown.  And a number of artists and activists were actively seeking to leave China because of the oppression.

Above all, we treasure the human connections, mutual support and camaraderie we built with the people we met. Unlike other places we have given presentations, groups in China were particularly interested in hearing how we have kept our relationship together for three decades:  What was our biggest conflict?  How did we resolve differences?  Have we ever considered breaking up?  We ended up telling audiences things we had previously only shared with close friends.  And in discussion groups, participants gave each other the opportunity to be heard and to witness each other’s struggles and aspirations. In setting up one of our presentations and discussion groups, we worked closely with wonderful people who lead Chinese groups of radical faeries.  This type of sharing and support are the core of faerie heart circles.

The current nationalistic policies of the American and Chinese governments may tend to separate its citizens, but what we share as LGBT people connects us across oceans and national boundaries.  We feel part of one movement. Chinese activists told us that the marriage equality victory in America and the gains for LGBT rights here were helping change things in China.  And as we witnessed firsthand the dedication, energy, courage, creativity and intelligence of Chinese LGBT activists in the face of government repression, we left inspired by what they have achieved and convinced more than ever that we in the LGBT community in America must use our freedom to the utmost.  Their work is testament to the power of grassroots, person-to-person education and community building. In the end, we educated and inspired each other – which is exactly what the LGBT community can do when it’s at its best.

Previous Columns:

A Love Affair with Edie Windsor
September 21, 2017

Although we met Edie Windsor only once, we’ll never forget the moment. It was on the steps of the United States Supreme Court back in March 2013, just minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court had concluded oral argument in Edie’s landmark lawsuit challenging the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”).

Edie had just finished a formal press conference, but she really wanted to be where her heart was: with all of the LGBTQ people gathered outside the Supreme Court that historic day. Edie was not to be denied—either before the Justices of the Court or with the LGBTQ community on the Court steps. As her legal team attempted to marshal her off the Supreme Court plaza, Edie, like the 84-year-old lesbian fireball of spirit, energy, and joy she was, stretched out her arms—really her entire body—to be part of all those gathered, including us.

When Time magazine honored Edie as Number 3 on its 2013 “Person of the Year” list, she responded: “The gay community is my ‘person of the year.’” She explained, “I am just one person who was part of the extraordinary and ongoing fight for marriage equality for all our families. There are thousands of people who helped us come this far and we still have a lot more work to do … . I look forward to continuing to fight for equal rights and educate the public about our lives alongside my gay brothers and sisters and our allies.”

Edie was a long-time grassroots activist. She was an early active member of Marriage Equality New York, then Marriage Equality USA (MEUSA), the grassroots organization with which we worked for many years. Always feisty and outspoken, Edie recounted in the new anthology The People’s Victoryhow, when an LGBT leader at a community meeting urged patience in seeking marriage equality, she raised her hand and demanded: “I’m 77 years old and I can’t wait!! What do we have to do?”

A key reason for urgency on Edie’s part was that her partner of over 40 years, Thea, was very ill with advanced multiple sclerosis.  A tireless fighter, Edie went to every rally or event she could. At an organizing meeting, Edie met MEUSA leaders Michael Sabatino and Robert Voorheis, who made the connection that led to Edie marrying Thea in Canada.

Michael and Robert recount in The People’s Victory how Edie and Thea flew to Toronto, Canada, and were married by Canada’s first openly gay judge, Justice Harvey Brownstone, in May 2007. “Thea required assistance to get on and off the plane and to disassemble and reassemble her wheelchair. Edie recalled, ‘I couldn’t put a ring on her finger without someone holding her hand out because Thea was no longer able to lift her hand herself.’”

When Thea died, Edie had to pay over $363,000 in federal estate taxes because they were lesbians and the federal government would not recognize their marriage. Edie wanted to rectify this injustice through a federal lawsuit. When a number of LGBT leaders and organizations believed that her case was not the best one to challenge DOMA, Edie persisted and found private counsel to bring the case. Eventually, everyone—including the U.S. Justice Department itself—worked to achieve victory at the Supreme Court.

The Court found Edie’s story and the multitude of harms that DOMA inflicted on thousands and thousands of same-sex couples compelling, and declared DOMA unconstitutional. Justice Ginsburg later described Edie and Thea’s relationship as a “grand partnership.” At oral argument in Edie’s case, Justice Ginsburg opined that while heterosexual couples have “full marriage,” DOMA relegated same-sex couples like Edie and Thea to a second class, “skim milk marriage.”

The Supreme Court’s Windsor decision is powerful. In striking down DOMA, Justice Kennedy wrote: “DOMA instruct[ed] all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage [was] less worthy than the marriages of others.” DOMA’s purpose was to “injure” and “disparage” married same-sex couples and to make them “unequal” to everyone else. As such, DOMA violated the constitutional rights of LGBT couples.

Whenever we give presentations about marriage equality, we tell Edie and Thea’s story. On one memorable occasion, a middle school student, upon hearing how unfairly DOMA had treated Edie, yelled spontaneously in front of an entire school assembly, “That’s bulls–t!” Edie would have loved it.

Edie’s story is testament to the importance of standing up and speaking out over and over again. Her story is filled with love—and inspiration, and hope for LGBTQ people in the face of adversity. Edie embodies the power of our everyday personal stories and grassroots activism to change hearts and minds all across America all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Edie once described her experience after the Supreme Court victory to The New Yorkermagazine as follows: “I don’t know how to say it that’s not corny as hell—I’ve been having a love affair with the gay community” and “I think Thea would love it.”

As we honor Edie at the time of her passing away, we are confident that the community—and America’s—love affair with Edie will live on for generations to come.

From Naughty to Nice
August 24, 2017

When I first came out as gay to my family over 30 years ago, my mom was wonderfully accepting. She already knew. For weeks before I actually told her one summer evening while I was home from college, she kept saying to me: “If there’s anything you want to tell me, I just want you to know that I will be very accepting … .” And so, one evening, I came out to her, and we had a great conversation. When she met John a few years later, I asked her what she thought of him, and she responded: “He’s nice.”  But quickly realizing that could sound like damning by faint praise, she exclaimed: “Nicer than nice!” She thought he was great, and quickly loved him as one of her own.

As news about my being gay spread through my mother’s side of the family, however, word got back to me that a few in my extended family didn’t necessarily think it was so “nice” that I was gay. I learned that one of my Chinese aunties said she’d heard through the family grapevine I was “naughty.” In general, there was a feeling among some of the family that we don’t talk about sexuality, love, and relationships. We don’t even know how to talk about such things. We don’t even do so with respect to straight people, and we certainly don’t know how to do so with respect to people who might be “naughty.”

Over the decades, John became completely integrated into my large extended family. He has planned family reunions, supported family members through illness and death, and cooked our traditional family dishes for our annual Chinese New Year celebrations. When John and I first married during San Francisco’s February 2004 “Winter of Love,” the date coincided with our family’s annual New Year gathering. The 2004 marriages were so spontaneous and joyful that my family toasted us with champagne and showered us with congratulations at that year’s annual family gathering.

The initial reticence on the part of some of my family to talk about LGBT life has been reflected in the broader society in varying ways in different cultural contexts in America, Asia, and other parts of the world. Last week, however, John and I spoke about marriage equality and LGBT issues to university students from Taiwan, China, and Japan studying this summer at Stanford University as part of the Volunteers in Asia program.

If these students’ interest and excitement in learning about, and talking about, marriage equality and LGBT life—and their support for LGBT people—is any indication of things to come on a broader level, then enormous change is taking place in Asia, just as it did in my own family years before. The students’ thirst for knowledge about LGBT people’s lives was palpable. Our presentation began at 7:00 pm, and three and a half hours later at 10:30 pm, many students were still actively engaging with us with many insightful questions and comments about LGBT life in America and their home countries. We could have gone on all night.

The Taiwanese students beamed with pride when we and they talked about the historic court decision in favor of marriage equality in Taiwan, making it the first country in Asia with marriage equality. Students from all of the countries applauded the victory. One student spoke about her activism as a Taiwanese lesbian. Another added, “I was there!” when we showed a photograph of the massive celebration the day of the victory. A 2014 poll found that 70 percent of Japanese in their 20s and 30s support full marriage equality. Many students asked perceptive questions about LGBT physical and mental health, legal issues about relationship and employment discrimination, and ways to improve life for LGBT students in schools.

Speaking with us at Stanford were our friends, the Tan Mercado family, two moms and their twin sons now in college, who were leaders in the fight against DOMA and discrimination against bi-national LGBT couples. Eight years ago, ICE arrested one of the moms in the wee hours of the morning at their home. Today, they are a legally married couple, with one of their sons a Stanford undergraduate and one of the coordinators of the Volunteers in Asia summer program. The entire family came and told their story of standing up for their family and those of many others, and of overcoming adversity. They shared the message that love makes a family. Their very presence allowed students to learn about LGBT families directly, and to see firsthand how terrific children of same-sex parents can turn out. After the formal presentation ended, the students surrounded them with support and questions about their lives.

By far the question the most students asked us was the best one: “When we go back to our home countries, how can we help?”  It’s the question that gives us the most hope and inspiration—that together, LGBT people in Asia and America are moving forward on the ongoing journey from “naughty” to “nice” … even nicer than nice!

The Power of Love
August 10, 2017

Three months ago, a young gay couple in their 20s in Aceh, Indonesia, was caned 83 times before a jeering crowd outside of a mosque after a Sharia court convicted them of the “crime” of the physical expression of their love for each other. According to news reports, vigilantes stormed the couple’s home and found them in bed together. BBC News described the scene of their torture: “The (gay) men stood on stage in white gowns praying while a team of hooded men lashed their backs with a cane … . A large crowd of observers cheered as the caning took place. ‘Let this be a lesson to you,’ one of the men watching cried out. ‘Do it harder,’ another man yelled.”

A BBC reporter who witnessed the flogging described how “you could definitely see … [the victims’] emotion[s]” on their faces, how “they were gripping their hands tightly” and how “extremely frightened and shaken” one of them was. The caning took place after the men survived two months in a prison with many homophobic inmates. The BBC reported that one of the men was in the final years of medical training to become a doctor, but that his university has now expelled him.

In addition to the obvious trauma these actions inflicted on the couple, the flogging spread fear across the LGBT community in Indonesia—as have anti-LGBT atrocities spread great fear in Chechnya. Recently, 141 people were arrested at what Indonesian police called a “gay sex party” in the nation’s capital Jakarta.

The arrest and flogging horrified us as it did millions of other people around the world, as has the shocking oppression taking place in Chechnya. We felt a visceral connection to the couple, and imagined how terrified we would be if vigilantes broke into our bedroom in the middle of night as we rested in bed together. We reflected on the threat to the men’s lives in prison and the physical pain and indignity they suffered at the flogging. We wondered if we would have the fortitude to survive such an imprisonment and flogging as they did.

Although we have never endured anything remotely comparable to what this young couple did, we identified personally with their experience because we, like many other LGBT people, have feared for our physical safety and faced public shaming because of who we are and whom we love. Indeed, no other aspect of our being able to marry legally was more powerful than the sense of dignity it gave us as citizens. As the final words of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark nationwide marriage equality decision reads, LGBTQ people “ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law” and “the Constitution grants them that right.”

But perhaps the most important connection we experienced to the couple was that of love. Amidst all that happened to them, we thought about how much these two gay men loved each other. They risked everything for their love, and the physical and emotional tenderness of their care for each other was more than the vigilantes, the torturers and the taunting crowds could bear. For years, we marched down Market Street as part of marriage equality contingents in the annual Pride Parade, shouting to the crowds, “It’s all about love! It’s all about pride!”

This young gay couple in Aceh inspires us. Our hearts go out to them and are with them. We dare to hope that their love survives. We dare to dream that someday “love wins” in Aceh and in the rest of Indonesia and the world.

Celebrating 6/26 Now and in the Future
July 27, 2017

We title our column “6/26 and Beyond” because, for the last fourteen years, June 26 has been the day the U.S. Supreme Court issued its key pro-LGBT equality decisions. 2017 was no exception. On June 26, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Pavan vs. Smith made even more explicit what it had already made clear before: When it comes to marriage, government must treat same-sex couples the same as different-sex couples.

In some ways akin to a number of states’ resistance to integrating public schools in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, a handful of states have tried to evade the clear dictates of the U.S. Supreme Court’s two landmark marriage equality decisions—Obergefell, recognizing the freedom to marry nationwide, and Windsor, striking down federal government discrimination against married same-sex couples.

One such state is Arkansas, where the state Department of Health in 2015 refused to put both same-sex spouses’ names on birth certificates for children conceived through artificial insemination as the department does for different-sex couples. Last year, a divided Arkansas Supreme Court upheld this discrimination. Last month, however, the U.S. Supreme Court said “no way”—in Pavan, a per curiam decision, issued without even the need for full briefing or oral argument. Per curiam decisions are “reserved for cases where ‘the law is settled and stable, the facts are not in dispute, and the decision below is clearly in error,’” and the Court found that Pavan was one of those cases.

In the opening line of the opinion, the Supreme Court repeated loud and clear its holding in Obergefell: “the Constitution entitles same-sex couples to civil marriage ‘on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.’” The Court went on to explain that Arkansas’ “differential treatment [of same-sex couples] infringes Obergefell’s commitment to provide same-sex couples ‘the constellation of benefits that the States have linked to marriage.’”

The Court further stated: “Obergefell proscribes such disparate treatment. As we explained there, a State may not ‘exclude same-sex couples from civil marriage on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.’” And the Court pointed out that birth certificates were one of the specific examples the Obergefell court gave of “the ‘rights, benefits, and responsibilities to which same-sex couples, no less than opposite-sex couples, must have access.”

Sadly, newly appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justices Thomas and Alito, filed a groundless and unprincipled dissenting opinion. In a 2016 speech turned law review article submitted to the Senate for his confirmation hearings, Gorsuch addressed the importance of precedent in the American legal system. He said: “[E]ven when a hard case does arise, once it’s decided it takes on the force of precedent, becomes an easy case in the future, and contributes further to the determinacy of our law. Truly the system is a wonder and it is little wonder so many throughout the world seek to emulate it.”

What truly is a wonder is how Gorsuch could not see that Obergefell is undeniably precedent and Pavan was an easy case. Significantly, Chief Justice Roberts, who strongly dissented in the Obergefell decision, did not join Gorsuch’s dissent. Per curiam decisions have no named author, and individual justices are not required to indicate their votes on such decisions. Roberts’ decision not to dissent by name, however, may mean he respects Obergefell as precedent, even though he disagrees with it.

Pavan should send an unmistakable message to other states and lower courts who might attempt to sidestep the clear constitutional protections of liberty and equality that Obergefell and Windsor afford LGBT couples. Just four days after Pavan was decided, however, the Texas Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision, allowing a lawsuit to proceed that challenges whether local governments must provide health insurance and other spousal benefits to married same-sex couples when it does so to different-sex couples. And even after Pavan, Indiana continues to defend in court its differential treatment of same-sex couples with respect to birth certificates.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s enforcement of the Constitution’s guarantees of liberty and equality for LGBT people remains critical to our lives. The composition of the Supreme Court is vital to future success. We still need more 6/26 victories in the future. With rumors abounding as to whether Justice Kennedy, the author of all of the Court’s landmark gay rights decisions, may retire as early as next year, many who support LGBT equality, women’s rights, and myriad other concerns are anxious.

Doing everything we can to flip the U.S. Senate in 2018 to a chamber that will only confirm a Justice who respects the constitutional and other legal rights of LGBT people is a strategic priority. Everything we as LGBT people have done for decades to win the hearts and minds of millions of Americans helps us inside the courtroom. Now, more than ever, is the time to engage.

A Victory for Love 120 Years in the Making
July 13, 2017

When Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and other gay rights pioneers founded the first LGBT rights advocacy organization in the world in Berlin, Germany, in 1897, did they envision revelers at Berlin’s famous Brandenburg Gate, just meters from the Reichstag, the seat of the German government, celebrating the attainment of marriage equality in Germany 120 years later? Perhaps they actually did. Back in 1919, Hirschfeld prophesied: “Soon the day will come when science will win victory over error, justice a victory over injustice, and human love a victory over human hatred and ignorance.”

A century later, Maik Beermann, one of the 393 German Parliamentarians voting in favor of equality put it simply: “As a father, I want my daughters to grow up in a country where they enjoy the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else, regardless of whether they love men or women.” And Thomas Oppermann, the parliamentary leader of the Social Democratic Party proclaimed: “If the Constitution guarantees one thing, it is that anyone in this country can live as they wish.”

Marriage equality in Germany is hugely significant for many reasons. Today, Germany plays an increasingly leading role in maintaining a unified Europe and, in recent years, has accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East, North Africa, and other places. Full marriage equality conveys the importance of dignity and respect for LGBT people to the rest of Europe and to new immigrants arriving from around the world.

Activists hope that momentum from the victory in Germany will bring equality to neighboring Switzerland and Austria, both German-speaking countries. Kathrin Bertschy of Switzerland’s Green Liberal Party told the TagesAnzeigenewpaper that with the German vote “[m]arriage for all is now unstoppable internationally.” Cédric Wermuth of the Swiss Social Democratic Party tweeted: “Switzerland must follow suit NOW. Discrimination is the only thing that is perverted.” Thousands of people also recently marched demanding marriage equality in Northern Ireland, the only part of the United Kingdom without equality. The country of Malta is poised to enact marriage equality in July.

Further, the German victory underscores the importance of strategic political organizing by proponents of LGBT rights, even when they do not hold parliamentary majorities in government. For years, marriage equality was stalled in Germany because German Chancellor Angela Merkel refused to let the issue come to a vote in Parliament, despite the fact that a January 2017 Federal Anti-Discrimination Bureau poll showed a staggering 83 percent of the public in favor of marriage equality.

But Germany will hold elections in September, and the Social Democratic Party, a key coalition partner with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party in the current coalition government, and the Green Party announced in late June they would make marriage equality legislation a condition for any future coalition governing agreement. Within days Merkel called for a Parliamentary vote where members were free to vote their conscience, and within the week, Parliament passed marriage equality with 75 members of Merkel’s party voting in favor.

Although Merkel voted against marriage equality, she strongly urged unity after the vote, hoping the vote would engender “social peace and togetherness.” With her words, she appeared to be attempting to set a tone of less polarization and divisiveness in the society. On the other side of the world, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who claims to support marriage equality but is blocking a free conscience vote in the Australian Parliament despite clear public support for equality, would do well to follow Merkel’s example.

The LGBT rights movement in Germany did not follow a linear upwards trajectory since its beginning in 1897. One of most enduring images of persecution of LGBT people in the West is the pink triangle that gay male prisoners were forced to wear in the Nazi concentration camps. Beginning in the 1970s, the LGBT rights movement reclaimed the pink triangle as a symbol of bravery and pride (see page 6), and today Germany has marriage equality, a key element in the critical process of integrating protections for LGBT people into the institutions of society. The triumph embodies Magnus Hirschfeld’s vision of the victory of “human love … over human hatred and ignorance,” “science … over error,” and “justice … over injustice”—a vision just as relevant to the world today as it was a century ago.

A Great Leap Forward for Marriage Equality
June 22, 2017

With this year’s theme of San Francisco Pride, “A Celebration of Diversity,” we are thrilled to celebrate a great leap forward in the worldwide marriage equality movement: last month’s legal victory in Taiwan that will make the nation the first in Asia to have marriage equality. “I’m leaping with joy like a bird,” exclaimed Taiwanese LGBTQ activist Chi Chia-wei, one of the parties to the suit, who was has been fighting for the right to marry for over 30 years, according to the Agence France-Presse (AFP). His words reawaken the joy that we and millions of others experienced during Pride two years ago when marriage equality became the law of the land across America.

The victory in Taiwan is particularly exciting for us as a biracial Chinese American family. We remember participating thirteen years ago in the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance’s historic marriage equality float in the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade, the first of its kind in any Chinese New Year parade in the world, beamed to television audiences across Asia. Our float boldly proclaimed that the Chinese symbol of marriage, double happiness 囍, should be available to all. We are delighted to see that vision starting to become a reality in Asia itself.

We and Asian LGBTQ activists hope that the victory in Taiwan will have ripple effects across the continent. “This will have a huge impact on mainland China. Next stop, Hong Kong, then mainland proper,” proclaimed a Chinese social media user, as reported by Radio Free Asia. Although Taiwan and China differ politically, they share deep cultural and familial roots. Ray Chan, Hong Kong’s first openly gay lawmaker, told AFP that he could foresee Hong Kong couples going to Taiwan to try to marry and then returning home and pressing the government for recognition of their relationships.

Japanese activist friends also welcomed the news, noting the importance of marriage equality becoming a reality “not only in western countries but also in Asia.” Vuong Kha Phong, a Vietnamese LGBTQ advocate proclaimed the Taiwan decision “a historic victory for the LGBT groups in Asia,” and looked to the decision to build “momentum to mobilize the community to take action” as Vietnam will reconsider its marriage laws in 2020, according to the AFP.

The language and reasoning of the Taiwan Constitutional Court’s historic decision itself is very strong. In an official press release, the Court proclaimed Taiwan’s exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage “obviously a gross legislative flaw.” The Court highlighted how Chi Chia-wei had been appealing to different branches of the government for the right to marry for “more than three decades.” It concluded that “after more than a decade” of the legislature being “unable to complete its legislative process on those bills regarding same-sex marriage,” the time was up.

The Court found that denying same-sex couples the ability to marry violated lesbian, gay, and bisexual people’s fundamental constitutional freedom “to decide ‘whether to marry’ and ‘whom to marry,’” a choice “vital” to “human dignity.” The Court also made an expansive ruling with respect to sexual orientation discrimination, holding that the Constitution’s equality guarantees required “heightened” judicial scrutiny of differential treatment based on sexual orientation, and that the marriage exclusion could not withstand such scrutiny. By applying “heightened” scrutiny explicitly, the Taiwan court went further than the U.S. Supreme Court has, and it is past time for the American court to take this critical step.

The Taiwan Court gave the legislature and other responsible authorities two years to comply with the ruling and “discretion” as to “the formality … for achieving the equal protection of the freedom of marriage” for same-sex couples. We and Taiwanese LGBTQ activists believe that full marriage equality is the only way to achieve this result. If the legislature fails to act in two years, same-sex couples will be able to marry under current procedures.

According to the AFP, Chi Chia-wei was jailed for five months after filing his first petition for the right to marry, back in 1986.  That was the same year the U.S. Supreme Court held that states could imprison LGBTQ people for the physical expression of their love. Today, both countries’ highest courts have ruled in favor of marriage equality. Chi told the AFP that he has “been able to carry on for so long” because he “wasn’t discouraged by the setbacks.” He said: “My belief is that if you can do one right thing in this life, it’s all worth it.”

As our community continues to pursue full LGBTQ freedom and equality on both sides of the Pacific, we take inspiration this Pride season from Chi’s optimism and perseverance and the collective work of countless other Taiwanese LGBTQ activists.  They remind us all that we are “doing the right thing” and “it’s all worth it.”

Celebrating Pride as We Remember Orlando
June 8, 2017

As we mark the first anniversary of the Orlando massacre in which 49, mostly Latinx, members of the LGBTQ community were murdered and 53 others were wounded at the Pulse Nightclub, we find ourselves reflecting on how sobering the events in the early hours of June 12, 2016, were.

Stuart had gotten up earlier than John had that Sunday morning, and as soon as he heard John rustling awake, he rushed to him to tell him that something horrific had happened the night before. We watched Christine Leinonen, mother of Christopher “Drew” Leinonen who together with his partner Juan Ramon Guerrero were killed that night, desperately seek news of her son’s fate on live television and plea for an end to “the hatred and the violence” and to “do something with the assault weapons.”

A year ago, Janiel Gonzalez described what had happened inside the bar to the Palm Beach Post: “I was ordering a Red Bull at the bar … . As I was signing my tab, out of nowhere … [I heard rapid gunfire] … . [I]t got louder and louder … . He kept on shooting and shooting and shooting … . I could smell the ammo in the air.” And “[w]hen I dropped to the floor … [I] saw people crying and covered in blood.”

Shawn Roysten, who also survived the massacre, explained in the Los Angeles Times: “There were so many bodies, so much blood.”  Eddie Justice lost his life that night when the gunman found him hiding in the bathroom. Shortly before he died he texted his mother: “Mommy I love you … . In club they’re shooting … . He’s coming. I’m gonna die.”

We have been fortunate not to have suffered such brutal and sudden loss in our lives. However, our recent experiences losing close loved ones and consoling others who have lost life partners and dear friends heighten our sense of connection and empathy with all of those who lost loved ones in Orlando. Our hearts are with Orlando and all other victims of gun violence. We hold each other and those we love more tightly.

A year ago, we wrote in this column: “We cannot fully honor the lives of those lost in Orlando on June 12 unless we do everything in our power not just to reduce hatred, but to eliminate access to the firearms that provide the means by which people carry out these types of massacres and other gun violence.”

Today, we ask ourselves: are we doing everything we can? Shortly after the shooting, Lambda Legal’s Deputy Legal Director Hayley Gorenberg wrote that “we must step up and fight to end gun violence.” And we need to do it “now.” And the Human Rights Campaign announced a new “organizational position that the safety of LGBTQ people in the United States requires the adoption of common-sense gun violence prevention measures.” Since then, Donald Trump was elected President with strong support from the National Rifle Association, and today, gun control advocates search for the way forward.

In 1962, Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan pondered in song: “How many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?  How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

Dith Pran, the Cambodian journalist who overcame incalculable odds to survive the Khmer Rouge genocide and whose life was the subject of the movie The Killing Fields, years later opined: “What matters is that we remember and we keep talking and maybe someday we will mean it when we say about a holocaust: ‘never again.’” Shouldn’t that someday be now?

Today, we heed Pran’s words—we remember, we keep talking, and we renew our commitment of a year ago. And this month, we celebrate Pride and all our community has done to reduce hatred, even as we remember all of those we have lost.

Voices of LGBTQ Refugees from Trump’s America
May 17, 2017

Many of us felt the sting of Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States and feared how it would affect our lives.  But as San Francisco Supervisor Jeff Sheehy reminded us at a hearing he convened last week on youth homelessness in the city, Trump’s election has already become a matter of “life and death” for some LGBTQ young people. Such was the case for D. Andrew Porter, a queer youth living in rural western Kentucky when Trump was elected, and who soon thereafter fled to San Francisco with a friend for safety. D. Andrew—who uses the pronoun “they”—shared their story and spoke of the desperate need for better services for homeless youth in powerful testimony they delivered at the hearing.

D. Andrew described how since Trump’s election last November, “threats of violence have drastically increased. A dear friend of mine living in Cookeville, Tennessee, had her car vandalized [and] set on fire … . [S]he was hospitalized after being assaulted.  And the realities set in. And my mother said, ‘If you stay here, you will die. Go.’”

So D. Andrew and a friend went—driving 2,327 miles in two days to San Francisco. D. Andrew, who is 25 years old and has been doing LGBTQ organizing in rural areas since the age of 15, never intended to leave Kentucky for San Francisco. “[B]eing a Southerner and living in Kentucky, all my life people have said: Move to California, move to New York City, move to these big urban spaces. And there you will find open arms and love and affirmation, the things that you are seeking here that we simply cannot provide you.” But D. Andrew “spent many years advocating against that. I’ll be quite frank about it: San Francisco was never where I thought I would end up.” With Trump’s election, D. Andrew felt they no longer had a choice.

Porter is not alone in fleeing to San Francisco, and they warn of potentially greater numbers of LGBTQ youth coming in the future. “The reality is that the refugees of Trump America are going to be younger and younger. Queer youth are coming out sooner and sooner. Trans youth are beginning to transition faster and faster.”

Although D. Andrew found “coming to California … really exciting and liberating,” they didn’t exactly find the “open arms” they had heard about. “Getting to California and … specifically being here in San Francisco, a new set of obstacles were thrown at my feet.” They, like many other homeless youth, found navigating the system to find youth services and housing extremely difficult—“barriers and barriers and barriers … to navigate.” Supervisor Sheehy described how D. Andrew “couch surfed among friends, but eventually ended up living in a cold, unheated industrial garage” before getting a studio apartment they share with two other people.

D. Andrew acknowledged how fortunate they are compared to many other youth because they “had some income saved up” and a network. They didn’t succeed by themselves. “My story is a common one, but my successes are not. And that’s the harsh truth.”  Many homeless youth “feel trapped in a cage of circumstances.”

D. recounted that one day “I was in the Castro and I gave money to a 16-year-old queer youth from Iowa and sat down with her and talked about her story and promised her that the reality is that even in the hardest of times you can do anything for a year … . And … the saddest truth I’ve ever had to say is that if you can’t make it [here] in a year, you probably should move back to less safe spaces, because I’d rather see you move into a more conservative area … than living in California, this space where we talk often about how [many] resources we have and how much we care deeply for these individuals, but … if you are living on the streets, how accessible are those resources to you?”

As Supervisor Sheehy set forth at the hearing, as of 2015, “the city’s point and time count identified 1,569 homeless youth on the street or in shelters,” and that is “probably an undercount.” Nearly half, 48 percent, identify as LGBTQ, and 13 percent are HIV positive. Numerous people who have been working in the field for years spoke at the hearing and identified many steps to take, such as opening navigation centers and drop in centers and providing housing and access to health care to improve the lives of homeless youth. They pointed to the fact that data shows that targeted programs work. Everyone pointed to the lack of financial resources.

As we listened to D. Andrew’s voice as an LGBTQ refugee from Trump’s America, we were above all struck by their strength, compassion, and desire to help others. For years, these qualities have sustained LGBTQ people from all walks of life in the face of myriad challenges. Those of us who have better living conditions than homeless youth are not separate from those of us on the street. We owe it to each other to end the scourge of Trump’s America and to demonstrate as much strength and courage in supporting LGBTQ youth as the youth themselves have shown.

As Supervisor Sheehy concludes, “We talk about refugees from other places in the world, and certainly we have to be a haven for people from other places in the world. But we have an internal refugee problem, specifically for LGBTQ kids, and all across America with what’s happening with Trump America.”

Famous
May 3, 2017

What does it mean to be famous? Such a question seems apt for a college philosophy or ethics class or something that Cher, Madonna, or Lady Gaga might ponder in a quiet moment. However, the query also lies at the heart of an extraordinary concurring opinion to a pro forma, one sentence order in transgender teen Gavin Grimm’s lawsuit to be able to use the bathroom that matches his gender.

In the opinion, Senior Judge Andre Davis of the 4^th Circuit Court of Appeals first praises Grimm’s eloquence, intelligence, and perseverance in pursing justice. In describing Gavin’s courageous testimony before his School Board, Judge Davis notes how Gavin “explained that he is a person worthy of dignity and privacy. He explained why it is humiliating to be segregated from the general population.” Gavin “knew, intuitively, what the law has in recent decades acknowledged: the perpetuation of stereotypes is one of many forms of invidious discrimination.”

But Judge Davis didn’t stop there. He went on to lay out a broader vision of transgender equality and dignity. He wrote that the school board’s treatment of Grimm reveals “the inequities that arise when the government organizes society by outdated constructs like biological sex and gender.” Grimm’s “case is about much more than bathrooms. It’s about a boy asking his school to treat him just like any other boy. It’s about protecting the rights of transgender people in public spaces and not forcing them to exist on the margins. It’s about governmental validation of the existence and experiences of transgender people, as well as the simple recognition of their humanity. His case is part of a larger movement that is redefining and broadening the scope of civil and human rights so that they extend to a vulnerable group that has traditionally been unrecognized, unrepresented, and unprotected.”

Then the 68-year-old senior judge from his seat of enormous power on the federal court of appeals reached out personally to Gavin, the struggling transgender high school senior. He wrote: “by challenging unjust policies rooted in invidious discrimination, [Gavin Grimm] takes his place among other modern-day human rights leaders who strive to ensure that, one day, equality will prevail, and that the core dignity of every one of our brothers and sisters is respected by lawmakers and others who wield power over their lives.” He likened Grimm to such famous names in the law as Korematsu, Brown, Loving, Windsor, and Obergefell—those “who refused to accept quietly the injustices that were perpetuated against them.”

But Judge Davis recognized that the name Gavin Grimm would likely not become a household name like the others. From Judge Davis’s perspective, though, Gavin was already and would continue to be “famous” for a much more important reason. Quoting Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shehab Nye’s poem Famous, Judge Davis stated: “Despite [Gavin’s] youth and the formidable power of those arrayed against him at every stage of these proceedings, ‘[Gavin] never forgot what [he] could do.’”

Nye’s poem Famous reads in part: “The river is famous to the fish. The loud voice is famous to silence, which knew it would inherit the earth before anybody said so … . I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing streets … famous as the one who smiled back. I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.”

Judge Davis is an African American man who grew up in East Baltimore (famous among other things, unfortunately, for its high homicide rate). According to Wikipedia, he was the son of a food services worker and schoolteacher, whose stepfather was a steel worker. Davis attended the prestigious Phillips Academy Andover, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Maryland School of Law. He worked his way up to become a judge of the federal appellate courts, just one tier below the U.S. Supreme Court in the federal judicial system.

Few readers of this column will have heard of Judge Davis before now. We hadn’t before the Gavin Grimm case. When one searches for the name Andre Davis on Google, two different pro football players come up as the top results. However, Judge Andre Davis is, and will always be, famous in our eyes because, in his efforts to fulfill his judicial responsibility to provide justice for Gavin Grimm and other transgender people, Judge Davis himself “never forgot what [he] could do.” He offers all of us the invitation to do the same.

Gay Win-Win: Marriage Equality Saving Lives
March 9, 2017

The U.S. Supreme Court’s two landmark marriage equality decisions contain powerfully eloquent declarations of the dignity and humanity of LGBTQ people. When the decisions were announced, the nation’s newspapers translated the “take home” message of the legal holdings in more down to earth ways.  The New York Daily News front page headline screamed, “U.S. GAY! ‘Equal dignity in the eyes of the law.’” The Montgomery, Alabama, Advertiser proclaimed, “LOVE WINS.” The Lafeyette, Indiana, Journal & Courier declared, “GAY WIN-WIN,” and USA Today’s front page announced, “Rainbow Rulings,” with a huge close-up photograph of a happy gay couple kissing on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court.

For years, we and many others in the marriage equality movement have hoped that our efforts would not only help secure equal marriage rights for LGBTQ couples, but also that our work would help our community achieve equality and dignity in all aspects of our lives. We intended for marriage equality to contribute to decades-long efforts to give LGBTQ youth hope to be able envision their lives in any way they chose and to experience happiness rather than shame in being LGBTQ. But the degree to which all the public education, the legal victories, the sights of LGBTQ people getting married coast to coast, and the bold headlines proclaiming, “U.S. GAY,” were resonating with young people was difficult to assess or quantify—until very recently.

On February 20, 2017, researchers from the Johns Hopkins and Harvard schools of public health announced stunning new findings: the number of adolescent suicide attempts in states that achieved marriage equality from 2004 to the beginning of 2015 dropped dramatically, while states that rejected equality saw no change during the same time period. When the researchers added up all the numbers, they found that over 134,000 fewer adolescents per year attempted suicide in states that adopted marriage equality with no reductions in states that maintained discriminatory laws. In equality states, adolescent suicide rates dropped 7 percent, with a 14 percent drop for lesbian, gay, and bisexual students. And the study found that reductions in suicide attempts were sustained over time, with lower rates remaining two years after legalization.

The study’s lead author, Julia Raifman, observed, “These are high school students so they aren’t getting married any time soon, for the most part;” however, “[t]here may be something about having equal rights—even if they have no immediate plans to take advantage of them—that makes students feel less stigmatized and more hopeful for the future.” Of course, many other concomitant efforts, such as anti-bullying measures and increasing numbers of LGBTQ people coming out in states that adopted marriage equality, could contribute to the improvements, and the study recognized that it could not identify the mechanism by which marriage equality lowered adolescent suicide rates. But interestingly, the study found that the reduction in suicide attempts did not occur until after marriage equality actually passed, and did not take place in the years leading up to the legal victory.

Despite this progress, teen suicide attempts, especially among LGBTQ youth, remain a huge problem. The study reported that in 2015, over 29 percent of LGBQ high school students reported having attempted suicide in the past year, compared to 6 percent of their heterosexual counterparts. In 2015, 34 percent of high school students who reported attempting suicide were LGBQ. Other data suggests that approximately 40 percent of transgender Americans have attempted suicide at some point in their lives.  It appears that the researchers had access only to data that tracked sexual orientation, and consequently were unable to provide information about transgender adolescents.

The “Healthy People 2020” program administered by the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seeks to reduce adolescent suicide rates by ten percent by 2020. The study’s authors note that their “research suggests that the legalization of same-sex marriage has been very effective in making progress toward that goal.” We hope that the new HHS Secretary Tom Price, who has been a staunch opponent of marriage equality, and others in the new administration take note. As Raifman observed, “We can all agree that reducing adolescent suicide attempts is a good thing, regardless of our political views.”

The study provides compelling evidence that legal and public policy pertaining to LGBTQ rights can have profound effects on the mental health and well-being of LGBTQ youth. We look to the U.S. Supreme Court to recognize this fact when they consider the extent to which federal law protects transgender youth later this month.

The Supreme Court in its nationwide marriage equality decision stated: “Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there. It offers the hope of companionship and understanding and assurance that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other.”

Our hope is that the achievement of nationwide marriage equality results in reductions in adolescent suicide attempts nationwide and that fewer LGBTQ youth find themselves calling out in loneliness. We look to the Court, other judges, and lawmakers to recognize the far-reaching impacts of legal protections for LGBTQ people. And when LGBTQ youth call out in loneliness, it’s the responsibility of friends, family, teachers, counselors, and the larger community to be there to provide care and understanding. We must make real the proclamations of the newspaper headlines that “Love Wins” and legal equality is a “Gay Win-Win.”

The complete study, “Difference-in-Differences Analysis of the Association Between State Same-Sex Marriage Policies and Adolescent Suicide Attempts,” can be found at http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2604258

Art Imitates Life in the New TV Show Doubt
March 3, 2017

As we eagerly anticipate the upcoming premiere of the landmark LGBT history miniseries When We Rise, we were excited to see the premiere of another groundbreaking television series that seeks to educate Americans about the lives of LGBT people: Doubt.  Stuart’s high school classmate, television writer Joan Rater, and her husband Tony Phelan are the creators of Doubt, whose all-star cast includes Laverne Cox, who plays a transgender attorney. In an inspiring personal essay published last week in Entertainment Weekly, Joan reveals that her and Tony’s inspiration for Cox’s character was their own teenage transgender son, Tom—and their collective desire to make the world a better place for transgender people to live.

As Joan writes in Entertainment Weekly, she and her husband Tony decided that—after first struggling with and then accepting and embracing their son Tom as transgender—they “want[ed] to be ambassadors” to help educate the public about the real lives of transgender people. They fantasized about “invit[ing] people who think being transgender is scary or weird or wrong over to our house to meet our family that includes our transgender son, and in the end, they see that he’s really sweet and not scary.” But since their house couldn’t fit the millions of people they wanted to reach, Joan recounts, “we wrote a TV show instead,” featuring Laverne Cox as a recurring transgender character.

Joan explains candidly that “when Tommy told us he was transgender, we didn’t know anything about gender identity, so we got really scared. Like panicked and crying.” But Tom provided his parents resources to educate them, and Joan and Tony “let smart people calm us down.” After they calmed down, they realized that Tom “was still the exact same person he was before he told us he was trans, only now he was happier. Once he told us, he felt relieved and was able to be more himself. He became even funnier and nicer. And it was kind of a miracle to our family to see this person that had been sad become happy. We watched this child of ours who had felt so awkward for so long start to feel more comfortable in his own skin.”

“And then we got to create a trans character as a member of the ensemble of Doubt so that people, who didn’t get to witness the miracle of a person being brave enough to be their authentic self in real life, could see it on TV. They could meet Cameron Wirth, as played by Laverne Cox, and fall in love with her because she’s funny and smart as hell and passionate about her clients and gorgeous and needy and lonely and all the things the rest of us are. And once they get to know her, her being trans won’t be scary or alienating. It’ll feel normal. And if we can do that, if we can broaden the idea of normal even a little bit, it’ll be a good thing. And maybe our show can be part of helping people become less afraid.”

We’re proud of Joan and her family, and we’re grateful that Joan and Tony are using their voices as television writers and creators to illuminate the lives and voices of transgender people. As When We Rise dramatizes the lives of LGBT activists, Joan and Tony have become activists themselves by taking their personal story and that of their son and bringing it to the small screen through the transgender character they created.  With the TV show Doubt, art imitates life in the hope that more people can live authentic and happy lives without having to imitate or pretend anymore.

Acting Up and Fighting Back at SFO :
February 9, 2017

As we arrived at SFO two Sundays ago to join thousands of people protesting the Trump administration’s detention of Muslim immigrants at the nation’s airports, our eyes welled up with tears. For weeks, we had tried to maintain a sense of equilibrium, attempting not to follow every internet post about what the new administration might do or indulge our worst fears. As Mark Twain is thought to have said: “Some of the worst things in my life never happened.”  But now, something was happening.  The US government was detaining or refusing entry to hundreds of lawful immigrants and refugees travelling to the US that weekend and denying future entry to thousands of others, based on their religion or national origin.

We wore our old “Immigration Equality” T-shirts that read on the back, “United by Love, Divided by Law.”  We had worn those shirts for years to support LGBT bi-national couples, many of whom until 2013 were denied legal status in America. Suddenly, the shirts had a new and different relevance. We imagined innocent Muslim people being detained in windowless rooms elsewhere in the airport. We took heed of the famous words of Martin Niemöller, the Protestant minister the Nazis imprisoned, that were written on homemade signs at the protest:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Thousands of people were speaking out that day even though they were not necessarily Muslim.  They hoped those in detention at the airport could hear their chants of support; they were present at the airport to welcome any detainees who made it through immigration.

The next day – Monday — we were scrolling through our email when we were stunned to read an ominous alert from a highly credible source:  Later that day Trump might issue another new executive order, this one stripping LGBT federal employees and contractors from protections against discrimination in place for decades and permitting federal discrimination against married same-sex couples and other LGBT people in a wide variety of contexts.  Although LGBT immigrants and refugees would suffer underthe administration’s immigration orders, those orders did not target LGBT people in particular. Now they were coming for us.  We felt sickened, vulnerable, and furious.

But as news of the proposed order started to leak, the White House quickly retreated, issuing a statement that very evening that protections for LGBT employees of government contractors would not be revoked and stating that Trump was “determined to protect the rights of all Americans, including the LGBTQ community” and that he “continue[d] to be respectful and supportive of LGBTQ rights…”  The resistance was having an effect — a small victory.

But we hold no illusion as to the harm that some of Trump’s actions could have on LGBT people and to the anti-LGBT agenda that Mike Pence and others in powerful positions seek to enact.  A different version of the proposed order is being circulated at this very moment.  And the next day, Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch as his pick for the US Supreme Court.  Lambda Legal characterized Gorsuch’s opinions as a federal appellate judge as “open[ing] the door to all manner of assaults on the civil rights of ordinary citizens – including lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people and everybody living with HIV.”

We attend demonstrations to speak out, to be counted, and to remind ourselves of hope.  We gain inspiration and seek to inspire others, especially young people, to further action. We find comfort and community and often see friends and have some fun as well. At the SFO demonstration, we took particular joy hearing thousands of people from all walks of life chanting: “Immigrant rights under attack. What do we do?  Act up! Fight back!” derived from the ACTUP chants that queer HIV/AIDS activists created in the 1980s.

We do our best to mind Martin Niemöller’s words.  Indeed, everyone, including and perhaps especially Trump supporters, should take heed of Niemöller’s cautionary tale. After all, Niemöller was not merely a passive bystander to the rise of Hitler; he was a Nazi and anti-Semite himself until the Nazis came after him and his views about the independence of his church.  Only then did he gain the wisdom for which he is remembered today.

We cannot ultimately control what happens in life, but we have enormous power over our intentions and actions.  Showing up and speaking out has always been fundamental to the success of the LGBT rights movement.  And as a minority, we’ve never been able to win without the help of others.  Thirty years ago, queer ACTUP activists summed up Niemöller’s admonition in two simple words:  Silence = Death.  Those words could not be more meaningful for all people today.  We have pulled our old ACTUP t-shirts out of storage, and we know we will be wearing them again very soon.

Queer Life in the Best Little Neighborhood You’ve Never Heard of: SF’s Portola District
January 26, 2017

We’ve all heard of San Francisco’s famous LGBT neighborhoods such as the Castro and Polk Street, right? But how about the Portola? The “Portowhat?” you might be asking. If so, you’d be like us before we discovered, and then moved to, this wonderfully diverse and down to earth village with a vibrant LGBT presence in the southeast quadrant of the city.

For years, LGBT people in the Bay Area have lived in neighborhoods outside of the Castro and other known enclaves, but generally with less visibility. When we moved to the Portola seven years ago, we were delighted to learn that not only were we the sixth LGBT household on our immediate block, but also that our block sported a radical faerie house and that two of our neighbors hosted an annual Walt Whitman party to celebrate the iconic queer poet’s birthday.

The Portola is also home to a longstanding lesbian community, including our real estate agent, who helped us. Many other LGBT and community-minded residents make a home in the neighborhood. We have tremendous straight ally neighbors too, many of whom have marched with us in the Pride Parade and joined in the Portola Pride Picnic, held in nearby McLaren Park.  A gay couple who moved in a couple years ago took the direct approach to raising queer visibility when they realized that drivers on the nearby 101 Freeway had a perfect view of the back of their house that stood atop one of the neighborhood’s many hills.  They painted the entire rear of the house in the colors of the rainbow flag, earning their home the nickname Chateau Rainbeau.

A Diverse Community

The area, which is now the Portola, was originally inhabited by Native Americans, with the first settlers being Eastern European Jewish immigrants, some of whom termed the community “Little Jerusalem.” Many Italian and Maltese immigrants also came and cultivated numerous rose and other flower nurseries that supplied most of San Francisco’s cut flowers. With last century’s baby boom, the nurseries gave way to housing, and the neighborhood is now home to a diverse spectrum of residents with large numbers of Latinx and Asian Americans. In our immediate area alone, we feel fortunate to have Italian, Maltese, El Salvadoran, Chinese, Filipino, Greek, Irish, African American, European American, Malaysian, Indian, and Iranian American neighbors.

For years, LGBT people have been a vital part of the life of the neighborhood, both taking an active role as community leaders and creating queer-themed events open to everyone. One of the striking things about the Portola is how many neighbors actually know each other and spend time together both to have fun and to make the neighborhood a better place. When we moved in, we were charmed to learn that LGBT and other residents had created a very popular come-one, come-all style holiday party where neighbors can catch up with each other at the nearby Italian American Social Club of San Francisco.

The new queer-friendly microbrewery—Ferment, Drink, Repeat (FDR)—will feature a specially formulated LGBT Pride brew this June and is located on the Portola’s main commercial street, San Bruno Avenue, which boasts a bounty of Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexican, and El Salvadoran restaurants and food stores.

Of course, all is not bliss in the Portola, and creating a community in which diverse people overcome barriers to live in harmony and connection with one another is not always easy.  On the morning of September 7, 2015, the neighborhood was rudely awakened to the sight of graffiti reading “No More Chinese” in multiple locations. The neighborhood reacted swiftly, powerfully, and creatively. Within hours, residents transformed the graffiti to read “[heart sign] more Chinese.” A few days later, a large and diverse group of residents came together for a public rally at one of the spots where the graffiti was painted and together denounced racism and stood up for inclusion and community solidarity. Former Supervisor David Campos, himself a Latino gay man, and Portola Neighborhood Association President Chris Waddling, an immigrant gay man whose husband is Chinese American, were among the community leaders who spearheaded the rally. The man who painted the graffiti turned out to be a long-time resident, and was prosecuted and convicted of multiple counts of vandalism and hate crimes. No such incidents have occurred since.

Drag Queen Bingo, Portolove, and the Goettingen Cascade Project

Nothing embodies the increasing queer visibility in the Portola more than the neighborhood’s semi-annual Drag Queen Bingo fundraisers that support local community projects. They are held at El Toro, San Bruno Avenue’s Latin music and dance club—the former location of Fucile’s Bar, where local legend has it that Frank Sinatra once sang. Anyone LGBT or otherwise interested in experimenting with a bit of gender bending, trying out some flamboyant self-expression, or just plain hanging out and playing bingo with those who do, is welcome to attend. It’s a family friendly event that attracts people of all ages, and last time included both fabulous drag queens dressed to the nines and stylishly handsome drag kings.

The next drag queen bingo—called “Portolove” and hosted by drag queen Van Detta—is coming soon on Thursday, February 9.  It will benefit the Goettingen Cascade Project, an innovative art and greening project that will employ state or the art materials to transform a formerly dilapidated outdoor staircase atop one of the neighborhood’s hills into the appearance of a glowing nighttime waterfall that will also function practically to illuminate the staircase at night for pedestrians. Phillip Hua, an internationally recognized queer artist who lives in the neighborhood with his husband, is the designer of the installation, which is part of the Goettingen Neighbors Group’s years’ long efforts to create beautiful gardens aside the previously neglected passageway. The group is one of many in the neighborhood taking a proactive approach to greening, celebrating gardens, and preserving the area’s historic nurseries. In recognition of these efforts and the neighborhood’s proximity to McLaren Park, the city named the Portola, “San Francisco’s Garden District,” last year.

Last drag queen bingo, we decided that it was time for us to do drag ourselves. But what should marriage equality activist grooms wear? The answer was obvious, and John adorned himself in one of famous marriage equality activist Molly McKay’s historic wedding dresses, while Stuart presented as a dashing butch bride. As John exited El Toro at the end of the evening, a passerby making a bee line to the bus suddenly stopped as she encountered John on the sidewalk. Her mouth agape, she audibly gasped and exclaimed: “How beautiful! Your wedding day!” John smiled and thanked her in the best falsetto he could muster, and she and he both had huge smiles on their faces as she made her way to the bus. Yet another reason we love this diverse, queer thriving, “can do” and “do it yourself” neighborhood we call home: The Portola.

Still Dreaming on MLK Weekend
January 12, 2017

When John attended his 40^th high school reunion in Kansas City last fall, it dawned on him that he and his classmates started kindergarten in early September 1963, less than a week after Martin Luther King delivered his renowned “I Have a Dream Speech” at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In his address, King famously dreamed that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” and that one day, even in Alabama, “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

Despite the many times John had heard the speech, it suddenly hit him that the great civil rights leader had been dreaming about little five-year-old kids like us—our generation. As we approach this weekend’s annual commemoration of King’s birthday, we can only imagine how troubled the visionary might be if he were alive today. King’s words 54 years ago have striking relevance in January 2017, as Americans dedicated to racial, gender, LGBT, immigrant, and economic justice and equality face grave threats and uncertainty.

In 1963 King told it like it was. Reflecting on the fact that Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation a century before, King observed: “[O]ne hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” Over a half century later, the essence of King’s message rings disturbingly true—even though significant improvements have taken place and the particular problems of today differ from those of 1963. And today, economic disparity evidenced by the vast number of Americans living on an “island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity” is reaching a crisis point.

But King did not merely describe problems; he issued a call to action—a charge that still inspires today. King declared: “We have … come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism … . It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.”

Later this month, millions of Americans will travel to the nation’s capital for the Women’s March on Washington. Five decades ago, King warned that “those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual” and proclaimed that “1963 is not an end, but a beginning.” 2017 must be a beginning, too.

King also spoke unapologetically of hope and articulated a long-term vision of how he wanted the world to be. King implored: “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair … . [E]ven though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream … . I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

We in the LGBT community know well the extraordinary value of dreaming, even in the darkest hour. When LGBT Americans routinely faced disapproval and hatred that forced them to live in secret or in denial, we dared to dream of a future in which we could live openly. We came out. When we faced the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, we dreamed of a day when the disease would not ravage our community. We cared for each other and took ownership of our health care in ways never seen before.  Even as the law permitted states to imprison people for being gay, we dreamed of a day when we could marry the person we loved and celebrate all aspects of our love. We achieved nationwide marriage equality. As we face today’s ongoing challenges, we must keep dreaming.

Although King summoned people to stand up fearlessly and nonviolently for their rights and dignity in the face of those who opposed them, his ultimate dream was one of unity—finding shared values and respect and ending divisions, not exacerbating them. He urged, “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” He noted the presence of “many of our white brothers” at the march and reminded everyone gathered, “we cannot walk alone.” In the dynamic climax to his speech, King dreams of the “day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

This King weekend, we wish that King’s vision had already become a reality. But we’ll be sporting our “Don’t Let the Dream Die” buttons—and we won’t take them off until the great visionary’s prophecy comes true.

Deck the Halls of Schools, Workplaces, and Courts with LGBT Equality
December 15, 2016

Whenever we hear the ubiquitous holiday music that pervade the airwaves this time of year, we can’t help but want to sing along — not with the traditional lyrics — but with the new and improved words that Marriage Equality USA wrote and performed for shoppers at this time each year.  For example, to the tune of Jingle Bells, we sang: ”Equal rights, equal rights, equal all the way! Oh what fun it is to sing for equal rights today!”  We followed it up with:  “Deck the Halls with marriage equality! ‘Tis the season for equality! Don we now our gay apparel ….”  And we belted out many others, hoping to bring a smile to people’s faces while spreading a message of the importance of love, dignity, and equality under the law.

This year ‘tis the season for workplace and transgender student equality as LGBT people will don their gay apparel and argue for these essential rights in five key federal cases over this year’s holidays.  These cases could result in rulings of nationwide scope next year or the year following.  It’s time for our entire community, not just the parties and their lawyers, to be engaged in these cases that could shape LGBT rights for decades.

As we have discussed in earlier columns, transgender teen Gavin Grimm’s case to be able to use the school restroom that matches his gender is being briefed before the United States Supreme Court right now for hearing sometime in early 2017.  That case could have a major impact on the rights of transgender people all across the country.  Four other cases asserting that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation as unlawful sex discrimination are now before Federal Courts of Appeals and could easily go to the US Supreme Court later next year.

Two weeks ago, Lambda Legal argued before the 7^th Circuit in Chicago on behalf of Kimberly Hively, a lesbian who asserts that her employer, Ivy Tech Community College, terminated her as a part-time adjunct professor after 14 years of service because of her sexual orientation.  In court papers, Hively explains that she “never had a negative evaluation,” but that she applied for six different full-time positions for which she had all the qualifications and never even got an interview.  Seven months after she filed a discrimination complaint against the college with the EEOC, the school let her go.  After the recent argument before the 7^th Circuit, legal observers believe a favorable outcome is likely.

This week, Lambda Legal argues before the 11^th Circuit in Atlanta on behalf of Jameka Evans, a lesbian hospital worker.  Jameka claims that Georgia Regional Hospital fired her because she publicly identified as a lesbian, did not “carry [her]self in a traditional woman manner,” dressed in traditionally male clothing, e.g., “(male uniform, low male haircut, shoes, etc.),” and did not otherwise “conform” to “gender stereotypes associated with women.”

Just after the New Year, the 2^nd Circuit in New York will hear the case of Donald Zara, a gay skydiving teacher who asserted that he was fired from his job for being openly gay.  Two weeks later, the same court will hear the case of Matthew Christiansen, an openly gay creative director at the international advertising firm, DDB Worldwide Communications Group, whose complaint alleges he suffers from PTSD and severe anxiety and depression because of horrific anti-gay abuse from his boss.  The district judge concluded that the alleged conduct, which included his boss drawing lewd pictures of Matthew on an office whiteboard and circulating to the office and via Facebook a movie poster he altered with Matthew’s “head on the body of a bikini-clad woman ‘in the gay sexual receiving position’” was “by any metric … reprehensible.”

For years, many courts have held that Title VII does not prohibit anti-gay conduct such as that alleged in these cases because Congress made no explicit reference to sexual orientation back in 1964 when it outlawed sex discrimination.  Indeed, the district judge in Matthew’s case stated that prior 2^nd Circuit precedent required her to dismiss his case despite his allegations of his boss’ egregious behavior. The enormous gains in public understanding of the lives of LGBT people, the powerful landmark marriage equality decisions, and a recent EEOC ruling applying Title VII to sexual orientation are causing courts now to openly question the soundness and validity of earlier decisions. The district judge in her opinion explicitly asked the 2^nd Circuit to reconsider its prior decision.

The United States Supreme Court has never addressed the issue of whether employers treating employees unfavorably because of their sexual orientation constitutes sex discrimination under Title VII.  However, the Court has held that Title VII’s plain wording outlaws any form of mistreatment of an employee based on sex, regardless of whether Congress actually considered the particular circumstances back in 1964.  The Court has explained that Title VII‘s prohibition on sex discrimination is broad, encompassing “the entire spectrum of disparate treatment of men and women resulting from sex stereotypes.” Title VII pertains to all employer “treatment of a person in a manner which but for that person’s sex would be different.”

By its plain terms, the crux of sexual orientation discrimination — firing a woman who dates another woman, but not firing a man who dates a woman — is sex discrimination pure and simple.
One recent court described the assumption that a woman will be romantically attracted to a man to be “the quintessential gender stereotype.”  We look to these appellate courts and subsequently the US Supreme Court to come to the same conclusion.

During the marriage equality struggle, we sang “We Wish for Marriage Equality” to the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”  Later in the carol, instead of demanding “figgy pudding” as they did back in 1935 when the song was written, we demanded marriage licenses and vowed “we won’t go until we get them.” This holiday season our community must commit that we won’t go until we get workplace and transgender student equality.  With our community’s enormous talent, resources, and commitment to living our lives freely and openly, we know that together we can.

Inconvenient Truth
December 1, 2016

No aspect of the 2016 election was more unsettling for us than being forced to confront one of life’s most discomforting but universal truths: despite our best efforts to direct a particular result, ultimately we cannot control what happens.

No one knows this truth more deeply than a good friend of ours who, as the final weeks of the election campaign were unfolding, was forced to confront it in the most profound and personal way possible: he learned that the cancer he had been diagnosed with a year earlier had metastasized and was spreading aggressively. He had just a short time left to live. Lying on a hospital bed at home under hospice care, he learned the results of the election. The news troubled him greatly even though he would soon be gone. He no longer had the time or capability to check news sources or follow the particulars of the drama taking place. He knew the essentials of what was going on and had deep concern for the future of all of us left behind.

Our friend, who had spent his entire work life in HIV/AIDS prevention and education, had practiced meditation for many years and invited friends to come sit in meditation with him every morning in his apartment. He grounded us in our breath and guided us in letting go of any tension we were holding in our bodies. He invited us to clear our minds of negative thoughts and emotions that were not helping us.

He offered that while not ignoring harmful things going on, we could view life as an art gallery, seeing beauty and goodness all around us. Our friend had realized that in life “there’s always something else left to do,” but he felt his life was complete. He was radiant. He accepted his impending death and did not fear it. He was grateful for his life, and we were all grateful for him as well. As he was dying, he was clearly very much alive. He said goodbye.

But he didn’t die as he thought he would. Even as he had done the ultimate letting go—accepting, even welcoming his death—life would not let him go just yet. He joked, “I’d really like to be able to have a date I could mark on the calendar for everyone.” Being alive was painful for him both physically and emotionally, and he couldn’t control when he would go. “I’m ready to be gone, but I’m still here.” Most importantly, our friend’s heart remained open. He continued to speak of love and compassion.  His good intentions sustained him, even when he fell short.

Franklin D. Roosevelt in his first inaugural address in 1932 proclaimed: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Roosevelt in the same address declared: “This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.” Our good friend has confronted the fear of death and has been able to choose not to indulge it. He has given us the gift of sharing the truth of the last days of life frankly and boldly. Perhaps his wisdom is part of our way forward.

We’ll Never Give Up
November 24, 2016

Just five months ago we joined thousands of other people at the corner of Castro and Market to come together in the face of the massacre of 49 members of LGBT community at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. We described it in the San Francisco Bay Times as “our worst nightmare as LGBTIQ people.” Two weeks ago we returned to that famous street corner, as did thousands of others, in shock, disbelief, and sadness in response to another nightmare: the results of the November 8, 2016, election.

At the November 9 gathering we read from one of the Dalai Lama’s poems, whose refrain implores: “Never give up. No matter what is going on around you. Never give up.” We had read the same poem nearly eight years ago to the day at yet another Castro rally the night after Prop 8 passed.

In the midst of our anger and dismay at the passage of Prop 8 in 2008, we also began contemplating the way forward, asking ourselves the counterintuitive question: Despite the horrific loss, what was the best thing that happened on Election Day? Our answer: Over 6.4 million Californians had voted on our side in favor of marriage equality, 48 percent of the electorate and the most people who had ever voted in favor of LGBT rights on any state ballot measure. And Barack Obama, who supported LGBT rights (although not full marriage equality) became the first African American President. Prop 8’s passage ended up unleashing a passion for marriage and full LGBT equality that was unanticipated and unlike anything seen before. It raised the visibility of LGBT people and their families to a new level. President Obama became the first President ever to embrace the freedom to marry and did countless things to advance LGBT rights. Just six and a half years after Prop 8 passed, nationwide marriage equality became the law of the land.

We’ve asked ourselves the same question this year: What’s the best thing that happened on Election Day? We confess that we’ve struggled to find an answer. We, like millions of Americans, have many fears about what might lie ahead and well-founded reasons for concern. Yet we truly don’t know what the future will bring. We are struck by how many of our friends and acquaintances from many different walks of life feel threatened personally by the results of election, and by how many of us are going through versions of the grieving process. We also take note that 62 million Americans and counting voted for the presidential candidate who supported full LGBTIQ equality—and she actually won the popular vote. Indeed, for the second time in the last four elections, the candidate who won the most votes will not become President. Who knows what the results of this election and what follows will unleash in these 62 million Americans, especially those most directly affected? Who knows what might emerge?

Our thoughts often turn to Gavin Grimm, the Virginia transgender teen who, of all things, has the task of convincing five members of the United States Supreme Court in the coming months that he should be able to use his school’s bathrooms just as all of his classmates can. No one knows how actions the new administration might take could affect the posture of the case. But one thing we do know is that Gavin is not giving up. Despite the absurdity that the highest court in the land has chosen to decide how Gavin can go to the bathroom, the case gives our community a new opportunity to educate the Court and the nation about the real lives and struggles of transgender people.

If Gavin’s not giving up, we’re not giving up. We’ll never give up on ourselves, our community, our resilience, our power and the future. We’ll never give up on the intention of our community to make the world a better place. We’ll never give up on hope.

Keep Calm and Stay Agitated
November 10, 2016

(Editor’s Note:  This column was written for the San Francisco Bay Times with a submission deadline before election day,  but for publication after the election)

Now that Americans have all cast their votes, we and many others are beginning to assess in real terms the impact of the election—in particular, how it will affect our lives. A few weeks ago, at John’s high school reunion in Kansas City, we were struck by how differently two of his classmates’ perceived the potential impact of the election on their lives.

One classmate, a straight man who is enormously supportive of LGBT rights, and his wife are compassionate physicians. Moreover, for the past 25 years, they have cared day in and day out for their own special needs son who has severe physical challenges. This classmate remarked that “our day-to-day issues make what goes on in Washington just not worth agitating about. Neither Hillary or Donald (or Gary) are going to make a huge difference to what occupies” us.

By contrast, a gay classmate, who has been with his partner for 23 years and someday hopes to marry him, offered a different perspective. He told us: “We may get married sometime soon, but as you know, Missouri is not as progressive as California—and we are waiting to see how this particular election turns out, especially for our local politicians; many of them still want to fight marriage equality.”

As LGBT people and also as people who have always believed that we should try to use the political system and public policy to better people’s lives, the first classmate’s remarks initially took us aback. What do you mean that “what goes on in Washington was just not worth agitating about?” We’ve been agitating about what goes on in Washington for years. Millions of other LGBT people have been doing so as well.

We’ve gone from protesting the Supreme Court 1986 decision permitting states to put LGBT people in jail to advocating for, and then celebrating, the Court’s 2015 nationwide marriage equality decision. The year 2017 will once again witness the Court addressing a vital LGBT issue: transgender kids’ right to use public restrooms fitting their gender identity.

We protested the federal government’s inaction on HIV/AIDS dating back over 30 years ago, and through Stuart’s professional work participated in the development of effective HIV/AIDS policy. We witnessed the passage of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and its eventual repeal, and participate in the ongoing struggle to pass nationwide protections against discrimination in employment, housing, and public services. The identity of the President, members of Congress, and the Supreme Court justices has had, and will continue to have, a profound effect on the lives of LGBT people.

John’s gay classmate’s thoughts also highlight the importance of statewide and local elections to LGBT people. Local elections, even in places like the San Francisco Bay Area, not long ago had significant effects on the rights and protections of LGBT people; they continue to have vital impacts across the country. Ever since the passage of Proposition 8, we have felt a vague foreboding on election day—a lasting imprint of LGBT people’s ongoing vulnerability as not all our basic civil rights are yet protected nationwide.

But the first classmate’s reaction suggested great wisdom as well. The circumstances of his life mean that caring for his son and family (not to mention his patients) is what he devotes most of his life to. It reminds us of the importance of caring for ourselves, those closest to us, and others as well, regardless of the outcome of elections or whether or not our movement for civil rights is enjoying success or facing challenges.

Indeed, caring for ourselves and others is the motivating reason for the movement itself. His reaction also points to the value of finding well being and happiness that sustains regardless of the results of elections or other life circumstances. Homo-bi-transphobia has caused far too many of us to live far too long in pain and isolation, but our community has found extraordinary and often creative ways to find joy, meaning, and human connection in the face of formidable personal and political obstacles. We don’t know what the next four or eight years will bring, but we will benefit by finding wellbeing amidst both the joys and the sorrows that lie ahead. Let’s keep calm and stay agitated.

Reunited and It Feels So Good
October 27, 2016

When I was a first-grader in Kansas City back in 1964, my classmate Katie and I announced some exciting news to our fellow classmates:  we were going to get married! We picked a date for our wedding, to be held on the playground at recess, and soon began making plans.  But one morning as we sat with crayons and paper in hand, writing out invitations for our fellow first graders, our teacher put the kibosh on our impending nuptials.  Leaning over us, she said, “Don’t you think you’ve taken this a little too far?”  Little did she know how prophetic her words would be:  40 years later my husband and I would be one of the first ten couples to marry in San Francisco City Hall on February 12, 2004 — and much of the nation would be asking a question remarkably similar to hers.

Stuart and I just returned last week from my 40^th high school reunion in Kansas City, attended by over 25 of my elementary school classmates and many other high school friends and spouses.  The reunion was fantastic, and as I was telling my first grade story to my friend Rebecca, she interrupted to exclaim that she and I had in fact pulled off the feat in second grade.  She recounted how one day at recess, the two of us held hands, faced each other, and exchanged vows, surrounded by classmates as witnesses.  I was, of course, delighted to learn of our success.  I wondered if in fact it somehow foreshadowed how Stuart and I and many other couples and supporters did not give up after our 2004 marriages were taken away.  Together, we worked to have California’s LGBT marriage ban declared unconstitutional.  In 2008, Stuart and I married legally in San Francisco City Hall – not on a school playground — surrounded by friends and family.

As I thought back on prior high school reunions, I realized how radically different the legal status of our relationship – and thereby the status of LGBT couples more generally — was at the time of each one.  At my 20^th reunion in 1996, we had no legal rights; no state had marriage equality, civil unions, or domestic partnerships; and Congress had just enacted the notorious “Defense of Marriage Act,” denying federal recognition for any LGBT marriages that might take place in the future.  The State of Missouri had laws criminalizing the sexual activity of LGBT people– even in the privacy of their own home.

By my 30^th reunion in 2006, the United States Supreme Court had declared all such laws unconstitutional.  Missouri could no longer imprison us for being gay, but as the same time the state afforded us no legal rights or recognition as a couple.  Stuart and I were by then California domestic partners, but we lost that legal status as soon as we left the state. The marriage equality movement was struggling mightily in the face of great adversity.  Massachusetts was the only state where LGBT couples could marry, but opponents were mounting efforts aimed to take that freedom away.  Many states had just passed anti-marriage equality constitutional amendments, and then President George W. Bush was calling for a federal constitutional amendment barring LGBT couples from marrying.  Stuart and I were one of the plaintiff couples in the lawsuit to have California’s marriage ban declared unconstitutional.

Last week, we attended my 40^th reunion as a legally married couple, whose marriage is recognized in every state in the union and is protected by the United States Constitution.  And it felt great.  My high school is a public school whose graduates come from a wide variety of backgrounds.  Members of our class have done many different things in their lives, from turtle farming to medicine, ministry to landscaping, dance and theater to law.  Those in attendance at the reunions — from 20 years ago to last week — have embraced Stuart as part of the community.   Twenty years ago, a straight evangelical Christian minister offered to perform a sacramental wedding ceremony for us if we wanted one.  Last week, classmates celebrated the success of the LGBT movement with us and wanted to hear what it was like for me to grow up as a gay person in school.

I left the reunion last week with a profound sense of the power of friendship that can be forged when we share something meaningful together – such as growing up and going to school together.  Much still lies ahead for the LGBT equality movement.  But as we continue to work to engender understanding of each other’s common humanity, I can’t wait to see what things will be like at our 50^th reunion.

King Harald and Lyric Scott: Can Love Win Again?
September 29, 2016

When we took a few moments to catch up on the news last week, we came upon two striking online videos that could not have appeared more different: King Harald of Norway’s much lauded speech embracing diversity delivered at a royal garden party, and excerpts of Charlotte, North Carolina, resident Lyric Scott’s Facebook Live feed, recording her immediate reaction to the fatal police shooting of her father, Keith Lamont Scott, near her house.

The depth and honesty of King Harald’s words at first startled then delighted those in attendance, and resonated not just in Norway but around the world. In his speech, the 79-year-old monarch celebrated Norway’s diversity and exhorted its citizens to deepen their sense of their common humanity. In a voice quiet, yet full of conviction, he reminded listeners that Norwegians were not only those who had been born in the county, but that “Norwegians have also immigrated from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Poland, Sweden, Somalia and Syria.” Indeed, he explained that his own grandparents had immigrated from Denmark and England in the beginning of the 20th Century. “It is not always easy to say where we come from, to which nationality we belong. Home is where the heart is. That cannot always be placed within country borders.”

The King offered numerous examples of the country’s diversity, including “Norwegians (who) believe in God, Allah, everything and nothing.” And he embraced the LGBT community, explaining:  “Norwegians are girls who love girls, boys who love boys, and girls and boys who love each other.”

In the beginning minutes of Lyric Scott’s Facebook Live video, Scott exclaims that “the police just shot my daddy four times for being black.” In angry, impassioned, and expletive-laden language, Scott throughout the video records in real time her thoughts as to what is going on. She expounds upon her belief that the police pulled up to her father’s car undercover as he was waiting to pick up his son at the school bus stop, and “shot my daddy because he was black. He was a sitting in the car reading a … book—so they shot him.”

Police say they were searching for someone else with an outstanding arrest warrant when they saw Keith Scott leave his car with a gun. According to police, Scott returned to his car; officers then approached the car; and when he came out of the car again with a gun, they shot him because they claim he “posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers … .”

Lyric Scott questions how the police could have legitimately feared her father because she says he was disabled, and suspects the police were planting a gun in his car even as she spoke. She also complains about the ambulance response time, warns of repercussions if her father ends up dying, and taunts police officers—all the while worried about how her little brother will get home from the bus stop.

And then Lyric’s Facebook feed records her live reaction when she learns from news reports that her father has died. She cries out, “they just killed my daddy,” and “my daddy is dead.” She utters a primal wail of grief and despair—in one sense voicing universal human pain some of us experience only internally, and in another sense vocalizing anguish and desperation unlike anything we have had to experience in our lives.

We do not know the facts of what literally happened that afternoon in Charlotte. But we do know that wealth disparities and racial segregation and discrimination persist in our society. The recently released 2016 Allianz Global Wealth Report found that what it calls the “Unequal States of America” has the highest disparity of wealth of any nation in the world. Protests over police shootings of African Americans bespeak not only problems in American policing and criminal justice, but more generally of intolerable racial disparities. Regardless of whether Lyric Scott’s assessment of her father’s death is literally true—something we do not know—her observation reflects reality figuratively. Continued racial and wealth disparities in this country contribute greatly to the fact that blacks are shot by police in disproportionate numbers to whites.

How then do we hold King Harald’s conclusion to his garden party address: “When we sing ‘Yes we love this country’ (Norway’s national anthem), we have to remember that we also sing about each other … . Therefore, the national anthem is also a declaration of love to the Norwegian people. My biggest hope … [is] that we can know that we—despite our differences—are one people.”

Do the King’s words only apply to Norway? Are they too idealistic even for that country? Do they pertain at all to the America laid bare in Charlotte, Tulsa, Baton Rouge, Chicago, Orlando, Cleveland, Ferguson, the Bay Area, and beyond? As an LGBT community, we proclaimed “Love Wins” when we achieved nationwide marriage equality last year. Lyric Scott’s haunting cry renders King Harald’s words a quiet plea for love to prevail in a world increasingly shown to be polarized. We must answer the sobering question: how do we make love win again?

Chicago Gun Violence Is an LGBT Issue
September 15, 2016

Over 500 people have been murdered and nearly 3,000 people shot in the city of Chicago already this year.  August alone witnessed 92 homicides and over 400 shootings in the city.  Chicago-based rapper Bo Deal explained in a recent BBC interview: “The past few months, I’ve seen more people close to me” that have “been shot and killed than I have ever.  Everybody’s got a gun….  I’ve never seen so many guns.” It’s “like somebody dropped off crates of guns in everybody’s hood.”  It “seems like it’s designed for us to lose… . Somebody is putting all these guns here.”

Gun violence is a nationwide problem that is multifaceted.  But as Deal observed, proliferation of guns in America has been by “design” of the legal and political movement the NRA and its allies have led for decades, resulting in the seemingly unrestricted flow of firearms that is “putting all these guns here.”  As to Deal’s perception that it seemed as if “crates of guns” were being dropped into Chicago neighborhoods, a 2014 City of Chicago Report revealed that nearly 60% of guns involved in Chicago crime come from out-of-state, with 19% coming from Indiana which directly borders Chicago.  In President Obama’s words, “you’ve just got to hop across the border” to Indiana, a state with some of the weakest gun laws in the nation, and you can easily get a gun.

The 2014 report explained that Indiana, along with Mississippi and Wisconsin, the other two states responsible for most out of state guns coming into Chicago, “permit gun owners to sell their guns to other people without any background checks of the new buyer or paperwork recording the sale. This makes it incredibly easy for gun traffickers, violent offenders and other prohibited purchasers to buy guns undetected.  In those states, guns can move from buyer to buyer and land in the hands of a shooter or murderer without any paper trail.”

Veteran Indiana State Representative Dr. Vernon Smith observed:  “If there was ever a state that was owned totally by the NRA, Indiana is one…. Indiana has constantly protected the NRA and carried out the NRA’s agenda.”  And anti-LGBT Indiana Governor Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential running mate, has long been an NRA favorite, having addressed the leadership forum of the NRA’s lobbying arm earlier this year even before becoming Trump’s running mate.

Of course, many guns used in Chicago crimes do not come from out-of-state.  In the early 1980s, Chicago enacted strict gun registration requirements to reduce the number and availability of guns citywide.  However, the United States Supreme Court in 2010 declared Chicago’s law, which it described as “effectively banning handgun possession by almost all” city residents, unconstitutional in violation of the Second Amendment.  The five Justices appointed by Presidents Bush and Reagan, including the late Justice Antonin Scalia, constituted the majority.  Scalia himself authored the landmark 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller decision that created an individual constitutional right to possess a firearm under at least some circumstances.  And in 2014, a federal court invalidated another Chicago law aimed to stem gun violence, the city’s ban on retail and private gun sales.

Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court could have a profound effect on the future of gun violence in America, because Scalia’s vote was the deciding vote in both landmark gun control cases.  President Obama’s nominee to succeed him, Merrick Garland, appears to oppose Scalia’s position.  Hillary Clinton, who strongly supports gun control, and Donald Trump, who strongly opposes it, would likely appoint very different justices to the Court.

Why do we write about these issues in a column that focuses on LGBT issues?

Last week, the Orlando Regional Medical Center announced that the last hospitalized survivor of the June 12 massacre that killed 49 members of the LGBT community was released to go home.  At the time of the shooting, we and many LGBT organizations and leaders stressed that gun control was an LGBT issue.  Just days after the shooting, the Human Rights Campaign announced a new “organizational position that the safety of LGBTQ people in the United States requires the adoption of common-sense gun violence prevention measures.”  Lambda Legal’s Deputy Legal Director Hayley Gorenberg wrote that “we must step up and fight to end gun violence.”  And we need to do it “now.”

The Chicago killings affect LGBT people too, including all LGBT people who live in communities where violence occurs or who have family, friends, and colleagues who live there.  And both the Orlando and Chicago killings disproportionately affect marginalized racial minorities.  The vast majority of the Orlando shooting victims were Latinx members of the LGBT community, and Chicago gun violence disproportionately affects African American and Latinx people, including those who are LGBT.

Ultimately, it comes down to recognizing and embracing our common humanity.  At root, the marriage equality movement was about the freedom to marry the person you love no matter who you are or whom you love.  Likewise, ending gun violence is about our common humanity and the human right to live free from gun violence no matter who you are.

We’re With You All the Way Gavin
September 1, 2016

“It’s been exhausting.”  So explained transgender high school senior Gavin Grimm in a recent Washington Blade interview, describing his now years long fight simply to be able to use his school’s restrooms as all his classmates can.  When Gavin prevailed at the 4^th Circuit Federal Court of Appeal earlier this year, his Virginia school district couldn’t just let things be and allow Gavin to live in relative peace his senior year of high school.  Instead, the district took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which earlier this month issued a stay of the appellate court’s order.  As a result, Gavin is prohibited from using his school’s regular restrooms until the Supreme Court decides whether or not to take the case and if they take it, issues a final decision in the case.  That could be months from now.

Five of the nine Supreme Court Justices had to vote in favor of the stay for the Court to issue it.  Predictably, Justices Roberts, Alito, and Thomas, consistent gay rights opponents at the Court, voted in favor.  In a move that raised eyebrows, Justice Kennedy, who has written all of the Court’s landmark gay rights cases, voted in favor, too.  However, his stay vote may not be predictive of his ultimate view of the case, and he may be concerned about other legal issues in the case unrelated to the underlying issue of transgender equality.  Justices Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor, consistent LGBT rights supporters at the Court, opposed the stay.  However, Justice Breyer, who has also always voted in favor of LGBT rights, curiously voted for the stay, although he appears personally to have opposed it.  In explaining his vote, he said he was doing it “as a courtesy” to the other four justices who had voted in favor of the stay, and because the Court was on summer recess.

Justice Breyer’s words broke our hearts.  What about “courtesy,” moreover dignity and respect for Gavin, a vulnerable 17 year old transgender student?  While the Court waits months to receive legal briefs and decide what to do with the case, Justice Breyer and his fellow Justices will take for granted their own use of public facilities.  Meanwhile, Gavin’s school district will continue to deny him this basic human right, thereby isolating and stigmatizing him daily.  As Gavin has articulated, this delay and denial carries a very real human cost. In Gavin’s Blade interview, he urged people to imagine how they would feel “if they were the only person forced to use the facility separate of that of their peers, especially when [the] decision was made in a public way that opened them up to the abuse ….”

A Texas federal trial court judge, already notorious for an anti-marriage equality ruling, dealt another blow to transgender kids last week when he issued a preliminary injunction striking down the U.S. Department of Education’s guidelines protecting transgender students from discrimination that the 4^th Circuit had embraced in Gavin’s case.  Judge Reed O’Connor’s order forbids the federal government from proceeding with any ongoing or future investigation of states or school districts for failing to comply with the guidelines and from otherwise enforcing the regulations through new lawsuits.  Just days after the decision, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who brought the suit and also has a long record of hostility to LGBT people, filed a new lawsuit before Judge O’Connor, this time challenging new federal government regulations expanding transgender people’s access to medical treatment.

The root issue to which these and other federal lawsuits involving transgender rights pertain is whether federal statutes prohibiting sex discrimination apply to discrimination on the basis of gender identity.  We take heart that four of the eleven federal circuit courts have already held that gender identity discrimination is unlawful sex discrimination under federal law.  The Texas decision is just a single lower court judge’s ruling, not an appellate ruling, and serious questions exist as to whether the judge exceeded his authority in issuing such a broad order.  Further, the Texas judge could not and did not prohibit the federal government from defending its guidelines and supporting transgender students in ongoing cases, such as Gavin’s case and litigation over North Carolina’s discriminatory legislation, known as HB2. Of course, the problem could be solved once and for all if voters elect Democratic majorities that are pro-equality in both the House and Senate and Hillary Clinton as President. Then, Congress could simply amend federal discrimination statutes to include gender identity and sexual orientation explicitly.

Meantime, the legal roller coaster for Gavin and other transgender people continues, and conservative anti-LGBT interests use transgender people as political targets for fundraising and gaining political power.  These interests have repeatedly targeted our community, most recently in the decade plus struggle for nationwide marriage equality.  Our community is facing the current challenges with the same commitment and determination that we have in the past, and we must support each other as the struggle continues.  We’re with you all the way Gavin.  We’re all in this together.

“Gay Olympics” or Gay Olympics?
August 18, 2016

When the Olympic Games come around every two years, it always feels a bit bittersweet to us.  We love the dazzling performances of extraordinary athletes like Simone Biles and Michael Phelps. However, the Olympics also bring back the sting of the United States Olympic Committee going to court back in 1982 to stop Dr. Tom Waddell and other organizers of the first ever competition for LGBT athletes from calling those games the “Gay Olympics.”  The USOC sued Waddell and other LGBT organizers just weeks before the first games were to commence, fighting all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it won.  As a result, the LGBT athletic event would have to be known as the “Gay Games,” and organizers were forbidden from calling it the “Gay Olympics.”  The USOC went so far as putting a lien (later withdrawn) on the home of Waddell — who was very ill with HIV/AIDS at the time — to recoup $96,000 in attorneys’ fees.  And adding salt to the wound, Vaughn Walker, a then closeted gay man, who later became a federal judge and wrote the lower court decision striking down Proposition 8, represented the USOC in the litigation.

Waddell and the other organizers, represented by the legendary LGBT rights attorney Mary Dunlap, argued that the USOC’s not contesting the existence of the Special Olympics, Junior Olympics, Police Olympics, Eskimo Olympics, Rat Olympics, Frog Olympics, Cockroach Olympics, Tank Olympics, Beer Olympics … meant that the USOC’s purpose in trying to prevent the Gay Olympics from existing was clear:  discrimination.  Organizers explained that the Gay Olympics was intended not only to provide a venue for athletes from around the world to participate freely regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, but to dismantle harmful stereotypes about LGBT people.  The Gay Olympics would show the world that LGBT people could be athletes — indeed champion athletes.

The USOC prevailed at the district, appellate, and Supreme Court levels, with the court majorities never squarely addressing the issue of discrimination.  But appellate judge Alex Kozinski in dissent at the Ninth Circuit largely agreed with the LGBT organizers, observing that “handicapped, juniors, police, Explorers, even dogs are allowed to carry the Olympic torch, but homosexuals are not.”  Kozinski noted that the USOC appeared to be trying to preserve “the very image of homosexuals that the [Waddell and other organizers] seek[] to combat” based on its view of the lack of “wholesomeness” of LGBT people.  Justices Brennan and Marshall in dissent at the Supreme Court concurred, observing that the LGBT organizers intended to use “the word ‘Olympic,’ to promote a realistic image of homosexual men and women that would help them move into the mainstream of their communities.” The title “The Best and Most Accomplished Amateur Gay Athletes Competition,” just doesn’t have the same ring and doesn’t send the same message as “Gay Olympics.”

Even though the USOC got its way, LGBT athletes were not deterred, and have come out and excelled around the world.  The Gay Games and other LGBT athletic events have been held for over 30 years.  Indeed, the 1994 Gay Games, held in New York in conjunction with the 25^th anniversary of Stonewall, drew nearly 11,000 athletes, greater than the number of competitors in the 1992 Olympic Games themselves.

Former Olympic champions — the pride of the United States – who were closeted when they competed years ago, have subsequently come out proudly.  Olympic hero Greg Louganis, the only male diver to win both diving Gold Medals in consecutive Olympics, came out as gay in 1995.  We’ll never forget his extraordinary performance at the 1988 Seoul Olympics that earned him the title of ABC’s Wide World of Sports 1988 “Athlete of the Year.”  And when Louganis came out, he revealed he accomplished this exceptional feat as a person living with HIV.

We also have strong memories of Caitlyn (then Bruce) Jenner leaving her competition literally in the dust, when she broke the world record winning the Gold Medal in the men’s decathlon in 1976 Olympics.  Jenner, who famously came out as transgender and transitioned in 2015, grabbed a fan’s American flag and waved it during his victory lap back in 1976, creating a new Olympic tradition that many now follow.

And although tennis great Billie Jean King was not out throughout much of the time she reigned atop the women’s tennis world, she coached the 1996 women’s Olympic tennis team as an out lesbian.  King, whom Sports Illustrated magazine honored in 1972 as “Sportsman of the Year,” received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her lifetime of accomplishments, and President Obama appointed her (along with openly gay ice hockey player Caitlin Cahow) to the official American delegation to the 2014 Sochi Olympics to demonstrate the very visibility of LGBT athletes that Waddell and his fellow organizers had envisioned three decades before.

The process of dismantling anti-LGBT prejudice that pervades sports and anti-LGBT attitudes in many of the 207 countries that compete in the Olympics has been slow.  However, as the San Francisco Bay Times reported in last edition’s cover story, a record number of openly LGBT athletes (at least 43), including the Bay Area’s own Kelly Griffin, are competing in the Rio Olympics, with some estimates of the actual number of LGBT competitors to be 500 or more.

We may not be able to have a “Gay Olympics,” but they can’t stop us making the Olympics gay – and slowly but surely we are.

Love Embodied: Kryptonite to Hate
July 7, 2016

At this year’s San Francisco Pride Parade, we had the privilege of marching with a special contingent memorializing all those killed at Pulse nightclub in the early hours of June 12. Organized with lightning speed by Richard Sizemore and many others, 49 of us held individual memorials, featuring the name and a life-size photograph of each of the victims. Hundreds of others wore shirts, stating simply “We Are Orlando.” For the previous dozen years, we had made the trip down Market Street, cheering and chanting wildly for marriage equality. This year we marched in silence, dedicating each step to the memory of the person whose portrait we held. We were a means for them to have a presence in the parade. And instead of raucous cheering, the crowds greeted us predominantly with reverent silence or noble applause for each of those lost. Many fought back tears.

The vast majority of victims were Latinx members of the LGBT community. We wanted to hold the memorials of Christopher “Drew” Leinonen and Juan Ramon Guerrero. They were the couple that lived together and that news outlets reported hoped to marry someday. But instead, their families contemplated a joint funeral for them. Juan’s sister Aryam described the couple to Time magazine: “They were honestly so in love. They were soul mates. You can tell by how they looked at each other.”

We were struck by how much Juan’s family and Drew’s mother, Christine Leinonen, not only accepted but also celebrated Juan and Drew. Aryam described Juan’s family as “really loving and accepting” of Juan when he came out and that Juan “was so much love and light.” Catherine McCarthy, a lifelong friend of Drew, wrote in the Washington Post that Christine’s “not just ‘tolerating’ [Drew’s] sexuality, but truly loving him, all of him, allowed him to exist unfettered and undiluted.” In a live interview on ABC television the morning of June 12, Christine, desperate to learn any news of Drew, told the world how “proud of him” she was for starting the gay-straight alliance at high school over fifteen years before, an accomplishment that won him the Florida Holocaust Museum’s Anne Frank Humanitarian Award “to bring gays and straights together.”As demonstrated by Drew’s founding his high school’s gay-straight alliance, Drew and Juan’s love was not passive; it was powerful. Catherine McCarthy described Drew as “love, embodied” and explained that “[h]e had all the time for love because he left little time for anything else.” According to the Orlando Sentinel, Drew and Juan’s mutual friend Brandon Wolf, who himself survived the Pulse massacre, memorialized them: “[Drew] and Juan were the love we wish to see in the world, the kind that pulls people together, breaks down walls, the kryptonite to hate.”

Nothing spoke more of the power of their love than Christine’s urgent entreaties to the nation that Sunday morning as she searched for her son: “We’re on this earth for such a short time. Let’s try to get rid of the hatred and the violence, please.” And she spoke of a different “club” from the Pulse nightclub, a “club” that “nobody wants to be in,” that of loved ones of gun violence victims. She appealed to all Americans: “[P]lease could we do something with the assault weapons so that we could stop this club from ever getting any new members. I beg all of you, please.”

When we married at San Francisco City Hall in February 2004 and found our lives transformed by the sense of dignity we experienced for the first time as LGBT people, we vowed to do everything in our power to make the dignity that comes with marriage equality something that all Americans could experience. We feel a similar urgency now. We cannot fully honor the lives of those lost in Orlando on June 12 unless we do everything in our power not just to reduce hatred but to eliminate access to the firearms that provide the means by which people carry out these types of massacres and other gun violence.

Drew’s close friend Catherine wrote: “There will be a time to change our laws. A time when this sharp grief will shift into a hot and forceful anger. We will not let their deaths go unremembered, nor leave any questions unanswered.” The American freedom to marry movement achieved something that often seemed unimaginable: nationwide marriage equality. It took millions and millions of us, our friends, families, and strangers doing everything we could and employing every skill we possess for our love, dignity, and common humanity. We never, ever gave up. It’s time to do the same to silence the gunfire. It’s time to embody love to become the kryptonite to hate.

Authors’ Note:  The activists who came together to make the We Are Orlando contingent a reality are too numerous to name here individually. However, we want to acknowledge the inspired leadership and dedication of Richard Sizemore, Mason Smith, Richel Desamparado, Tristan Moaveniyan, PSPrint, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and San Francisco Pride.

The Pulse of Pride
June 23, 2016

Joining the iconic march down Market Street in San Francisco on the last Sunday in June—or down any main street anywhere in the world at a Pride celebration—to us is the essence of Pride. Millions of us together show the world outwardly our inner beauty and strength as LGBTIQ people and supporters. As we march, we hear cheers from the crowd that drown out voices external or internal that have told us there is something wrong with us. We celebrate the gifts of being born LGBTIQ.

This year’s parade takes on special significance because of the catastrophic massacre of LGBTIQ people and allies on Latin night at Pulse nightclub in Orlando—a place where people thought it was safe to come, dance, and be themselves. When we heard the news two Sundays ago, we were filled with utter horror, shock, and sadness. Even though we did not personally know anyone at Pulse nightclub that night, we identified immediately with all those who were there. They were kin.

Orlando embodied our worst nightmare as LGBTIQ people—the fear that someone might attack or kill us simply because of who we are. Many of us have faced such threats, cared for victims of such violence, or mourned the loss of friends or family. For those of us lucky enough to face less risk, Orlando reminds us that millions of people around the world—LGBTIQ and otherwise—live with the daily threat of violence.

Orlando also caused us to reflect on how hatred of LGBTIQ people and the belief that there is something wrong with being LGBTIQ is learned and not innate. When the perpetrator Omar Mateen was a toddler crawling on the floor, he was not thinking anti-LGBTIQ thoughts and hating LGBTIQ people. He learned these attitudes. The day after the killings, Mateen’s father stated on Facebook that: “God will punish those involved in homosexuality,” apparently trying to articulate that people like his son should not punish gay people because God will. His words suggest one potential source of Mateen’s learning such horrific ideas.

And the fact that Mateen himself appears to be a person who was attracted to people of the same sex exposes another hideous element of homophobia: self-hatred. Sadly, many of us have felt self-hatred to some degree, and it is deeply disturbing to experience it. Orlando represents self-hatred at its worst, as Mateen killed and injured so many other people as he destroyed himself.

Never has it been more urgent for people who spread messages of condemnation or rejection to understand the devastating harm they cause, not just in Orlando, but also around the world, to millions of LGBTIQ people and their loved ones on an ongoing basis. In further remarks, Mateen’s father stated that “nobody has the right to harm anything, anybody.” We agree, and it does not stop with the harm that an assault rifle can inflict on others. Although we embrace the Constitution’s guarantees of freedom of thought, expression and religion, messages that there is something wrong with being LGBTIQ inflict inner and outer harm on LGBTIQ people even when the speaker or writer has no conscious intention to hurt someone else. It matters not whether the message comes in a religious context, like that of Mateen’s father, or otherwise.

Leelah Alcorn was a 16-year-old transgender youth from Ohio who concluded that the way she was treated at home, in the church, and at school because she was transgender made life so unbearable that she committed suicide last year. To make her life meaningful, she posted a plea on Facebook, timed to appear shortly after her death. After explaining that one of her parents had told her that she was wrong about her being transgender and that “God doesn’t make mistakes,” she pleaded: “If you are reading this, parents, please don’t tell this to your kids. Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate them self. That’s exactly what it did to me.”

Shortly after the shootings, Stuart’s 92-year-old dad wrote us an email that began: “More than ever, you have my love and support, and total empathy for what you and your whole community are enduring.” On Sunday, millions of us will set aside our fears to march and cheer to love and support each other as part of the LGBTIQ community. By doing so, we will be inviting the rest of the world to do the same.

Pride and Presidents
June 9, 2016

“Building a Society of Rights means there is no room for first- and second-class citizens. It means choosing inclusion over discrimination. It means creating unity from diversity.” These words sound as if they could have easily come from President Barack Obama’s eighth and final Pride Proclamation, marking June 2016 as LGBT Pride month. However, these words came from a different president: President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico in his June 2, 2016, Huffington Post essay explaining why he introduced legislation in the Mexican Congress to amend Mexico’s Constitution to make marriage equality the law of the nation.  Currently, marriage equality is the law in 9 of Mexico’s 31 states and the federal district of Mexico City.

The marriage equality movement in Mexico has been building quickly and steadily in the last several years. In late 2009, Mexico City passed legislation allowing LGBT couples to wed, and in 2010 the Mexican Supreme Court upheld the law and ruled that such marriages were valid throughout the nation. Progress continued in subsequent years.

Then last June, just days before the U.S. Supreme Court decided Obergefell, the Mexican Supreme Court issued its own marriage equality opinion. Unlike the U.S., the Mexican Supreme Court lacks the authority to issue one decision that directly and immediately invalidates all state marriage bans throughout the country. However, the Court held that any same-sex couple refused a marriage license anywhere in the country could seek a federal court injunction ordering that the couple be married and that granting the injunction was mandatory. The Court stated, “there is no justified reason that the matrimonial union be heterosexual, nor that it be stated as between only a man and only a woman… . Such a statement turns out to be discriminatory in its mere expression.”

In early 2016, the Mexican Supreme Court unanimously struck down the state of Jalisco’s marriage ban in its entirety, stating that it “undermined” people’s “self-determination” and violated “the principle of equality.” Guadalajara, Mexico’s second most populous city after Mexico City, is located in Jalisco. However, to have true nationwide marriage equality–where LGBT couples can simply marry without having to undertake the expensive and degrading process of obtaining a federal injunction–each Mexican state that currently lacks equality would need to enact its own legislation or the Supreme Court would need to invalidate each state’s law in separate challenges. In an interview, Supreme Court Justice Olga Sanchez Cordero urged states to adjust their rules to avoid the Court declaring their laws unconstitutional.

President Peña Nieto, though, wants to cut through this cumbersome process and “guarantee every person’s full marriage rights” once and for all through a constitutional amendment. The process of amending the Mexican Constitution is difficult, requiring 2/3 votes of both houses of Congress and ratification by a simple majority of the states. The President, however, noted that May 2016 polling showed that “66 percent of people fully or partially agree that same-sex marriage should be allowed under our Constitution.” While acknowledging some resistance, he stated that “as President, it is my duty to ensure that the personal beliefs and customs of some do not limit the human rights of others.”

Neither did President Peña Nieto limit his actions to marriage equality. He launched “an initiative to revise [the country’s] entire legal framework” and “identify any and all laws that go against equality and propose the necessary changes to improve them.”  He also announced in May that Mexico will join the United Nation’s LGBTI Core Group formed to promote LGBTI rights internationally.

We applaud President Peña Neito’s initiatives and the Mexican Supreme Court’s unanimous support for marriage equality. We look for nationwide marriage equality to come to Mexico soon. And we are reminded that when we go to the polls in November, we will have a stark choice as to whether the U.S. continues to have a President that embraces LGBT pride and acts on it, and a Supreme Court that protects the constitutional rights of LGBT Americans.

We Can’t Believe We’re Alive
May 19, 2016

We were in the car recently and turned on the radio to catch the headlines on the five o’clock news. We turned the volume up extra loud when we heard the lead story: the United States Department of Justice was suing the state of North Carolina for violating the civil rights of transgender Americans by denying them the right to use the bathroom that fit their gender identity.

We heard United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch name North Carolina’s notorious House Bill 2 (HB2) for what it is: unlawful discrimination against transgender people. Lynch did not mince words. She explained how North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory and the state legislature “created state-sponsored discrimination against transgender individuals, who simply seek to engage in the most private of functions in a place of safety and security—a right taken for granted by most of us.” Lynch exposed the duplicity of HB2’s proponents, explaining that they had “invent[ed] a problem that doesn’t exist as a pretext for discrimination and harassment.” She explained that HB2 “inflict[s] further indignity on a population that has already suffered far more than its fair share. This law provides no benefit to society—all it does is harm innocent Americans … This action is about a great deal more than just bathrooms. This is about the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens… .”

We were moved when Lynch, the first African American woman to head the Justice Department and herself a North Carolinian, went on to relate HB2 and the struggle for LGBT freedom to civil rights struggles of the past. Lynch explained: “This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation. We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. We saw it in fierce and widespread resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. And we saw it in the proliferation of state bans on same-sex unions intended to stifle any hope that gay and lesbian Americans might one day be afforded the right to marry. That right, of course, is now recognized as a guarantee embedded in our Constitution, and in the wake of that historic triumph, we have seen bill after bill in state after state taking aim at the LGBT community … [N]one of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something they are not… .” She reminded the nation that “[i]t was not so very long ago that states, including North Carolina, had signs above restrooms, water fountains and on public accommodations keeping people out based upon a distinction without a difference.”

Lynch impressed us further by speaking directly to the transgender community. She said: “Some of you have lived freely for decades. Others of you are still wondering how you can possibly live the lives you were born to lead. But no matter how isolated or scared you may feel today, the Department of Justice and the entire Obama Administration wants you to know that we see you; we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.”

We thought to ourselves: “We can’t believe we are alive.” The Attorney General of the United States is engaging the full force of the Executive Branch of the United States government to fight for the rights of transgender people. We’ve experienced similar feelings a few times over the last dozen years–when we married in San Francisco City Hall in February 2004, when Congress repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell by a supermajority, when the President came out for full marriage equality, and when the Supreme Court made it a reality. Standing up boldly for civil rights is exactly what our government should be doing, and millions of LGBT Americans over decades have lived their lives openly and proudly and worked to make this day a reality.

As the marriage equality struggle made abundantly clear, great harm can occur when Americans’ civil rights are put up to a popular vote. It’s déjà vu as legislatures and electorates are now putting transgender people’s dignity up to a vote. The Obama administration is doing exactly the right thing by trying to stop these laws dead in their tracks.

As with many other LGBT struggles, crisis presents opportunity. Over and over, when we have faced our greatest adversities, we have educated the nation about lives and ultimately about our common humanity and the universal human desire for safety and happiness. Attorney General Lynch in her remarks recognized how our nation’s advances in civil rights have not been “easy” and have come with “pain and suffering.” The current struggle sadly is no different. But we are very hopeful that what transgender Americans are doing in response to HB2 and other attacks—telling the truth of their lives—is educating Americans day by day.  As this process unfolds, we are very glad that the United States Department of Justice is by our side.

Exciting Developments for Marriage Equality in China
April 21, 2016

My grandparents grew up in a small village in southern China, and raised my mother and her siblings in Hawaii. My grandparents may have thought of themselves as very open-minded about marriage when they told my mother she did not have to have an arranged marriage – all they asked was that she marry a man who spoke their same village dialect of Cantonese.  But my mother had ideas of her own, and she looked far beyond the family village when she married my father, who is of English and Irish descent.

Our family has a history of working for marriage equality, and it wasn’t until 1967 that interracial marriages like my parents’ were legal in all 50 states. Although John and I have been together over 29 years now, our marriage has been legal in all 50 states for less than a year – yet we are already looking forward to a day when our marriage will be legal in China as well.

Marriage equality activists across the U.S. used to ask for marriage licenses every year as a way to demonstrate the unfairness of marriage discrimination, and to put a human face on the issue as a way to open hearts and change minds. Ultimately, when our marriage license was taken away, we joined others and sued the government – after many ups and downs, we prevailed.

We are heartened to see how couples in China and elsewhere in Asia have adopted this strategy of asking for marriage licenses. One brave couple in Changsha, China, asked for a marriage license – and when they were turned down, they sued the government.

Sun Wenlin and Hu Mingliang filed the first lawsuit in China for equal marriage rights.  When they arrived at their hearing before Changsha Furong People’s Court, they were greeted by cheers from hundreds of supporters waving rainbow flags. Although they lost the first legal round this past week, their case has generated tremendous public interest and support, demonstrating how quickly times are changing. As they plan their appeal, China is engaging in a national conversation about LGBT rights and marriage equality like never before. The New York Times noted that when the People’s Daily wrote and tweeted about the case, they even included a photograph of the plaintiff couple holding hands – a big step for the official newspaper of the Communist Party.

LGBT life is becoming increasingly visible in China, where homosexuality became legal in 1997 – several years before the last sodomy laws were overturned here in the United States. Shanghai has vibrant annual Pride celebrations, PFLAG chapters are active from Guangzhou to Beijing, and rising support in opinion polls show an unmistakable trend towards equality. In his majority Obergefell opinion for marriage equality, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “Confucius taught that marriage lies at the foundation of government.” This led to a nationwide social media conversation in China last year, and prompted one Chinese scholar to say that he thinks “the ruling will have a big impact on China and may promote the legalization of same-sex marriage in China.” Although my grandparents did not live to see this day, I hope they would have been proud.

Faggot
April 7, 2016

Last Sunday, our family had a wonderful dinner in the East Bay to celebrate Stuart’s mom’s 92^nd birthday.  On the way home from dinner, the three of us went to a small, quiet shopping center where I bought Stuart’s mom a new pill box at a drug store, while the two of them shopped at the grocery store.  Buying the pill box was fairly uneventful, although a somewhat mental challenged man, who may also have been on drugs, harassed some of the other customers, telling them they were rich and they should give him money.

As I left the drug store I passed the man, who told me I, too, was rich and should give him money.  I walked on by, choosing not to engage with him.  Seconds later, I heard him yell out at me, “faggot.”

I just kept on walking and joined Stuart and his mom at the grocery store. The man didn’t follow me and said nothing else to me.  His remark had little immediate impact on me.  I wondered if the man used the term “faggot” to some degree as a generic insult. I was neither dressed nor acting particularly “gay” or “not gay” that evening (just as I appeared neither rich nor not rich). The man was clearly disturbed and in need.

Nevertheless, I told Stuart on our way home from his mom’s place that if felt bizarre being called a “faggot” out of the blue while doing the eminently mundane act of walking in a quiet shopping center with a pill box in hand – indeed especially while I was doing such an ordinary thing.

I’ve been fortunate that I have relatively infrequently been called “faggot” or otherwise harassed or faced verbal insults as an LGBT person, although on occasion I have experienced significant threats.  Several years ago, I was leafleting and talking to students about marriage equality on the quad of a college campus when a large and intimidating student became enraged and called me a “fucking faggot” more times than I could count.  He stalked the two of us who were leafleting to the point that we called the police as he was screaming “fucking faggot” at me with his tightly clenched fist inches away from my chin.  We also feared he had a gun.  The police arrested him, and I pressed criminal charges against him in court.  That incident upset me greatly.

Nothing resembling that happened in last week’s incident, but the experience of being called a “faggot” out of the blue stayed with me.  I must admit I have wondered whether I was giving off a “gay vibe” even doing such an innocuous thing as carrying a pill box.  But the fact that being called a “faggot” was the last thing I expected or was thinking about that night struck me most. It reminded me that LGBT people still today, even in the Bay Area, never know when they could face insults, either subtle or not so subtle.  Some people feel a generalized license to make anti-gay insults as they wish.

Although I could brush off the incident as an adult today, hearing people verbally abuse others who appeared LGBT when I was growing up was really damaging to me then. It greatly contributed to my denying who I was to myself in an effort to ensure that no one would say that about me, although sometimes they still did.  It made coming out seem very risky and unattractive.  And, of course, it silenced my ability to speak up for myself and others.  Such insults, threats, and name calling continue to seriously harm many LGBT youth today.  And even casual name calling can be triggering or traumatizing for LGBT adults who have previously experienced substantial physical, verbal or emotional abuse.

As a white cisgender appearing male, the mundaneness of the circumstances of my being verbally gay bashed last Sunday night is an important reminder of how some LGBT people, women, people of color, and others experience this type of insult or scrutiny in myriad forms on a daily basis, simply living their lives as who they are.

We are all in this together, and we must continue to tell our stories of what it feels like to be who we are.  There’s nothing like getting a glimpse of what it feels like to walk in another’s shoes.

Bearing Witness
March 24, 2016

Ryan Kendall was a star witness for marriage equality and against so-called “conversion therapy” when he took the stand in the Proposition 8 trial in San Francisco federal court six years ago. Ryan bravely recounted some of the most vulnerable moments of his life as he told the story of his parents’ horrendous reaction to learning he was gay and of his surviving forced conversion therapy as a youth.  Ryan’s testimony marked a key moment in the trial because the immutability of sexual orientation is an important legal issue pertaining to constitutional rights of LGBT people. Ryan was in exactly the right place at the right time. Judge Vaughan Walker, who presided over the case and is gay, described Ryan’s testimony as “the most touching testimony of the trial,” – so powerful that it led Walker himself to reveal that he had undergone conversion therapy as well.  Since the Prop. 8 trial, Ryan has gone on to testify before numerous state legislatures about the harms of conversion therapy.

But Ryan knows firsthand that at any point in life one may be called upon to testify as a witness to love… or hate. A few years after his Prop. 8 testimony, Ryan found himself on the other side of the country and in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time.  In the end, though, he may have been just the right person to be there.

After the Prop. 8 trial, Ryan, a former Republican, dedicated his life to becoming a civil rights lawyer. His pursuit of excellence led him to Columbia University in New York but also happened to put him on a tragic collision course to witnessing a horrible hate crime. He recently recounted the experience in The Advocate:

It was on a warm spring night in late May 2013. I was out celebrating the end of the semester and wanted to continue the festivities in the gayborhood after a Columbia University-sponsored event at the Delancey ended. I got something to eat, hopped in a cab, and headed to Greenwich Village.

 Once there, I walked up the street, turning right on West Eighth Avenue, just in time to see Elliot Morales exchanging words with Mark Carson and his best friend, Danny Robinson.

 As I approached, I heard Morales repeatedly call Carson and Robinson “faggots.” I thought a fight might break out. So I passed them by on the left. As soon as I had gotten in front of them, though, I was frozen in place — paralyzed by the unmistakable crack of a gunshot behind me.

While Ryan was able to choose to be a witness in the Prop. 8 trial, he had no choice in witnessing a hate crime and a murder. Mark Carson was dead, shot by Elliot Morales – and as fate would have it, Ryan was present for the whole thing:

In the moment after a gunshot, you don’t think, you just do. I didn’t even have time to be afraid. Once I could move again, I turned around to see what had happened.

 As I did, Morales walked by, brandishing his weapon and saying, “Don’t you look at me.”

 But I did look, and I flagged down the responding police officers to tell them what I had seen. The images from that night remain with me. I will never forget the sight of Mark Carson dying at my feet — yet another young black man killed with a gun in the street.

Over three years later, Ryan, now a law student at the UCLA, recently returned to New York to testify at Morales’s murder trial.  He told the courtroom exactly what he had witnessed, and the jury convicted Morales of hate crime murder.

Ryan has never been a passive witness; he is perceptive, engaged, and circumspect. Ryan observed, “As Morales cross-examined me on the stand, I saw a broken man who could have been helped at so many turns.”

Ryan had used the months and years since the murder took place to reflect more widely on what he had witnessed:

In the first few months after the shooting, I was angry at Morales for stealing Carson’s life simply because he was gay. In the months and years that I’ve waited to testify against Morales, my anger at him receded.

Ryan found himself confronted with the question of whether “Carson’s death could have been prevented.”

Along with countless other LGBT people, their friends, and their families, Ryan, has used his voice tirelessly to convey the humanity of LGBT people to the world so that crimes such as the one Morales committed might someday no longer occur.  He has also worked to raise the self-esteem of LGBT people; indeed Morales at trial claimed to be bisexual.

Ryan examined what little he knew of Morales as a person.  He noted that Morales, 33 years old at the time of committing the murder, “had already had been incarcerated for 11 years after committing an armed robbery during which two women were bound and beaten. When Morales was released from prison, he doubtlessly found himself cast out into a society with little support or chance at a decent life…. Then it is no wonder that, as he testified in court, Morales was out of prison by May 2013 but staying on a friend’s couch, with little more than his clothes and a gun.”

Ryan, who describes himself as perceiving “the world through a lens of policy and law,” observes how our prison system seeks “to punish, not to rehabilitate,” how our society lacks sufficient “mental health and social services,” and how easy it is to obtain firearms.  He notes how difficult it is for a person convicted of such a felony to find a job.  He urges us to consider candidates’ positions on these issues as we make “crucial decision[s]” in the 2016 elections.  In Ryan’s words:

I can imagine a world where we choose to break the vicious cycle of imprisonment and recidivism and replace it with a virtuous cycle of education, job training, and hope.

In the end, maybe this murder couldn’t have been prevented. Maybe Morales would have been impervious to help. Maybe he would have found one way or another to kill someone.

But to honor Mark Carson’s life, we should at least try to make tragic outcomes like this less common. We should try to build a world with more love and less violence, with more opportunity and less suffering, with more hope and less hate.

Ryan’s essay regarding his experience, What Happens After You Witness a Hate Crime, is published here: http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2016/3/16/what-happens-after-you-witness-hate-crime

LGBT Rights and Abortion Rights Are Inseparable
March 10, 2016

Last week, the US Supreme Court heard one of the most important abortion rights cases in decades, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. At first blush, some LGBT folks might think that abortion rights have little to do with them. After all, gay men and lesbians don’t get “accidentally pregnant” — to quote a term used in some anti-marriage equality lower court decision of the past decade. However, LGBT rights and reproductive freedom have long been closely intertwined. At stake in both movements are individuals’ fundamental freedoms to control their own bodies and to decide for themselves the paths their lives will take.  LGBT people should care about women’s right to safe and legal abortion not only because it’s the right thing to do but because our two movements depend on each other.

Our first experience of the connection between the two movements came nearly 30 years ago when we participated in an LGBT direct action group, called “Queer and Present Danger,” that was part of the first and only shut down of the US Supreme Court.  The action was organized to protest the Court’s notorious Bowers v. Hardwick decision that upheld the constitutionality of so-called “sodomy” laws that criminalized intimate sexual activity between persons of the same sex.  Our group got along so well that we decided to keep working together on other pressing issues, such as HIV/AIDS and abortion rights.  At the time, during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, LGBT activists were pressing the Reagan administration and the federal government to end their neglect of people with HIV/AIDS.  “Operation Rescue,” a well funded right wing anti-choice group that blockaded Planned Parenthood and other clinics serving women, was also in high gear.  In 1988-1989, Operation Rescue held hundreds of blockades with thousands of arrests of their members. We took part in numerous actions regarding HIV/AIDS and in “clinic defense,” where we worked to ensure access to women’s clinics despite the presence of Operation Rescue.  We saw no separation between these two human rights struggles.

The US Supreme Court recognizes the connection as well.  Until the Supreme Court held in 1973 that women have a fundamental constitutional right to make reproductive choices for themselves, 46 states had laws interfering with a woman’s right to have a safe and legal abortion.  Until the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas decision finally overturned Bowers v. Hardwick in 2003, states could imprison LGBT people for sexual intimacy.  Some states even put people in jail for simply touching another person of the same sex in a sexual way.  Without these decisions, the government today would still be able to exert extraordinary control over the bodies of LGBT people and women.

Recent Supreme Court decisions in favor of constitutional freedoms for LGBT people rest on prior legal victories for reproductive freedom.  The Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision relied heavily on language from a key abortion rights precedent, when it stated:

“[M]atters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the [Constitution]…. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State….It is a promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter.”

That language comes verbatim from Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, which among other things invalidated a law that required a married woman to notify her husband before having an abortion. In Casey, the Court stated that what a woman experiences by having a child “is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman’s role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture. The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society.”

The fiercest opposition to both the LGBT and reproductive freedom movements comes from conservative Christian political forces.  These groups seek not only to raise money and gain political power off these issues, but to impose their personal religious and moral views on everyone through law.  LGBT and reproductive choice supporters have fought side by side in efforts to defeat right wing ballot initiatives. Moreover, with respect to both matters, the Supreme Court has held, quoting the Casey decision:  “The issue is whether the majority may use the power of the State to enforce … [their moral and religious] views on the whole society through operation of the criminal law. ‘Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.’”  As the Court stated in its 2015 marriage equality decision, “the idea of the Constitution ‘was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts.’ This is why ‘fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.’”

In this year’s abortion rights case before the Supreme Court, the reproductive freedom movement is drawing upon one of the key elements responsible for the recent successes of the LGBT movement:  coming out.  In 2014, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg attributed the “remarkable change” in lesbian and gay rights over recent years to the willingness of gay and lesbian Americans to “say who they are.”  The power of LGBT people coming out and telling their personal stories has been and continues to be integral to achieving and maintaining LGBT and marriage equality.

In Whole Woman’s Health, over a hundred women lawyers who have had abortions filed their own “coming out” brief, telling the Justices their stories as to how the freedom to decide for themselves what happens to their bodies was vital to their lives and well being.  Among those women are prominent women in the LGBT rights movement, such as Susan Sommer, Director of Constitutional Litigation for Lambda Legal, and Judy Appel, Executive Director of Our Family Coalition.  One woman who filed the brief explained:  “I am the daughter of a teenage mother who is the daughter of a teenage mother. I had an abortion when I was 16 years old and living in rural Oregon. I believe that access to a safe, legal abortion broke the familial cycle of teenage parenthood and allowed me to not only escape a very unhealthy, emotional[ly] abusive teenage relationship but to … work for one of the nation’s most storied civil rights organizations” and become a lawyer. “I often tell people … that access to a safe, legal abortion saved my life.”

The Supreme Court will likely issue its decision in Whole Woman’s Health the last week of June, on or near the first year anniversary of last year’s landmark marriage equality decision.  The success of the two movements will remain vital to the lives of all women and LGBT people.

Justice for Gavin Grimm
February 11, 2016

Gavin Grimm, a 16-year old high school junior from Gloucester, Virginia, simply wants to be able to use his school’s restrooms as all his classmates can.  But like LGBT couples who had to go to court just to be able to marry, Gavin has had to sue his school district for the right to use the boys’ room.  A panel of the Fourth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals just held argument on key parts of his case and could issue a decision soon.

The ACLU represents Gavin in court and through court filings we quote here, Gavin reveals his story.  Although Gavin was born biologically female, he was aware from early on “that he did not feel like a girl.”  By middle school age, Gavin had “acknowledged … to himself and to close friends” that he was male, and in the spring of freshman year he came out as transgender to his parents because the stress of hiding his gender identity was so overwhelming.  Gavin’s distress was so severe he couldn’t attend school.  With his parents’ assistance, Gavin started getting the professional treatment he needed from a psychologist experienced with gender dysphoria. The psychologist advised that Gavin should be able to live as a male and “should be treated as a boy in all respects, including with respect to his use of the restroom.”  Gavin began hormone therapy and legally changed his name.  The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles approved Gavin’s being identified as male on state identification cards and driver licenses.

At the beginning of sophomore year, Gavin and his mom let the school know what was going on and met with the principal and guidance counselor to explain that Gavin was a transgender boy and that, “consistent with his medically supervised treatment, he would be attending school as a male student.”  Although Gavin initially consented to using a separate restroom located in the nurse’s office because he didn’t know how his classmates would react, Gavin “was pleased to discover that his teachers and the vast majority of his peers respected the fact that he is a boy and treated him accordingly.”  He asked the principal to let him use the boys’ room, and the principal agreed.  For the next seven weeks or so, things went fine, and he was using the boys’ room “without incident.”

Then, parents and other adults got involved and made life miserable again for Gavin.  After two horrific public meetings, the county school board adopted a policy resulting in Gavin’s being banned from “using the same restrooms as other boys” and exiling “him to single-stall, unisex restrooms that no other student is required to use.”  Gavin and his parents attended the meetings to speak against the policy, but doing so meant that Gavin at age 15 had to come out as transgender to the entire community and the press and to reveal publicly that he was the student at the center of the controversy.  Among many accusations, speakers at the meetings “claimed that permitting transgender students to use the same restrooms as others would lead to teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections” and “cited the Bible and complained about ‘morality creep.’” One speaker called Gavin “a ‘freak’ and compared him to a person who thinks he is a dog and wants to urinate on fire hydrants.”  Gavin was left feeling humiliated, as if he had “been turned into ‘a public spectacle’ in front of the entire community ‘like a walking freak show.’”

At school, Gavin is now forced to use a bathroom separate from all the other students, branding him daily as separate and “other” from his fellow students.  Gender dysphoria expert Dr. Randi Ettner described in court papers how each time Gavin is forced to use a bathroom separate from his peers – especially at age 15-16, where fitting in is immensely important to most teenagers — it deals him a “devastating blow … and places him at extreme risk for immediate and long-term psychological harm.”  Indeed, Gavin reports that he “limits the amount of liquids he drinks and tries to ‘hold it’” when he needs to go to the bathroom at school. Consequently, he has “repeatedly developed painful urinary tract infections and has felt distracted and uncomfortable in class.”

The Fourth Circuit Appeals court decision will likely have a profound impact on Gavin’s life, and it could greatly affect the lives of transgender people nationwide.  Although Gavin’s case comes to the court at a relatively preliminary stage in the proceedings, the court’s decision could address the degree to which the U.S. Constitution and federal law protect against gender identity discrimination, and the case could eventually make its way to the US Supreme Court.

We offer our support, respect, and admiration to Gavin and his parents.  Gavin’s legal papers recount that at the school board meeting Gavin testified:  “All I want to do is be a normal child and use the restroom in peace.”  After the January 27^th court hearing, Buzzfeed News reported that Gavin acknowledged that “[a]t first I was terrified, then I realized I have a platform, and I am going to use that platform to help people.”  Like so many LGBT leaders before him, Gavin appears to be finding his voice through his struggle and using his talents not just to make his own life better but to improve the lives of others.  Buzzfeed reports that after the hearing, his mother said that “we have learned through this process [Gavin]… is his best advocate, and we are proud to be his parents.”  We are proud of Gavin, too.

Gavin’s case is G. G. v. Gloucester County School Board (No. 15-2056).

Exciting Developments for LGBT Rights and Marriage Equality in Taiwan
January 28, 2016

On January 16, 2016, Tsai Ing-wen made history when she was elected Taiwan’s first female president.  Tsai’s election not only broke a glass ceiling for women in Taiwan, but it could herald a long-awaited breakthrough for LGBT rights in Taiwan and the rest of Asia.  President-elect Tsai is an unabashed supporter of LGBT rights and marriage equality. During the presidential campaign, Tsai posted a pro-marriage equality video on her Facebook page to coincide with Taiwan’s 13^th annual Pride Parade.  Taiwan Pride, which attracted nearly 80,000 participants, is the largest such event in Asia.  In the video, Tsai proclaimed “I am Tsai Ing-wen, and I support marriage equality.” She explained that “we are all equal” in love and that everyone should be “free to love” and pursue happiness — as pink and red hearts and rainbow rings floated across the screen.  It was a first for Taiwanese politics.

No county in Asia has marriage equality yet.  Tsai’s election, along with her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) winning an absolute majority in the national legislature, could mean that Taiwan will become the first.  Tsai and the DPP defeated the ruling Kuomintang Party (KMT), which failed to advance LGBT equality while in power.  In 2013, over 20 DPP legislators introduced a marriage equality bill, but the KMT has prevented the bill from moving forward.  We do not yet know whether the new government will have sufficient votes and political will to pass marriage equality and other LGBT bills.  Tsai and her party have not committed to making marriage equality a legislative priority.  As a candidate, Tsai stated that marriage equality is “something that society needs to tackle together as a whole, in which some are supportive while others are more reserved.” Indeed, Tsai has explained that her political “style” is to be “patient” and to work “steadily, practically, and accurately to achieve the ideal.” But the political landscape for LGBT rights in Taiwan has changed significantly.

In addition to legislative efforts, Taiwan’s vocal and assertive LGBT activists appear ready to seize the moment to pressure the new government to make legal equality a reality.  Taiwanese LGBT activists have been pressing for equality for years.  As we did in America, LGBT couples in Taiwan have presented themselves to local officials to ask for marriage licenses, putting a human face on discrimination.  In 2012, a couple filed a marriage equality lawsuit, which was subsequently withdrawn for strategic purposes when it appeared that a positive ruling would not be forthcoming.  The cities of Taipei, Kaohsiung, and Taichung recognize partnerships for same-sex couples.  Last year, hundreds of supporters marched on the Kuomintang Party Headquarters to protest the party’s inaction and threw rainbow water balloons at the building in an act of symbolic defiance.  When the government’s Justice Ministry conducted an online marriage equality poll, approximately 60 percent of respondents voted in favor.  A 2013 poll showed 53 percent public support for marriage equality, with a whopping 78 percent of people in their twenties in favor.  Another 2013 poll showed that marriage equality did not then have majority support, but a 2014 poll showed support at 54 percent.

In 2013, the China Post opined that “[l]egalizing same-sex marriage will be a huge step forward in the fight for universal equality akin to ending apartheid.”  It’s hard to overestimate the importance of winning marriage equality in Asia, home to billions of the world’s population.  Activists are fighting for equality in many Asian countries, and a victory in Taiwan would not only bring marriage equality there but could ignite a spark across the entire continent.

6/26 and Beyond
January 14, 2016

As the new year commences, we initiated a new name for our column in the San Francisco Bay Times:  6/26 and Beyond.  You might ask:  What’s 6/26?  It’s June 26 – not only the date of the founding of the United Nations (1945) — and for that matter the invention of the toothbrush (1498) — but the date the United States Supreme Court has issued its three most important landmark LGBT rights decisions.  Indeed, Congresswoman Suzan DelBene, along with 93 cosponsors, has introduced legislation that would designate June 26 as national “LGBT Equality Day.”

Twelve years ago — on June 26, 2003 — the US Supreme Court issued its breakthrough decision, Lawrence v. Texas, finally holding that laws that criminalize the physical expression of love and affection between people of the same gender violate the Constitution.  In the Court’s own eloquent words:  “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The government “cannot demean” the “existence” of LGBT people or “control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”  For the first time in American history, the Court recognized LGBT love, describing how “intimate conduct” between people of the same sex “can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring.”

Ten years after Lawrence – June 26, 2013 — the Court expressed a deeper understanding of LGBT love and dignity in its landmark United States v. Windsor decision, overturning key elements of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”) that prohibited the federal government from recognizing same-sex couples’ marriages.  In Windsor, the Court recognized that marriage equality states like New York had enabled LGBT couples to “live with pride in themselves and their union and in a status of equality with all other married persons” but that DOMA served to “injure” and “disparage” these couples and to make them “unequal” to everyone else.  Reflecting a profound understanding of the daily human cost of such discrimination, the Court noted that “DOMA instruct[ed] all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage [was] less worthy than the marriages of others.”

And last summer – June 26, 2015 – the Court held in Obergefell v. Hodges that the liberty and equality guarantees of the Constitution mandate nationwide marriage equality.  The Court’s opinion evinced great understanding of the struggles, hopes and dreams of LGBTQ Americans.  The decision recounted how throughout much of our nation’s history “[g]ays and lesbians were prohibited from most government employment, barred from military service, excluded under immigration laws, targeted by police, and burdened in their rights to associate.”  The Court recognized our struggle from protest to political involvement to legal action.  And it acknowledged the inadequacies of partial victories:  “Outlaw to outcast may be a step forward, but it does not achieve the full promise of liberty.”  The Court named marriage discrimination for what it was:  “injustice.”  And it concluded that by seeking marriage equality, LGBTQ people “ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

That’s what 6/26 has meant so far for LGBT equality.  But the new title of our column is “6/26 and Beyond.”  What does “beyond” mean?  One thing it means is that the marriage equality victories represent extraordinarily important advances toward a broader goal:  full LGBTQ equality in all aspects of our lives.  LGBTQ people need more landmark Supreme Court decisions on future 6/26’s.  Last summer’s opinion laid the groundwork for a broad decision regarding all types of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, but the Court stopped short of issuing such a ruling.  We need that ruling in a future case.  As we have emphasized before and will continue to do throughout the year, electing a President who will appoint Supreme Court justices who understand that the Constitution prohibits governmental discrimination against LGBTQ people in any form is imperative to the future of our movement.  Our choice in November will be clear.

And we embrace the Cambridge English Dictionary’s definition of beyond, namely “outside a limit.”  We believe the heart of the LGBTQ rights movement has always been the “beyond” and breaking down limits of identity, gender, love, expression, freedom and human experience.  Over the holidays, we had a dinner with our 21 year old niece and her new boyfriend.  As our niece’s boyfriend spoke about how he recognized his privilege as a European American cisgender heterosexual male and told us about a close friend who was genderqueer, we felt as if we were living in the beyond.  In upcoming issues, we will write both about marriage equality and other matters pertaining to LGBTQ lives.  We believe the future for LGBTQ people is bright, and we look forward to the next 6/26 and beyond.

When Hmong-American Sunisa Lee took home gold as all-around women’s gymnastics champion, Cambodian-American Jordan Windle finished 9th in the men’s 10-meter platform diving competition, and openly LGBTIQ Filipinx boxer Nesthy Petecio won silver in women’s featherweight boxing at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, I felt a special sense of excitement.

Over 40 years ago, I had the great fortune to work with refugees from the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—first in the U.S. and then at a camp in the Philippines. I taught refugees English as well as cultural elements and practical skills needed to adapt to life in America.

But I learned far more from the refugees and my Filipinx colleagues than I ever taught them. The connection we shared and the introduction they gave me to their cultures have been lifelong gifts to me.

I remember spending many hours listening to Cambodian refugees recount how they survived the Khmer Rouge genocide that ensued after the U.S. military departed Southeast Asia. They faced torture and starvation and had to overcome the murder of close family members and dear loved ones. Vietnamese refugees told their stories of years of war, escaping on boats under the cover of darkness, and staying alive as their rickety vessels traversed the South China Sea. After working in the camp in the Philippines, I visited the Hmong refugee camp in northeast Thailand, just across the Mekong River from their home country Laos. Many of the refugees risked their lives as they crossed the river to safety.

Sunisa Lee is the first Hmong American and presumably the first Hmong person to win an Olympic medal. Jordan Windle is the first Cambodian American to compete for the U.S. in the Olympics. Windle, born in Cambodia, was orphaned as an infant and suffered from serious malnutrition and illness when he was adopted by an openly gay man from the U.S. Now, he’s the proud son of an openly gay father and his husband, another Olympic feat.

Windle is a vocal advocate for LGBTIQ and other marginalized people. He’s already working to help youth in his native Cambodia find opportunities. Upon her victory, Petecio declared: “This win is for the LGBTQ community. Let’s go, fight!” I feel truly proud of all of them.

Lee, Windle, and Petecio’s presence at the Olympics also serves as a reminder of the grave consequences of war. Neither Lee nor Windle would have competed as Americans had the U.S. military not been a pivotal force in the horrendous wars in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 70s that cost millions of lives. I’ll never forget as an 11-year-old boy watching President Richard Nixon on national television announce the 1970 U.S. troop invasion of Cambodia, following over a year of secret bombing.

Hmong people had lived for millennia in tightknit isolated communities in the mountains of Laos. In the 1960s, the CIA recruited thousands of them to fight a secret war against communists in Laos. The death rate of Hmong soldiers was 10 times that of American soldiers in Vietnam. Between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped more bombs on the nation of Laos than all the bombs dropped in World War II, making the tiny country the most bombed country in world history.

The Philippines were ruled by Spanish colonists for over 300 hundred years, then possessed as a territory of the U.S. for forty years, and occupied by the Japanese military during World War II, before gaining independence in 1946. Today, the Philippines still struggles to overcome the legacy of hundreds of years of occupation.

And a 29-member team consisting entirely of current refugees competed in the Tokyo Olympics as they did in Rio in 2016.

We must ask Bob Dylan’s question: “How many times must the cannonballs fly, before they’re forever banned?”

At the same time, we must take hope in the triumphs of Lee, Windle, and Petecio, and how their presence serves as an example that things can change for the better.

My dad and Stuart’s dad both fought against the Japanese military as part of the U.S. Army in the Philippines in 1945. Over 75 years later, we teach about marriage equality and LGBTIQ rights to Japanese university students, studying in the Olympic host city Tokyo, a place we love. As young soldiers, our fathers would never have imagined such a thing to be possible.

Although we all must participate in truth, reconciliation, and reparation for the present-day effects of the past, we don’t have to continue to live out the conflicts, hatred, and wars that previous generations enacted. Lee, Windle, and Petecio were born at the turn of a new century. Their Olympic triumphs symbolize what may be possible if we want it collectively as a global society—and are willing to undertake the dedication and effort that the three of them did to achieve their Olympic glory.

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Help Spread the Word: Critical Need for Poll Workers in Major U.S. Cities
September 24, 2020

I’ve been a “political junkie” since I was 10 years old and followed every presidential election closely ever since. Naturally, I was very excited when I could vote myself in the 1980 presidential primary in Illinois, where I was attending college in Evanston, just outside Chicago. I rose early to vote before going to class, but when I arrived at the polling place, the head poll worker greeted me with some very disturbing news: she had no record of my being registered to vote. I handed her my voter registration card to prove I was. She examined her voter list again and consulted with her fellow poll workers, but still found no record of my being registered.

I knew I had registered and resolved at that moment that Cook County, Illinois, infamous for rigging elections in the 1960s under the influence of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, would not deny me the right to vote. Voting was sacred to me.

The poll workers were very sympathetic and helped me in every way they could. I skipped my classes to make numerous phone calls and trips back and forth to the polling place, trying to prove I was legally registered. I had known that the City of Evanston could be somewhat hostile to students’ interests. I learned that day it also tried to make voting difficult for students in order to protect vested local interests. Local authorities conducted canvasses to verify voters during the summer to effectively cleanse voter rolls of many students, like me, who were away at that time of year. Unbeknownst to me, my name had been removed the previous summer.

It took all day, but at 5 pm, I received a call from Cook County telling me that I had prevailed and was, in fact, entitled to vote. The County called the local poll workers separately as well.

As soon as I stepped into the polling place to actually vote, all the poll workers rose spontaneously to give me a standing ovation. I’ll never forget that moment. I’m sure the other voters in line were confused about what was going on, but it was clear to me that the poll workers cared about my right to vote as much as I did.

Forty years later, our nation faces an unprecedented shortage of poll workers because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We need people who care deeply about democracy to step up, just like the poll workers stood up for me back in 1980. The need is especially critical in cities like Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Detroit.

A staggering 77% of polling places were closed in Philadelphia during the June 2020 Pennsylvania primary because of a shortage of poll workers. Closed polling places mean extraordinarily long lines and wait times to vote, and long distances to travel to vote. The result is thousands of people effectively being denied the right to vote.

A repeat of the primary in Philadelphia at the general election would strike a mortal blow to American democracy in its very birthplace. Philadelphia needs thousands of city residents to sign up as poll workers as soon as possible. Likewise, in Milwaukee, only 5 of 280 polling places were open for the April 2020 Wisconsin primary. Meagan Wolfe, Wisconsin’s chief election official, announced last month that the state “needs thousands of its citizens to step up and become poll workers for November.”

To actually serve as a poll worker in Philadelphia, Milwaukee, or Detroit, you must be an American citizen who lives there. Specific requirements and compensation vary from city to city. However, all of us who care about democracy can help to spread the word.

Stuart and I are volunteers for a grassroots effort based here in Northern California, to support local efforts to recruit poll workers in those cities. We’re spreading the word in every way we can, and in the internet age you can do so as well. Our local group’s efforts have already resulted in hundreds of Philadelphians signing up as poll workers.

Anyone may sign up to be a poll worker in any location and get more information through the nonpartisan organization Power the Polls at https://www.powerthepolls.org/?source=CFG

My namesake, the late, great Congressman and life-long voting rights champion John Lewis, wrote in his posthumous New York Times essay: “The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.”

Together, we must help to ensure that our fellow citizens do not lose that most powerful change agent—the vote. Please spread the word.

Power the Polls: https://www.powerthepolls.org/?source=CFG

Poland at a Crossroads with LGBTIQ People in the Crosshairs
September 10, 2020

On a warm summer evening in 1987, I found myself hanging out in the heart of the medieval main square of Krakow, Poland, with my three new East German friends I had met a few hours before. As we passed around a bottle of Bulgarian red wine, we conversed about our lives in America and behind the Iron Curtain. It was the perfect final evening of my trip to the Soviet-bloc, a place I had long wanted to visit having grown up during the Cold War. The next morning, I would board a train to Vienna.

My East German friends were members of a theatre troupe and in town for an arts festival. They would return to East Berlin the next morning. Suddenly, one turned to me and said: “I would give anything to be with you on that train to Vienna tomorrow morning.” We all knew that the Eastern Bloc’s repressive travel restrictions forbid it.

Moments later, the exquisite hourly call of a trumpeter, atop the highest tower of St. Mary’s Catholic Church, reverberated across the square. Trumpeters have been sounding such a call live since the 1300s when it then announced the opening or closing of the old city’s gates.

What’s unique about the trumpeter’s call is that it stops abruptly midway through. Legend has it that centuries ago a trumpeter was announcing the closing of the gates to ward off an invading army, when an enemy soldier’s arrow pierced his throat and silenced him before he could complete the call.

That evening, Krakow’s main square was nearly silent, save the trumpeter’s call and the sound of our voices. Poles were suffering through a period of severe government repression; restaurants, bars, and shops were closed at the time of the evening. Just two years later, Poland would find itself at a crossroads when the Cold War unexpectedly ended.

Poland is now a member of the European Union and one of the largest recipients of the EU structural fund, but it once again stands at a crossroads. Poland’s far right Law & Justice Party is trying to establish an authoritarian, nationalist government based on their very conservative view of the values of the Roman Catholic Church and traditional Polish norms. They already control the presidency and the powerful lower house of Parliament. They have effectively seized control of the influential state media and for the last few years have been doing the same with the judiciary, a move the EU declared “a clear risk” to “the rule of law in Poland.”

This July, President Andrzej Duda’s successful re-election campaign demonized LGBTIQ people as its primary political weapon to attract and energize conservative voters. Duda invoked the virulent homophobia of deceased Pope (now Saint) John Paul II, who remains hugely popular in his native Poland. He quoted John Paul II’s declarations that being gay was an “intrinsic moral evil” and “objective disorder,” and same-sex marriage was “perhaps part of a new ideology of evil.”

Duda slandered the LGBTIQ movement as being more dangerous than communism, claiming that LGBTIQ “are not people, but ideology.” Like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Duda is an authoritarian leader who foments homophobia for his political gain, linking it to nationalist values and inspiring further hatred. Indeed, some 100 Polish locales covering about one-third of the country have passed “LGBT-free” or “LGBT Ideology-free” zones, authorizing banning of LGBTIQ rights marches and other events.

But Duda won re-election by a razor-thin 51% to 49% margin. And in response to Duda’s viciously homophobic campaign and policies, the LGBTIQ community and its allies have arisen in ways never seen before. Despite extremist violence and police brutality and unwarranted arrests, many thousands of people have participated in pro-LGBTIQ marches and demonstrations, most recently fueled by the weeks-long pre-trial detention of nonbinary activist Margot Szutowicz.

On August 30, thousands of people gathered for Krakow’s 16th annual Equality March in the historic main square, the same spot where my East German friends and I conversed late into the night 33 years earlier. They did so even though Krakow itself is in a regional “LGBT-free zone.”

As I reflect on events in Poland, I recall George W. Bush’s fomenting anti-gay hysteria against marriage equality as a political tool in the 2004 U.S. Presidential election. My mind also turns to the homophobic 2008 Proposition 8 campaign that, like Duda’s reelection, prevailed by a narrow margin, 52% to 48%.

After Prop. 8’s passage, something completely unanticipated and transformative took place. Across California and the nation, the LGBTIQ community and a broad cross section of the public awakened to rise, organize, and speak out against homophobia and hatred.

The situation for many LGBTIQ Poles seems dire today, and some are fleeing the country. Indeed, the future of Poland as a free state is on the line. But the awakening of widespread, fearless, and outspoken activism in support of LGBTIQ people and democracy has led some to term this summer’s events “Poland’s Stonewall.”

Poland is at a crossroads with LGBTIQ in the crosshairs. The Krakow trumpeter’s disrupted call warns of the threat of imminent danger. We hope this summer’s unprecedented outpouring of support for LGBTIQ people and democracy leads to a day when the trumpeter may complete its call, heralding Poland’s opening its doors to LGBTIQ equality, and indeed, the restoration of a free society.

My Father the Lifelong Activist (Mason Gaffney)
August 13, 2020

My father died last month at age 96. He was a remarkably gifted and talented economics professor, who The New York Times reported “was at the forefront” of a progressive tax-policy movement to create a more equitable society and to protect the environment. To me and my five other siblings, he was also our beloved—and charmingly eccentric—Dad.

But being the child of not one, but two, accomplished university professors carried with it pressure to match their successes. Dad, in particular, was not shy about making his expectations known, and whether I was measuring up—or not.  Barely concealing his disappointment, Dad asked me on more than one occasion if I would have been more ambitious if I hadn’t read so much existentialist literature in college.

All of that changed a number of years ago in ways I never could have imagined.

When I came out to Dad over 35 years ago, it surprised me how much he struggled with it, given what a free thinker he was. In Dad’s own words, he went through “denial, guilt, and remorse” and tried everything, including “lecturing, exhorting, ‘reasoning together,’” and appealing to the need for survival of the species to try to convince me I wasn’t gay. At one point, he even told me he was concerned that homosexuality may have caused the fall of the Roman Empire.

Throughout it all, I remained patient, never giving up on our relationship. I always took his calls, and always had time to spare—sometimes hours—for his questions, lectures, and theories. At some point, Dad himself tired of his intellectual mind games and indeed my patience with him. He told me, “Stuart, I think it might be time just to tell me to f–k off.”

This was Dad’s way of telling me he finally accepted I was gay.

Dad met John 32 years ago, and soon thereafter described John to his colleagues as someone the family had “grown to love dearly.” Dad was thrilled when we got married in 2008, and at the reception not only toasted us but also apologized for letting me down and “not being there” for me when I needed him.

Dad campaigned actively to defeat Proposition 8, sending an email to numerous colleagues, including Mormon ones, with the urgent subject line: “Please VOTE NO on Prop 8! Please forward to everyone you know!” After Prop 8 passed, Dad joined a “Repeal H8” rally in Riverside County, where the anti-gay initiative had garnered nearly 65 percent of the vote.

The day after the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre, Dad wrote to us: “More than ever, you have my love and support, and total empathy for what you and your whole community are enduring … . This cuts close to home … Special love, Dad.”

And even on a family Zoom call from skilled nursing in June, Dad applauded the U.S. Supreme Court’s outlawing employment discrimination against LGBTIQ people nationwide and recalled his joy at marching together as a family in the 2007 San Francisco Pride Parade.

Dad had come to make our cause his cause, and considered LGBTIQ rights and marriage equality activism to be a family affair.

Several years ago, I had an epiphany about Dad and most importantly about our relationship. Our family joined Dad at an economics conference to celebrate his receiving a lifetime achievement award from his peers. To my surprise and delight, Dad in his acceptance speech not only discussed tax policy, but he also told everyone about our wedding and advocated for marriage equality. I looked around the banquet hall and saw it was filled with people who were not just economists but who were also activists working to make the world a better place.

I had always thought of Dad as a somewhat absent-minded economics professor. But at that moment, I realized Dad was a lifelong activist, fighting an entrenched system of unfairness.

It dawned on me for the first time that, in this way, Dad had grown to see me as a “chip off the old block.” The activist in him recognized the activist in me. He was no longer upset with me for being gay; he was proud of me as his gay son fighting an unjust system. I was following in his footsteps.

Indeed, some people viewed Dad and his colleagues’ ideas based on the theories of Henry George to be more radical than those of Marx. In the 1950s, a fellow graduate student at UC Berkeley tried (unsuccessfully) to brand him a Communist and have him expelled from the doctoral program. Dad stood up to developers and co-led two successful voter initiatives to limit urban sprawl and establish a greenbelt in Riverside. In the early 1960s, Dad participated in the Congress of Racial Equality’s lunch counter sit-ins and protests to fight segregation in Columbia, Missouri, where he was a professor at the time. And in Missouri, Dad’s marriage to Mom was illegal because they were of different races.

One of Dad’s close colleagues termed Dad’s death a “terrible blow for the cause of justice” because of “his willingness to patiently help others to see the light of justice.”

Last month, not only did my siblings and I lose our Dad, but we also all lost a fellow activist. However, as John and I, his colleagues, and our family carry on his legacy, Dad through us will remain very much alive.

Harry Britt Will Always Sing in Our Hearts
July 16, 2020

On June 24, the LGBTIQ movement lost one of its greatest unsung heroes, Harry Britt. As not nearly enough people know today, Harry Britt took up the mantle of LGBTIQ leadership on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in January 1979, succeeding Harvey Milk after Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were murdered by former Supervisor Dan White. Indeed, Milk had specifically named Britt as one of the people he wished to succeed him if he were assassinated in office.

When Britt assumed Milk’s seat in the wake of the horrific tragedy, he himself became one of the very first openly gay public officials in the nation. Britt went on to win election to the Board four times. In 1988, he made history by becoming the Board’s first openly gay President when he won the most votes of any Supervisorial candidate at a time when elections were citywide.  Britt’s victory marked a watershed in LGBTIQ electoral politics and inspired numerous other queer candidates to pursue and win elected office.

The year before in 1987, Britt had sought to do something even more monumental: become the first member of Congress to run as an openly gay man with the specific intention of giving LGBTIQ people “our ownvoice” in Congress, as he put it in his campaign literature.

In spring 1987, San Francisco had an open seat in Congress because of the untimely death of Representative Sala Burton. Britt, along with 12 other hopefuls, faced a formidable challenge in the quick special election against an experienced Democratic Party official who was largely unknown to the general public: Nancy Pelosi.  Pelosi entered the race with a double-digit lead in the polls and far outpaced her rivals in terms of establishment support and fundraising.

But something remarkable occurred. An extraordinary grassroots campaign arose to support Britt. In a 1987 Mother Jones piece, Britt described how his campaign “became a magnet for progressive causes.” He won the endorsement of the Sierra Club and the support of numerous other environmental, labor, and left-leaning organizations. Britt recognized that “[c]entral to [his] campaign was an unprecedented effort by lesbians and gay men,” although Pelosi herself garnered significant lesbian and gay support, too.

On the evening of March 17, Ben Schatz, then an attorney with National Gay Rights Advocates and now of Kinsey Sicks fame, held a house party for Britt, which ended up changing our lives forever. We, in fact, met at that party, when Ben introduced us and we shook hands right over the fruit bowl, a seemingly perfect place for two 20-something politically minded, idealistic gay men to meet. We ended up being the last guests to leave that evening and have been together ever since.

At the party, former State Senator Carole Migden, then Chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, told those gathered that we had a rare opportunity with Britt to elect a truly progressive, openly gay man to Congress. With the election taking place at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, Britt’s campaign emphasized his years of experience in the face of relentless adversity as one of the most effective leaders in the battle against what Britt termed a “terrifying disease.”

Britt had also been a visionary on same-sex partner recognition, introducing and then winning passage of domestic partner legislation way back in 1982. The law would have been the first in the nation had then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein not vetoed it.  Britt later wrote San Francisco’s domestic partnership law that was passed by initiative in 1990.

Shortly before election day, the San Francisco Sentinel reported that “Britt had pulled even” in the polls. But in the end, Pelosi narrowly defeated Britt by 3.5 percentage points. With Britt’s campaign gaining momentum as the campaign went on, political experts speculated at the time that Britt might have won the race if the election had been held just a week later.

Perhaps Britt’s boldest statement of his career was his powerful pronouncement of gay resolve the morning after the so-called “White Night Riots” that erupted after a jury convicted Dan White merely of manslaughter for the cold-blooded assassination of both Milk and Moscone. Britt proclaimed: “Harvey Milk’s people do not have anything to apologize for. Now the society is going to have to deal with us not as nice little fairies who have hairdressing salons, but as people capable of violence. We’re not going to put up with Dan Whites anymore.”

Although we do not condone violence, the fearless commitment of LGBTIQ people to our freedom, dignity, and equality that Britt articulated 41 years ago undergirds all that came after it and all that will come in the future. Harry Britt will always sing in our hearts.

A Supreme Court Decision We Can All Take Pride In
June 15, 2020

Over six decades ago, courageous queer Americans fought for their dignity and livelihood in the face of the so-called “Lavender Scare,” the 1950s federal government witch hunt that cost some 5,000 LGBTIQ federal employees their jobs. In the words of historian David K. Johnson, they began a movement in which gay people “could stand up for themselves and demand equal rights as ‘homosexual American citizens.’”

Last week, the activists’ nearly 70-year-old dream came true when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed employment discrimination against LGBTIQ people nationwide. By living as authentically, courageously, compassionately, and openly as possible, LGBTIQ people together won this great victory.

We bow to all the brave LGBTIQ people who did not live to see this day, but whose steadfast efforts and commitment made it possible. Today, we are particularly happy for the millions of LGBTIQ people who live in one of the 29 states that lack full statewide protection from employment discrimination. Queer people living in those states must no longer worry that if they get married on a Saturday, they could find a pink slip on their desk Monday morning.

The Supreme Court’s decision is straightforward and clear. Employment discrimination against LGBTIQ people constitutes unlawful sex discrimination in violation of Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Court is unambiguous: “An individual’s homosexuality or transgender status is not relevant to employment decisions. That’s because it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”  The reason is that “[a]n employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex.”

The ruling will likely have significant impact nationwide on LGBTIQ equality in areas such as housing, education, and health care—indeed, any matter upon which federal law prohibits sex discrimination.

The decision could have worldwide impact as high courts in other countries sometimes look to the U.S. Supreme Court for guidance. LGBTIQ activists in other nations can now point to the U.S. as a model and put greater pressure on their own governments to pass anti-discrimination laws.

The Court’s opinion demonstrates personal respect and understanding of LGBTIQ people, particularly transgender plaintiff Aimee Stephens, who tragically passed away just weeks before the decision was announced. Without qualification, the ruling refers to Stephens as a woman and uses her pronouns “she” and “her” and her surname title “Ms.” It describes Stephens’ “despair and loneliness” living contrary to her true gender and how “clinicians diagnosed her with gender dysphoria and recommended that she begin living as a woman.”

Remarkably, conservative Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch authored the decision, and John Roberts joined it. The six-member majority consisted of Clinton, G.W. Bush, Obama, and Trump nominees.

Sadly, Kavanaugh dissented, but he wrote almost a gay pride statement at the end of his dissenting opinion: “Millions of gay and lesbian Americans have worked hard for many decades to achieve equal treatment in fact and in law. They have exhibited extraordinary vision, tenacity, and grit—battling often steep odds in the legislative and judicial arenas, not to mention in their daily lives. They … can take pride in today’s result.”

Although it’s fantastic that Gorsuch and Roberts voted in favor of LGBTIQ equality in the recent cases, we have no assurance how they will vote in future cases.

The Title VII cases pertained to interpretation of a federal statute, not to LGBTIQ constitutional rights. Fortunately, Roberts, who vigorously dissented from the 2015 Obergefell marriage equality decision, did not dissent in a 2017 case pertaining to birth certificates that applied Obergefell as precedent. Gorsuch, however, dissented in the 2017 case, taking an ill-considered and unprincipled position. The State of Indiana last week asked the Court to hear another birth certificate case. Further, Gorsuch suggested in his 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop concurrence that he might support religious exceptions to anti-LGBTIQ discrimination laws.

Kavanaugh’s vote in the Title VII cases also does not mean he will necessarily vote against us in constitutional cases.

Next term, the Supreme Court will decide whether Catholic Social Services can take local taxpayer money to provide foster care placement services when it flagrantly violates local anti-discrimination laws by refusing to place children with loving same-sex couples because of its homophobic religious views. In Kavanaugh’s recent dissent, he expressly endorsed prior Supreme Court precedent, that Roberts, Gorsuch, and Alito also signed onto, proclaiming that LGBTIQ people could not be treated “as inferior in dignity and worth.” Kavanaugh and the rest of the Court will have to ask themselves what dignity LGBTIQ people have if their hard earned tax dollars are allowed to go to an organization that slanders them as unfit foster parents and deprives abused and neglected children of safe and nurturing homes.

This Pride week, we as a community celebrate this month’s enormous nationwide victory for LGBTIQ equality—even as we and our nation continue to confront additional issues of urgent concern. Now is the time for LGBTIQ people and all fair-minded Americans to seize the moment and press boldly for further long-overdue change to bring about dignity and equality for all.

Happy Pride to all!

Pride in Not Hating During Difficult Times
June 11, 2020

“Hatred never ceases through hatred. Only by not-hating does it end.” So reads an enigmatic 2,000-year-old Indian Buddhist text. As LGBTIQ Pride month begins, we find ourselves taking pride in the fact that a gay African American man’s forceful yet considered response to a completely unprovoked act of racism against him provides us an opportunity to see how this ancient adage can still apply in today’s tumultuous times.

As millions around the world are now aware, Christian Cooper, an acclaimed “pioneer of queer representation in comics,” was enjoying birdwatching in a part of New York’s Central Park where dogs must be leashed to protect bird habitat. After Cooper asked a dog owner to put a leash on her dog, he began filming what ensued on his phone.

The dog owner first started to come at Cooper to grab his phone, and he firmly but politely told her: “Please don’t come close to me.” Perhaps disarmed by Cooper’s clarity and equanimity, the dog owner attempted, in Cooper’s words, “to get an edge in [the] situation,” threatening to call 911 and falsely “tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.” She soon did just that and launched into histrionics to the 911 operator: “There’s a man, an African-American man. He is recording me and threatening me and my dog.” She implored the operator: “Please send the cops immediately!”

In an interview with The View, Cooper explained that he began filming the dog owner, because he and many other birdwatchers had been documenting incidents of dog owners failing to abide by park rules designed to protect wildlife. The city itself had done very little to enforce the rules.

Cooper described the dog walker’s fabrication that he as a black man was about to attack her as a racist act, and “I decided consciously that I was not going to participate in my own dehumanization.” He later told The New York Times: “There are certain dark societal impulses that she, as a white woman facing in a conflict with a black man, that she thought she could marshal to her advantage.”

This same sense of power and entitlement perhaps led Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin to think he could jam his knee into a handcuffed George Floyd’s neck to the point of asphyxiation, or gave Travis and Gregory McMichael the idea they could gun down Ahmaud Arbery as he was innocently jogging down the street.

But Cooper has also spoken out against reported death threats the dog owner has now received, telling CNN they were “wholly inappropriate and abhorrent and should stop immediately.” He reflected: “I find it strange that people who were upset … that she tried to bring death by cop down on my head would then turn around and try to put death threats on her head. Where is the logic in that? Where does that make any kind of sense?”

Can hatred cease by more hatred?

Significantly, Cooper has resisted invitations to up the ante and brand the dog owner herself a “racist,” saying “only she can answer that.” And Cooper believes she will do so by “how she conducts herself” in the future and how “she chooses to reflect on this situation and examine it.”  Could Cooper’s “not hating” the dog owner enable her to be less defensive and reflect more deeply on her actions?

Cooper is interested in quelling racist impulses and stopping racist acts—not vilifying the dog owner as a person. He said that “it’s not really about her … . It’s about the underlying current of racism … that has been going on for centuries.”

Cooper’s heart is even big enough to feel compassion for the dog owner as she faces what he terms a “tidal wave” of public criticism. “[I]t’s got to hurt … . I’m not excusing the racism, but I don’t know if her life needed to be torn apart.”

Cooper also holds the dog owner responsible for her actions. If “this painful process … takes us a step further toward addressing the underlying racial, horrible assumptions that we African-Americans have to deal with … then it’s worth it.”

A less reported detail of the incident is the fact that Cooper was actually in the process of offering the dog a treat when the dog owner began to escalate things. Does Cooper’s decision to act with kindness and not hate from the beginning reflect a type of queer sensibility? How does “not hating” influence our actions and those of others? Answering these questions may guide us as we begin Pride month and as our nation searches for a way forward.

We Love You, Aimee Stephens!
May 20, 2020

“Aimee, Aimee, Aimee! We love you! We love you! We love you!” That’s what Aimee Stephens, plaintiff in the historic transgender rights case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, heard thousands of her supporters chant as she emerged from the Supreme Court last October after oral argument in her case.

We sense that Stephens may not have fully received that message of love ever before in her life. Stephens had known she was a girl since age 5, but wasn’t able to live in accord with her true self until nearly 50 years later. In an ACLU video she explained, “I’m fighting for my rights and the rights of others to be who we are. I did not realize that there [were] that many people in support, but to hear them outside [on] the courthouse steps chanting my name, telling me that they loved me—that had a big effect on [me].”

Tragically, Stephens passed away from kidney failure last week before she could learn whether her vision of transgender equality would become reality.

Among those showering Stephens with love that day was a supporter holding a sign that read, “We are all Aimee Stephens.” The sign’s simple declaration attested to the fact that Stephens was standing up for the civil rights of over 1.5 million transgender Americans and countless intersex and gender non-binary people. The sign also articulated Stephen’s message and the core, universal value of the entire LGBTIQ movement: Our common humanity, our common desire to love and be loved, our common aspiration to be free to be our true selves, and our common need for equality under the law.

As Stephens had put it in a Detroit News interview: “If you’re part of the human race, which we all are, we all deserve the same basic rights.” In an ACLU video, Stephens’ wife Donna observed, “Everybody wants to be their true self.”

And couldn’t we all benefit from experiencing more love the way Stephens did on the steps of the Supreme Court—not in a narcissistic way, but in a sustaining sense of safety, wellbeing and happiness within?

As a young adult training to become a pastor, Stephens found herself drawn to comforting families mourning the death of loved ones and ended up having a nearly 30-year career working in funeral services. She was known for her “sensitivity and compassion” for grieving clients.

However, even as Stephens comforted others in crisis, she struggled with inner turmoil because she had been unable to live in accord with her true gender identity. She fell into “despair, loneliness, and shame.” After several years of psychotherapy, she decided to live her life fully in accord with her true gender. In 2013,  she penned an extremely forthcoming, caring, and reassuring letter to her friends and work colleagues, explaining that she had struggled with gender dysphoria her “entire life” and that finally for her “peace of mind and to end the agony in [her] soul” she was going to live as her “true self.”

Two weeks after Stephens gave the letter to her boss, he fired her, declaring it was “wrong for a biological male to deny his sex by dressing as a woman.”

Stephens stood up for herself, and her case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, representing the hope of millions of transgender people to be their “true selves” in the workplace.

As Stephens advocated for transgender rights through her lawsuit, few of us knew she was battling kidney disease and needed frequent dialysis. When Stephens’ employer fired her, she not only lost her income but also her health insurance.

After being fired for being transgender, Stephens found looking for other work in the funeral services industry difficult, and her wife Donna was forced to take on several jobs to make ends meet, depriving them of precious time together. We can only imagine the deleterious effect these additional stresses, coupled with decades of transphobia, had on Stephens’ health. In late April, Stephens’ kidneys failed and she entered hospice care.

In the ACLU video, Stephens says: “The more I’ve seen the support, it gives me the strength to get up another day, to go on fighting another day and give that same hope to all the rest.” Whether “you win or lose, the wheel still keeps turning—whether it be for you or not.” Thank you, Aimee, for turning that wheel and emanating love for all of us.

Gay Blood Is Thicker Than Water
April 23, 2020

Many years ago, when I was a college student, I did my civic duty and decided to participate in a Red Cross blood drive publicized on campus. As a nurse prepared me to donate, I told her I was gay in response to a screening question, and she said she didn’t know whether I could donate. To find out, she yelled to her supervisor on the other side of the crowded donation site: “Marjorie—do we take gay blood?!”

Before I could explain that my blood was not “gay,” Marjorie hollered back: “No!”

Not surprisingly I, like many LGBTIQ people, have been deeply disturbed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s decades-long policy discriminating against gay and bisexual men in blood donation, founded on fear and prejudice and not medical science.

On March 19, 2020, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams at a White House press conference urged all Americans to give blood as the COVID-19 crisis threatens to deplete the U.S. supply. But the Surgeon General’s call by its very nature excluded gay and bisexual men—or at least all gay and bisexual men who had not been celibate for over a year, per the FDA rules updated in 2015. In response to Adams’ call, LGBTIQ leaders, such as State Senator Scott Wiener, who termed the FDA restriction “completely unnecessary” given “overwhelmingly accurate” current laboratory blood screening technologies, urged the FDA to end its anti-gay policy immediately.

A week later, the FDA reduced the gay celibacy requirement from 1 year to 3 months, stating that the reduction would remain in effect even after the COVID-19 crisis ended. The FDA’s actions, though a welcome step forward, reveal their recognition that the anti-gay policy itself makes no sense. Why would it suddenly be OK to ease the restriction on a permanent basis? If the COVID-19 crisis enabled the FDA to let go of 75% of its anti-gay prejudice, why not just let go of it all?

Some prominent Americans and also personal friends have said they notice that people have been kinder to each other during the COVID-19 crisis, much as they perceived people to be after 9/11. I hope that we as a society and many of us individually take advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to reflect upon and re-evaluate how we live and act now and in the future.

However, a half block from our house in our heavily Asian-American neighborhood, I recently saw scrawled on a telephone pole anti-Chinese graffiti, calling on neighbors to buy guns. It reminded me of a South Asian American friend’s observation that after 9/11 people were not nicer to her or other people thought to look Middle Eastern.

Ongoing discrimination not just about blood donations continues to loom over the LGBTIQ community during the current crisis as well. Earlier this month, we completed our U.S. Census questionnaire—something critical for each of us to do to ensure our representation in Congress and access to federal funds. As soon as we read the gender question offering respondents only the binary choice of male and female, we were reminded of how the Trump administration 3 year ago eliminated questions about gender identity and sexual orientation that could have provided invaluable information about our community and enabled us to be fully seen and dignified in the Census.

The Evangelical Christian charity Samaritan’s Purse, led by the notoriously anti-LGBTIQ minister Franklin Graham, has for weeks run a makeshift overflow tent hospital in Central Park for COVID-19 patients, sanctioned by the City of New York during the crisis. Although the organization claims it does not discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity in caring for patients, it openly discriminates in employment and who can volunteer. I can only imagine how disturbing it could be for an LGBTIQ person to receive life or death medical treatment under those tents.

Looming over us is the real possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis could rule that Title VII, the nation’s law prohibiting employment discrimination, does not apply to us. Although the legal arguments presented to the Court are strongly in our favor, we remember how back in 1986 at the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the Supreme Court held that states could put LGBTIQ people in jail for sexual expression of our love, even in the privacy of our own homes. When employers resume hiring as the COVID-19 crisis recedes, nothing in federal statute would prevent employers from openly discriminating against LGBTIQ people if the Court rules against us in the current cases.

All of this and more could potentially whip us into a state of fury. Although some activists say that anger at injustice is an important motivator for them, two quotations often attributed to the Dalai Lama come to mind. It is said that someone asked the Dalai Lama how he could harbor no anger towards the Chinese government given all it had done to him and Tibetan culture and people. He replied, “They have taken everything from us, why should I let them take away my peace and happiness as well?” And “don’t ever mistake my silence for ignorance, my calmness for acceptance, or my kindness for weakness.”

These words bespeak the importance of protecting our ability to love, care, and find peace and stability even when external circumstances make it difficult. And although John and I fervently wish that the HIV/AIDS epidemic never took place, we cherish what it has taught us about love, care, dignity, community, and life itself, and recognize its role in increasing the visibility of LGBTIQ people, thereby laying groundwork of the marriage equality movement and other advances.

Let us take this opportunity now to learn from the current pandemic so that when restrictions are finally eased, we don’t move backwards but instead move forward towards a more equal, just, and caring society.

2020 Foresight: Expect the Unexpected
April 9, 2020

When I was a senior in high school back in the 1970s, I played classical piano and was invited to perform the difficult Mendelssohn Piano Concerto in G-Minor before hundreds of students and their parents at our school’s annual holiday concert. I prepared for months on end. The morning of the concert was a sunny and crisp early winter day in Kansas City where we lived. But by afternoon clouds moved in, and soon it began to snow. I remember my mother was so nervous about my performance at the concert and how difficult it might be to get there through the snow, she baked the ham we were having for dinner with the plastic wrapper on it, yielding a completely inedible gooey mess.

And it just kept snowing and snowing. The roads became nearly impassable. We made it to the concert, but few others did. I performed the concerto that I had worked on so hard before a very small audience.

I was crestfallen, but years later at my 40th high school reunion I saw my old music teacher, who also still remembered that night decades ago. Seeing him made me feel something very different: how marvelous and nourishing it was to have played so much music together with him and my fellow students from grade school through high school graduation. (I also played clarinet and tenor saxophone in many different bands, ensembles, and orchestras.) Despite the fact that I never got to perform the Mendelssohn concerto as I had imagined, I had completely immersed myself in the music for all those months I had practiced. In fact, I had been very fortunate. I’ve never again played as much music as I did during my senior year of high school.

The experience gave me a taste of one of life’s most basic truths: things don’t always turn out the way we expect them to. Several years later I confronted that truth again when I came to terms with my sexuality. I had known since I was a small child that I was attracted to people of the same sex, but one reason that I didn’t come out until my 20s was because I simply could not conceive that there was anything different or out of the mainstream about me. When I finally connected the dots late one evening while riding my bike in front of the iconic mosaic at the heart of the Stanford quad, I remember stopping in astonishment with the realization: “Wow, I can’t believe it! I’m gay!” Things weren’t the way I expected them to be. It was also the beginning of my realizing, in fact, how lucky I was to be gay.

We in the LGBTIQ community are perhaps particularly familiar with the truth that life can turn out other than planned. For instance, during the heady days of San Francisco in the late 1970s, no one could foresee the havoc that the HIV/AIDS epidemic would wreak on the community just a few short years later.

As we popped the cork to ring in the New Year 2020, neither I nor anyone else I know imagined that less than three months later in the face of a new deadly virus, we’d be sheltering in place at home, doing everything we could to keep six feet away from any other human being except those with whom we lived—and, of all things, fretting about whether we had enough toilet paper.

It’s not surprising that many of us in the LGBTIQ community who lived through the 1980s and 1990s in San Francisco are experiencing varying degrees of PTSD these days. But our community learned a lot about life, death, how to truly care for each other, and how to fight back and stand up for our lives during the darkest days of the AIDS crisis and beyond. We hope some of that wisdom is proving useful amidst the COVID-19 outbreak.

Life’s unexpected turns can be wonderful, too—like when 33 years ago as I was preparing to leave a party because none of my friends were there, I turned around and met Stuart and we ended up being the last guests to depart and have been together ever since. Or the morning of February 12, 2004, when then-Mayor Gavin Newsom surprised the world and burst open the doors of San Francisco City Hall for LGBTIQ people to marry, igniting the marriage equality movement.

None of this negates the value of planning for the future and anticipating it as best we can. Indeed, the balance, skills, and stability we can bring to life before something unexpected takes place can help us when it does. Reminder to self: We really need to update and upgrade our earthquake kit!

Although Stuart has been working harder than ever at his job in health policy at UCSF during the shutdown, we’ve also enjoyed slowing down, spending more time outdoors, seeing neighbors (six feet apart) to and from walks in the park, and living life much more simply. We hope to maintain some of these things when life eventually returns to so-called normal.

And we hope to have learned something more about the vicissitudes and unpredictability of life—and to experience and appreciate each present moment and each loved one here and now. Please take good care of yourself and others during these unexpected and challenging times.

Ellen Pontac (1941–2020): Flooding the World with Love and Life
March 24, 2020

We met the extraordinary Ellen Pontac, along with the love of her life Shelly Bailes, on the miraculous first day of San Francisco’s Winter of Love, February 12, 2004. To our collective amazement, we, Shelly and Ellen (affectionately known as “Shellen”), and other same-sex couples had just gotten married, thanks to then San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom suddenly opening the door for same-sex couples to tie the knot.

As we stood in the grand rotunda of San Francisco City Hall in wonder at what was taking place, we saw an elated Pontac and Bailes signing up people to join Marriage Equality California, which later became Marriage Equality USA (MEUSA). We eagerly joined, commencing over eleven years working side by side with them and many other committed activists for marriage equality.

On March 15, 2020, Pontac passed away after a long illness at her home in Davis, California, with her wife Bailes and other loved ones by her side. Pontac and Bailes had been together for 46 years—years in which they “laughed, played, traveled, and worked together,” and “life was the best it could be,” as Bailes described in a recent Facebook post.

Pontac and Bailes met in New York City back in 1973, just four years after the Stonewall Riots. They moved in together the next year—a daring move because both were going through divorces and had children. As Bailes recounted to ABC-10 television in Sacramento last year, “Both our lawyers at the time told us that if we told anybody about our relationship, we would lose our kids. They would take them right out of our home.” Indeed, “one time Ellen’s ex-husband broke down our door, dragged her kids out by the hair in their pajamas, and threw them in the car,” Bailes recounted.

For a number of years, the couple kept a low profile in order to protect their family, but after moving to California and hearing Harvey Milk’s call to come out at San Francisco Pride 1978, they decided they needed and wanted to come out and be activists.

In 1986, the pair were instrumental in the city of Davis, which became one of the first municipalities in the country to pass an ordinance prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination and that defeated (by a 16 percentage point margin) an effort to repeal the measure at the polls.

In 2000—way before marriage equality was a cause celebre and a time when many in the LGBTIQ community did not understand its importance—Pontac and Bailes became marriage equality activists.

Together with other activists, we joined Pontac and Bailes in lobbying, organizing, and speaking at countless rallies. MEUSA created numerous events to publicize the importance of ending marriage discrimination, and Pontac and Bailes, other couples, and MEUSA activists showed up for every twist and turn of the marriage equality roller coaster to put a human face on the issue. No one was more committed, resilient, and visible than Pontac and Bailes.

At MEUSA’s 20th anniversary celebration in San Francisco, MEUSA leader Molly McKay described Pontac, Bailes, and other MEUSA activists as the “rebellious energizer bunnies of the movement.” McKay recounted that Pontac always said that to win marriage equality, we needed to “flood the world with our truth to share our lives, our loves, our stories and to help find and encourage others to do the same.”

One of the memorable things we did with Pontac and Bailes was to join 40 other activists on a 2004 nationwide bus tour from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., on the “Marriage Equality Express,” nicknamed “the caravan.” The caravan was the brainchild of another MEUSA leader Davina Kotulski, who wanted to channel the seemingly boundless energy that San Francisco’s Winter of Love had generated and to reveal to the nation the real lives of LGBTIQ people harmed by marriage discrimination. The caravan culminated in a national rally, featuring speeches from all of the caravan riders.

Marriage Equality activists Ellen Pontac and Shelly Bailes with Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis aboard the organization’s float in the 34th Annual San Francisco Pride Parade. Photo Source: ljworld.com

We were also humbled to ride with the pair and other seasoned activists on Marriage Equality California’s float in the euphoric 2004 San Francisco Pride Parade as we were just getting involved in the movement.

Pontac and Bailes were renowned for their creative and catchy homemade signs, their expressive personal reactions to the wins and losses on the road to equality, and their expression of their love for one another—all making them one of the most prominent couples in the nationwide marriage equality movement.

Their signature sign highlighted the longevity of their loving and committed relationship: “Shelly & Ellen, Together 30 Years, 7 Mo, 19 Days, 10 Hrs.” With each successive year that they fought for full marriage equality, they crossed out the number 30 and added an additional year, while holding an additional sign highlighting the particular issue at that time in the struggle. At a rally before the federal court hearing to determine whether the videotapes of the Prop 8 trial should be made public, their sign read: “Free the Tapes!” The judge hearing the case grinned when he saw the sign as he walked into the courthouse that morning, and even referred to the sign in his remarks from the bench.

Through everything, Pontac and Bailes not only maintained their sense of humor, but also never wavered in their confidence that love and equality would ultimately prevail. We and many other MEUSA activists shared that faith. Perhaps it was something that the magic of the Winter of Love instilled in us.

Pontac wrote in The People’s Victory: Stories From the Front Line of the Fight for Marriage Equality: “I always knew we were going to win this fight. When we joined Marriage Equality I believed that ‘Marriage was a Portal to Full Equality’ and I still feel that way. I know that when you open the hearts and minds of everyday people they not only begin to understand what equality means, but their hearts and minds don’t shut closed so easily.” Pontac and Bailes’ advocacy was never just for themselves personally; it was for all LGBTIQ people.

More than anything else, Pontac and Bailes revealed through their activism how much they loved each other and loved being married. Pontac and Bailes were one of the first two couples to marry legally in California when they tied the knot in Davis at 5:01 pm on June 16, 2008. Pontac exclaimed, “I’m just overjoyed. I can’t … imagine a better life,” according to ABC-10.

At a rally subsequent to the passage of Proposition 8, Pontac declared: “There are so many things about being married that are amazing … . The thing that thrills me most often is when I’m able to introduce someone to my wife.” She continued, “When you say this is my wife, everyone knows what you mean. And the feeling is absolutely glorious … when I’m able to say: ‘This is my wife Shelly Bailes.’” Bailes for her part declared in a recent Facebook post: “I am the luckiest person on earth.”

At one rally, Pontac held a sign that read simply, “I LOVE HER,” while Bailes’ sign proclaimed: “We are NEVER GOING AWAY.” Indeed, they never did and their love shone widely to the world. The contribution Ellen Pontac and her wife Shelly Bailes made to marriage equality and to LGBTIQ rights will be felt for generations to come.

Transforming the World One Outfit at a Time
March 12, 2020

Over the past few months, we’ve been busy cleaning out my mom’s condo since she died. My mom had a great fashion sense and kept herself feeling young even in her later decades not only by acting young, but also by dressing according to current trends and pulling it off with style. Dressing on the outside the way she felt on the inside was vital to her. John, my siblings, and I carted countless pieces of clothes to charities, including one designed to help economically-disadvantaged women to have free clothing to wear to job interviews as they re-enter the labor market.

We would’ve loved having something nearby like the new nonprofit Transform Cincy, founded by Nancy Dawson and her friend Tristan Vaught in Cincinnati, Ohio. Dawson, who runs a successful bridal makeup business called BRIDEface, is the proud parent of a transgender daughter, Phoebe, who came out to her family as transgender at age 10. As Dawson told NBC’s Today show, “as soon as we started recognizing Phoebe as Phoebe, she really blossomed.”

However, they soon realized “there wasn’t a safe space we could go and just try on dresses, skirts, without being judged or looked at.” Then one day, Dawson saw a social media post from her friend Vaught, saying that instead of doing “gender reveal” baby showers, people should do “showers for people who are transitioning.” A dream was born.

Together with Dawson’s other daughter Ella, they created Transform Cincy, a safe space where trans youth can build a new wardrobe at no cost, housed at the storefront where Dawson operates BRIDEface. Daughter Phoebe explained to Today how important being able to dress in accord with one’s gender identity was: “When I first started wearing clothes that … matched my identity, it was really affirming. And it felt like I could express outwardly how I felt on the inside.”

When trans youth contact Transform, they answer a few questions to help Ella, who serves as the stylist. She curates a session just for them, and then when they arrive in person, outfits are waiting for them to try on.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Transform has become far more than just a place for trans youth to find clothes that are a great match for them; it has evolved into a safe space where trans teens can find support. Transform’s first client, 17-year-old Elliot Reed, told National Public Radio: “It made me feel so accepted and validated.” A 15-year-old told Today after their recent visit, “ … today was just so totally awesome; you feel so loved and welcomed when you’re at Transform. They choose clothes specifically for you and your identity, and it’s so validating, walking out with a new part of yourself.”

Nancy recounted to Today the story of a teen who had driven three hours from a small town to Transform. The teen “had never met another trans person in her life, and neither had her mom, so it was so great to give them that support.” Indeed, the Transform experience provides support for both parents and children. As Ella told Today, “They’re getting a lot more than clothing. A lot of the times, the parents need somebody to talk to; they need somebody that understands, because a lot of times this is a big journey for the parents as well as the kids.”

In explaining the need for places like Transform, cofounder Vaught told local television station WCPO, “Can you imagine when you’re transitioning, trying to go to a department store and where do you go to actually change?” In California, Assembly Member Evan Low introduced state legislation last month requiring retail department stores with over 500 employees to maintain an undivided, gender inclusive area of its sales floor where children’s clothes, toys, and childcare items that have “traditionally been marketed for either girls or for boys [are] displayed.” The bill serves to help enable children to develop and express themselves free from constraining gender norms and thus helps all children, not just trans youth. We hope that it is part of a movement to free all consumers from restrictive gender constraints and biases in clothes and other products.

Tragically, Dawson received a cancer diagnosis late last year that will likely cut her life short soon, and her daughters will have to grow up further and live without her. However, Dawson told Today that she sees “Transform as being one of my legacies along with my children.” Everyone will miss her greatly, but Transform will continue. As donations grow and demand increases, Transform will need to grow soon as well—into a larger storefront. Vaughn described Dawson as “truly a light. Her energy, her passion, her courage is still going to be seen throughout each person we see here.”

We can’t help but remember another bright Cincinnati area trans teen whose light was never allowed to shine: Leelah Alcorn. Six years ago, Leelah committed suicide, leaving a gut-wrenching social media post describing her despair. In it, she described how she had been raised in a very conservative Christian environment and when she came out to her mom as transgender at age 14, her parents reacted very negatively and undertook a series of actions the resulted in her hating herself and descending into isolation: “No friends, no support, no love. Just my parent’s disappointment and the cruelty of loneliness.” In the note, Leelah pleads for societal change: “The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights.”

Dawson and everyone else at Tranform Cincy are not only helping to save trans youth from suicide, but are also helping trans youth to flourish as their own people. They and other caring people across the country are working to make Leelah’s vision a reality. Let’s all join them.

Every Moment a Marriage Equality Moment: Breakfast with My Dad at His Retirement Community
February 27, 2020

You never know for sure what awaits you at breakfast time at my 96-year-old dad’s Southern California retirement community, where John and I visited over the recent Presidents’ Day weekend. And I don’t mean whether it’ll be fried eggs or pancakes; I mean the conversation around the breakfast table.

One morning my dad, my sister (who was also visiting), John, and I dined with two other residents: Mr. and Mrs. Paulson, a couple I had met on a previous visit with my dad on my own. Our breakfast was unremarkable. I introduced John and my sister to the Paulsons, who told us about their children and grandchildren, not an unusual experience.

On the final morning of our visit, John skipped breakfast, and by chance my dad and I ate with the Paulsons again. We soon learned that our prior breakfast with the Paulsons had been anything but ordinary for them.

A few minutes after we sat down, Mrs. Paulson turned to me and asked, “Was that your wife we met yesterday?” I said, “No, you may be thinking of my sister. You met my husband John at breakfast the other day.”

Mrs. Paulson looked at me puzzled and said, “Why do you call him your husband, when that’s against the will of God?” Taken aback, I explained, “I call him my husband because we love each, we’re spending the rest of our lives together, and we’re legally married.”

She turned to her husband and asked, “That’s not the same as our marriage, is it?” Mr. Paulson, apparently knowing the desired response, responded, “No.” At which Mrs. Paulson continued on with me: “Why do you call it a legal marriage, when it’s not recognized by our church?” I explained, “We weren’t married in your church. We were married in City Hall, and our marriage is legally recognized in all 50 states.” She persisted, “But why would you want to get married when it goes against the Bible?”

“We got married for the same reason that most people do—we love each other, we’re committed to each other, and we’re spending our lives together,” I said. “Marriage comes with many rights and responsibilities, and that’s part of how we are able to care for each other in sickness and in health. We are married under the law.”

Befuddled and clearly not getting the answer she wanted, Mrs. Paulson turned to my father who had been listening intently but had said nothing. Her eyes seemed to say to my dad, “Do you hear what I’m hearing? Surely as his father you’re not OK with this?”

Not missing a beat, Dad met her gaze and said, “And they can legally adopt children too!”

At that, Mrs. Paulson returned to her bacon and eggs.

After breakfast, Dad said nothing to me about what had transpired and proceeded to his room to take his morning nap. When John and I finished packing and returned to his room to say goodbye, I awakened Dad from his slumber. Before I could say anything, Dad, still half-asleep, exclaimed with a wry smile, “Be sure to tell John what happened at breakfast! You handled it expertly.”

I responded that he had too. “We’re a team. We’re a family.”

I told Dad, “I love you.” He said, “I love you too. More than ever.”

Negotiating Meiwaku and Getting Your Fair Share of Rice
February 13, 2020

We’ve just returned from a wonderful two weeks in Japan, where we gave talks on marriage equality, HIV/AIDS, and LGBTIQ rights, and met with fellow activists. We spoke to hundreds of students, professors, activists, and businesspeople, who showed great interest. The New York Times recently reported a “’boom’ in LGBT awareness” in Japan, citing recent polling showing that nearly 80 percent of Japanese under age 60 now support marriage equality.

The “boom” was immediately evident to us. When we first gave marriage equality talks in Japan seven years ago, we asked a class of university students whether they personally knew someone LGBT. Barely anyone raised their hand. When we asked the same question two weeks ago, many hands popped up, with one woman telling the class that she knew an LGBT person because, in fact, she was one herself.

Seven years ago, nowhere in Japan offered partnership certificates to same-sex couples. During our trip, Osaka Prefecture, with a population of nearly 9 million people, began issuing certificates, meaning that 20 percent of Japanese now live in places that offer certificates. Although the certificates offer few substantive legal rights, they hold symbolic value not just for the couples themselves but also as a signal to the nation of growing governmental support for LGBT rights. Activists are pressing hard in the lead up to the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics to increase the number of places that offer certificates.

And a year ago, a diverse group of same-sex couples filed marriage equality lawsuits across the country. The influential Japan Federation of Bar Associations, a legal regulatory authority, opined that the country’s current laws excluding same-sex couples from marriage violate the Japanese Constitution.

Last week, the plaintiffs and lawyers in the lawsuits held public events to mark the anniversary. We were delighted to meet some of the plaintiff couples in Tokyo, to discuss our shared journeys, and to provide inspiration to each other. We also met with Kanako Otsuji, the first openly LGBTIQ elected member of the Diet (Japanese Parliament), who last year introduced marriage equality legislation in the Diet.

But substantial barriers to winning equality remain. The conservative government led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has shown no indication that it would give Otsuji’s marriage equality bill a hearing in the Diet. The Japanese Supreme Court is considered a conservative institution that historically has rarely invalidated legislation as unconstitutional.

In the U.S., the fact that millions of LGBTIQ people have come out has been foundational to the victories our community has won. In Japan, the route to winning equality may differ because coming out remains personally challenging to many Japanese LGBTIQ people.

Japanese women face parallel struggles to that of LGBTIQ people. Although Japan boasts the third largest economy in the world, it ranked a lowly 110th out of 149 countries in the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Gender Gap Index. And the country ranked 165th out of 193 nations in terms of women members of representative national legislatures, according to a 2017 study. A few years ago, Otsuji told us that, in some respects, it was more difficult for her to run for the Diet as a woman than as an LGBT person.

On our last night in Japan, we dined with two Japanese friends, who are both successful professionals: one a man, and the other a woman. We ate at a cozy vegetarian Japanese restaurant, tucked away on a winding alley in central Osaka, with just two tables and a few seats around the counter behind which the young owner prepared set meals for his customers. When the owner presented our set meals at our table, an animated conversation in Japanese between the owner and our Japanese friends ensued.

When the flurry of words ended, we asked our friends what had transpired. They explained that the owner had brought our woman friend a smaller serving of rice for the meal, explaining that female customers received less rice than male customers because they needed less food (even though, we note, we all paid the same price for our meals). Despite our friends’ protestations, the owner insisted. Our friends decided not to escalate the disagreement further and simply let it go, leaving our female friend to internalize the anger and frustration she felt.

Earlier, she had explained to us the Japanese term meiwaku. We understand it translates roughly as being an annoyance or causing disturbance to others. Japanese children are taught from an early age not to assert themselves in ways that are perceived as disturbing or troubling to other people. Doing so is considered selfish in a society that values group harmony above all. Our friend confided to us that even though she was completely in the right when it came to receiving the same amount of food as male customers, she, in fact, felt guilty for raising the issue even to the limited degree she did.

Another female Japanese friend told us this type of disparate treatment of women at restaurants is a thing of the past in Tokyo. But this profound societal value of not being meiwaku seems to pose a great challenge to LGBTIQ people coming out and to women’s professional and political advancement.

We do not profess expertise in Japanese societal norms, but it seems that the ability to which LGBTIQ people and women can demonstrate that their full and open participation in society is not meiwaku may be key to personal, political, and professional success—and both metaphorically and literally to getting a fair share of rice.

Fasten Your Seatbelts for 2020!
January 16, 2020

It’s finally here, the year so many of us have been waiting for: 2020. The year millions of Americans, including many in the LGBTIQ community, hope will bring forth the end of the Trump presidency. A year that will likely have a monumental impact—for better or for worse—on the LGBTIQ community, the nation, and the world.

In her classic 1950 film All About Eve, gay icon Bette Davis cautions her evening party guests, “Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy night.” Indeed, 2020 could turn out to be a bumpy nightmare for the LGBTIQ community—or a watershed year for the advancement of LGBTIQ rights.

In the next few weeks or months, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on whether employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity constitutes sex discrimination in violation of Title VII, the federal law that outlaws race and sex discrimination in employment nationwide. The decision will have major nationwide impact, especially in the nearly 30 states that lack full state law prohibitions on discrimination against LGBTIQ people.

The ruling will also have ramifications in the areas of housing, public accommodation, education, and sports. A victory would be huge. But even though the actual legal arguments are strongly on our side, we could easily lose because of Trump’s two appointments to the Court: Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

The Gorsuch and Kavanaugh appointments already cement a strongly conservative 5–4 majority on the Court for years to come. At age 71, Clarence Thomas, the oldest person in that 5-member majority, could remain on the Court for years. If Trump were re-elected and had the opportunity to replace any of the 4 liberal/moderate members of the Court minority, the impact could be felt for generations. Achieving full constitutional protections for LGBTIQ people—an unfinished work despite nationwide marriage equality—would be even more at risk than it is today.

A Trump/Pence re-election would also likely mean continued executive level attacks on the transgender community, the undermining of the rights of transgender people, and further measures to legitimate discrimination against all LGBTIQ people under the guise of so-called “religious freedom.” With Gorsuch and Kavanuagh on the Court, the federal courts would likely provide little if any protection against these efforts.

However, all of these Republican threats to our community come as we, as LGBTIQ people continue to make significant strides toward greater societal embrace of gender and sexual orientation diversity than ever before.

From a national political perspective, the prominence of openly gay Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is testament of a sea change in public acceptance. As political junkies who have followed the influential Iowa Caucuses since their inception in the 1970s, we find it truly extraordinary from a historical perspective that polls show that a gay man who appears with and speaks openly about his husband could win the caucuses. That would have been unthinkable even just a few years ago.

And who knows? Mayor Buttigieg could be inaugurated president of the United States on January 20, 2021, with his husband Chasten at his side. Stranger things have happened … and indeed arguably did happen with the election of the current occupant of the White House four years ago.

And if Buttigieg became president, he could lead a restructuring of the Supreme Court of which he has often spoken to restore balance and reshape the future of constitutional rights, not just for LGBTIQ people but for millions of other Americans as well. And he would support full federal protections for LGBTIQ people and end the attacks on transgender Americans, as many other Democratic contenders would do as well.

Or Trump could be re-elected.

Bette Davis’ admonishment to “fasten your seatbelts” is delivered as a sassy throwaway line. But when we consider the uncertainties that lie ahead in 2020 and the tendency of some of us to fret and despair or become outraged at every twist and turn along the way, Davis’ words offer sage advice.

Although 2020 is the time to stand up, speak out, and be counted, “fasten your seatbelts” is a wise reminder to take care of each other and ourselves as we do. After all, seatbelts are designed to protect us from the minor bumps and the hard knocks along the way. We wish you a truly happy new year, buckled up individually and bound together as community.

Wishing You an Imaginative Holiday
December 19, 2019

Years ago, at SF MOMA’s retrospective of the work of Japanese conceptual artist Yoko Ono, we remember climbing a tall ladder, and then using a magnifying glass to read a word, written in tiny letters on a piece of paper suspended from the ceiling. The word was “YES.”

Ono first exhibited the piece at a 1966 gallery show in London when John Lennon, whom she had not yet met, walked in, climbed the ladder, and read that same word. In Lennon’s words: ” … in tiny little letters it says ‘YES.’ So it was positive. I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn’t say ‘no’ or ‘f–k you’ or something. It said ‘YES.’”

Of course, Lennon and Ono’s collaboration went on to become legendary. For us, Ono’s work illuminated the vitality of hope, engagement, optimism, and yes—imagination. Five years later, Lennon inspired millions for generations to come by singing: “Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one … .”

Indeed, he was not. Lennon attested that Ono was responsible for much of the song, and in 2017, she finally received the co-writing credit he had wished for her to have.

This holiday season we find ourselves pondering the wonder and power of imagination. The holidays are perhaps the time when many Americans embrace imagination most, in particular the idea of an old, plump gentleman dressed in red, who resides at the North Pole.

The poet and novelist Alice Walker declared, “I have fallen in love with the imagination. If you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.” The painter Vincent Van Gogh advised: “Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.” The writer Maxine Hong Kingston keenly observed, “A good strong imagination doesn’t go off into some wild fantasy of nowhere. It goes to the truth.”

Imagination provides us the opportunity to recognize truth and find hope that might be less accessible if we limit our minds to analysis and reason. One of the greatest scientific geniuses of all time, Albert Einstein, proclaimed: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

And imagination can be transformative in politics and activism. It has played a pivotal role in the LGBTIQ movement. Thinking over the past year, who could have imagined that Pete Buttigieg, the openly gay Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, would be a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination? Pete and his husband Chasten could. Forty years earlier, Harvey Milk imagined himself on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and with a lot of work by thousands inspired by a dream, he won election.

On February 12, 2004, Gavin Newsom, in allegiance to the Constitution but in defiance of state law, imagined San Francisco as a place that recognized the truth of the dignity and equality of same-sex love and marriage equality for all. He was able to make that truth a reality for 30 days in 2004, and thousands from around the globe, including ourselves, responded.

When those marriages were nullified six months later, who could have imagined that just over a decade later the dream of nationwide marriage equality would become a reality? Although devastated, many of us could. The experience of that 2004 dream come true inspired countless people, not just in San Francisco but across the country, to work for lasting equality.

Today, LGBTIQ activists in China are imagining their country passing marriage equality legislation, even as Chinese President Xi Jinping presides over a political and cultural crackdown not seen since the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. This fall, Chinese queer activists launched a grassroots campaign encouraging the community to submit their personal stories and desires for equality to the national legislature during the authorized public comment period for an unrelated marriage and family code bill. Upwards of 200,000 people appear to have submitted comments.

Imagination abounds in the LGBTIQ community—from artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers to drag performers to the Radical Faeries and more. It is foundational. Queer people come out because we imagine a better life no longer hiding or repressing our sexuality. Transgender people take courageous steps because they imagine the wholeness they will feel when their body matches their gender. Our community’s political engagement and activism are founded not just on our desire to make our own lives better, but also on the dream that LGBTIQ youth growing up will not face the same challenges we did.

This year, we’re asking Santa to bring us the gift of letting our imaginations run wild to discover new truths and possibilities. We wish you an imaginative holiday season and New Year 2020!

Strawberries and Cream with the ‘Bad Boys’
December 5, 2019

This holiday season, I find myself reminded of two old family stories. The first comes from my dad’s side of the family and is a story about my paternal Great, Great Grandfather Amos recounted for posterity when he died. Amos was a Quaker minister who with his wife Nancy founded a tiny Quaker meeting in southern Illinois in the 19th Century.

“It was said that Mr. Lewis had a very fine strawberry patch which the ‘bad boys’ of the neighborhood used regularly to loot, stealing the fruit and destroying the vines; that one day while such ‘bad boys’ were so engaged, they were surprised by Mr. Lewis. But instead of collaring and soundly thrashing them when they were caught, as they expected and as was done by others to them, Mr. Lewis said to them in a kindly and gentle voice: ‘Boys, the best of the berries have been picked and taken into the house, but if you will come in, you can have some here with sugar and cream.’”

I like this story, not only because it was told about my great, great grandfather, whom of course I never met, but also because it recounts a very simple act of kindness. I imagine that Amos felt so content, safe, and at peace in his own life that he felt no need to lash out at the so-called “bad boys” in anger.

Given that they all lived in a very small town, it is likely that Amos knew the boys and how other townspeople had repeatedly treated them harshly when they were caught misbehaving. Amos not only chose an alternative nonviolent approach, part and parcel of the Quaker way of life, but also to indulge the boys with kindness, sharing the best strawberries with them—with sugar and cream to boot.

The second story is a very different account from my mother’s side of the family, from my maternal Great Grandmother Jenny, and takes place years later and hundreds of miles away in small town North Carolina. It’s in the form of a letter Jenny wrote in her early 60s to her son, my grandfather, from the Tranquil Park Sanitarium, where it appears she was receiving treatment for debilitating panic attacks:

“I am not allowed to write at length but I want to tell you how glad I am that I came here. I have such a cool room with private bath and attentive nurse and a nice cool porch where we gather with congenial company and it’s as pleasant as the mountains and I’m improving all the time. I took a long walk yesterday and slept fine last night. I am not exaggerating. I would not deceive you.”

The letter continues: “At home you know how it is. I got nervous over things and here I have nothing to think about and everything is so quiet. We have music by the Victrola a great deal. You know how I enjoy music … . I think what a blessing there is such a place provided for suffering humanity.”

Unfortunately, anxiety and panic disorders run through part of my mother’s family. My grandfather to whom this letter was written had a mental and physical breakdown himself two decades after Jenny did. Jenny returned home from Tranquil Park, but became ill again, and despite further residential treatment, became isolated and suffered mental illness for the rest of her life.

My great, great grandfather Amos on my dad’s side of the family is, of course, no relation to my great grandmother Jenny on my mother’s side. However, when I reflect on these two stories together, I imagine Amos’ kindness and generosity reaching across time, space, and blood to Jenny in her suffering.

I am struck by how caring Jenny described the sanitarium staff to be and how comforting the environs were. I find myself relaxing as I contemplate the “nice cool porch with congenial company,” where it’s “pleasant as the mountains.” Listening to music around the wind-up Victrola, doubtlessly the latest in technology at the time, sounds both nurturing and exhilarating. I love how Jenny writes that “everything is so quiet,” in striking contrast to her previously racing mind, swirling in fear and anxiety. Over a century later, I find myself wanting to care for Jenny.

The holidays can epitomize the extremes of human emotions, from great joy and generosity to stress, anxiety, and disappointment. Our DNA, life experiences, and relationships greatly influence what we encounter in our hearts and minds this time of year. Stuart and I hope that during this season we all can check in to our own versions of Tranquil Park when we need a break, and when we feel safe and whole, even invite the “bad boys” in to share our best strawberries—with sugar and cream.

Will an Ambulance Dump You on the Side of the Road?
November 28, 2019

Imagine you’re a transgender person who after years of waiting finally has been able to have life-affirming gender confirmation surgery. But some unlikely and unexpected complication arises, and you need to be rushed to the nearest ER. When in the ambulance en route you tell the EMT what’s going on; the EMT commands the driver to stop the car immediately. After the EMT and driver exchange a few words among themselves, they open the door and dump you on the side of the road—left on your own to somehow make it to the ER.

You later learn that your having gender confirmation surgery had offended the EMT and driver’s personal religious beliefs.  Under the Trump-Pence administration’s new religious “conscience” rule, more aptly called the “denial of care” rule, they could refuse you services at any time because the medical provider, like most medical facilities nationwide, received particular types of federal funding through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Fortunately for the time being, this scenario is less likely to take place because Northern California Federal District Judge William Alsup last week joined federal court judges in New York and Washington State in ruling that the denial of care rule had no basis in law and enjoined its enforcement nationwide.

The breadth of the Trump-Pence Administration’s denial of care rule that they are attempting to enforce is astonishing. The rule’s preamble focuses on abortion-related care and services, but the new regulation applies to any medical service provider who objects to providing their services to anyone for any religious belief. In the context of Trump-Pence political strategy, it is clear that the rule panders to conservative political Christian interests and targets women, LGBTIQ people—especially transgender people—and other politically vulnerable populations.

Judge Alsup in his ruling explicates how the denial of service rule does not just apply to physicians and nurses, but to ambulance drivers and many other staff who have at best a remote connection to the medical care being provided. Using abortion (and that includes emergency abortions necessary to save the life of the mother) as an example, Alsup explains that “a clerk scheduling surgeries for an operating room could refuse to reserve slots for abortions … . So could an employee who merely sterilizes and places surgical instruments or ensures that the supply cabinets in the operating room are fully stocked in preparation for an abortion.”

Professional staff who provide “[p]re- and post-op tasks [that] include monitoring and ensuring that a patient is stable and/or recovering following a procedure such as taking vitals and placing an intravenous line” could refuse to do so based on their religious objections. “Medical laboratories run tests that assist in diagnosing or in analyzing the outcome of certain procedures” could close their doors to people they chose to based on religious grounds.

Pharmacists whose “only possible role in an abortion … procedure would be dispensing advance medication to facilitate the procedure or post-procedure medication to stabilize or heal the patient, such as pain medication” could turn their backs on a patient.

Housekeeping staff could even object to cleaning a patient’s hospital room. And “an entity could lose all of its HHS funding if it fired a hospital front-desk employee for refusing to tell a woman seeking an emergency abortion for a [life-threatening] pregnancy which floor she needed to go to for her procedure.”

Although we are gratified that three federal district courts have struck down the denial of care rule that could cause so much harm, these cases will very likely wind their ways through the federal appellate courts and could ultimately end up at the U.S. Supreme Court.

And that’s one of numerous reasons that arch anti-LGBTIQ conservative Brian Brown’s October 29th tweet of a photo of himself with Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh and very conservative Catholics advocates inside the Supreme Court itself deeply disturbs us. The New Yorker reports that Brown believes that “the rights of L.G.B.T. people shouldn’t be protected at all—that, in his ideal society, there would be no L.G.B.T. people, in fact.”

Brown’s misnamed National Organization for Marriage is a strident opponent of LGBTIQ equality in the U.S. and worldwide.  The group has filed numerous legal briefs against LGBTIQ rights, including briefs in the employment discrimination cases now pending before the Court—even as Brown met with Alito and Kavanaugh inside the Court.

We are a democracy, not a theocracy. But even from a religious point of view, it seems particularly incongruous for people who purport to be devout Christians to trumpet denying medical care to other human beings. After all, one of the things that Jesus of the Gospels is most famous for is healing the sick. He didn’t assert conscience-based religious objections to caring for people.

Where is that compassion now?

Presidential Candidates Debate a Crucial Issue to the LGBTIQ Community
October 31, 2019

Hours into the October Democratic Presidential Debate, four of the twelve candidates (Biden, Buttigieg, Castro, and Warren) were asked whether they would favor adding justices to the Supreme Court to protect women’s rights in the event the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. The composition of the Court is also of vital importance to the lives of LGBTIQ people and many other Americans as well. Here’s how the candidates responded to this crucial question that rarely receives the attention it deserves.

Openly gay South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg took a leading role at the debate in advocating structural reform to the Court. Buttigieg is “committed to establishing a commission on day one” of his presidency to “propose reforms to depoliticize” the Court. “We can’t go on like this, where every single time there is a vacancy, we have this apocalyptic ideological firefight over what to do next.”

Buttigieg offered a proposal “to have a 15-member court where five of the members can only be appointed by unanimous agreement of the other 10.” But he emphasized that he was “not wedded to a particular solution” and would also consider possibilities such as term limits or rotating justices to the Supreme Court from the federal appellate bench.

Buttigieg asserted that when he first proposed Court reform, “some folks said that was too bold to even contemplate.” But in urging nonpartisanship, Buttigieg did not call out Republican presidents for being far more ideological and partisan in their Supreme Court nominations (such as Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch) than Democratic presidents. And he did not explicitly denounce the extraordinary measures Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell undertook to block President Obama’s 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland to the Court and McConnell’s changing the Senate rules to install Trump’s pick Gorsuch.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren was noncommittal, responding: “I think there are a number of options. I think, as Mayor Buttigieg said, there are many different ways. People are talking about different options, and I think we may have to talk about them.”

Warren, not one to shy away from proposing major policy changes, did not explain whether she would make Court reform a priority. After her initial statement, she quickly pivoted to talk about the substantive issue of abortion, advocating that Congress should enact legislation codifying Roe v. Wade, a position that all four candidates took.

Warren’s response did not address the myriad other issues in which the Court plays a decisive role and the problem that a conservative Supreme Court might rule that Congress lacks the power to guarantee access to abortion nationwide in the face of state laws severely restricting or forbidding it.

Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro opposed adding additional justices to the Court, making the provocatively worded declaration: “I wouldn’t pack the Court.” Castro acknowledged that Buttigieg’s 15-member Court idea was “interesting,” but opined that “if” he were choosing from one of Buttigieg’s proposals, he would favor term limits for Justices or having justices rotate from the appellate courts. Castro, like all of the candidates, made clear that he would nominate justices “who respect the precedent of Roe v. Wade.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden also employed the term “court packing” in firmly opposing adding additional justices to the Court. He reasoned that the Democrats’ adding justices when they had the power to do so would result in Republicans doing the same and further undermine the “credibility” of the Court.

In an attempt to appear assertive, Biden promised that if next year one of the justices left the Court as happened during the 2016 election year, “I would make sure that we would do exactly what McConnell did last time out. We would not allow any hearing to be held for a new justice.”

But how could Biden possibly ensure that McConnell and the Republican majority in the Senate would not get such a justice confirmed as they did with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh? Biden presently holds no political office, and if he could stop McConnell, why didn’t he do so back in 2016 when he was Vice President and thus the titular “president of the Senate”?

Taking a long-term view of the possible ramifications of changing the structure of the Supreme Court is a legitimate and perhaps persuasive argument. The Court has had nine Justices for the last 150 years, although the number of Justices before that varied from 6 to 10. But the argument fails to respond to the immediate threat to the well being of millions of Americans, including LGBTIQ people, that the current Supreme Court poses and the nakedly partisan strategy that the Republicans have pursued over the past 50 years to shape the ideological stance of the Court.

None of the other eight candidates on stage interrupted to assert their position on the question. In addition, Harris, Klobuchar, Booker. and Gabbard all chose not to advocate reforming the Court when asked what they would do if recent state laws severely restricting abortion were upheld in the courts.

Stay tuned. We will continue to report on this critical issue as the campaign unfolds.

Supreme Court Faces the Reality of Anti-LGBT Discrimination
October 16, 2019

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court faced the reality of the vast diversity of human experience when it comes to gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity in a way it had never done before. The Court held oral arguments in cases regarding whether anti-LGBT employment discrimination violates Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

As we explained in the last edition, resolution of the cases should be straightforward. As Justice Kagan put it during the argument, Title VII provides an “extremely simple test”; that is, “would the same thing would have happened to you if you were of a different sex?”

Kagan made clear that the employer in the case before the Court violated Title VII because it fired a highly valued, long-term employee simply because he “was a man who loved other men.” The employer wouldn’t have done so if the employee were a woman who loved men.

Similarly, counsel for Aimee Stephens, whose employer fired her because she was transgender, explained that her employer fired her based on the “ultimate sex stereotype” that a person should be cisgender. Counsel explained that Stephen’s employer fired her “because she had a male sex assigned at birth” and would not have done so had she been designated female at birth.

The cases strikingly illuminate a central root of modern anti-LGBT discrimination: queer people transgress deeply engrained, rigid gender norms that remain widespread. A primary reason that LGBTIQ people suffer discrimination is that we are living proof that all people are, in fact, not straight, cisgender men or women who live on a strict gender binary. People are much more beautifully nuanced, complex, and dynamic than those confinements.

We don’t know if a majority of the Court will recognize this substantive underpinning of the cases, but the language of Title VII is clear, something that Trump’s arch conservative Court appointee Neil Gorsuch even seemed to acknowledge. Indeed, the outcome of these cases appears to hinge on whether Gorsuch possesses the moral and intellectual integrity to stay true to his long professed conviction that when the actual words of a statute are unambiguous, the court must follow those words rather than attempt to glean the subjective intentions of the legislators who enacted the law.

Gorsuch, however, seemed to despair during oral argument that enforcing the plain words of the statute could lead to “massive social upheaval.” And questions regarding the use of bathrooms (and, to a lesser extent, workplace dress codes) took center stage during significant parts of the argument. Even Justice Sotomayor, who seemed clearly in favor of the LGBT plaintiffs, identified the bathroom question as a “difficult issue.”

She recognized a transgender person’s “genuine” need to use the bathroom that comports with their gender identity, but asserted that “there are other women who are made uncomfortable, and not merely uncomfortable, but who would feel intruded upon if someone who still had male characteristics walked into their bathroom.”

The extensive discussion of bathroom access is based on ignorance. Americans have been sharing bathrooms with transgender people without incident for a long time and weren’t even aware they were doing it. Anti-LGBTIQ conservatives recently created transgender bathroom panic as a political scare tactic to fight civil rights legislation protecting transgender people, most prominently Houston’s Proposition 1 in 2015.

Separate bathrooms for blacks and whites was a prominent aspect of racist Jim Crow laws, because many white people felt not just “uncomfortable” but “intruded upon,” to say the least, by sharing bathrooms with blacks. The fears and prejudices of many white people were not a legitimate justification for such laws that were eventually struck down as discriminatory. A right-wing political scare tactic should not be a basis today for denying LGBTIQ people their basic civil rights that federal law mandates.

The outcome of the cases may ultimately depend on whether Justice Kagan can successfully use her coalition-building skills to convince Gorsuch, and possibly Kavanaugh (who said too little during the arguments to discern where he stood on the cases), to come together to create a favorable majority. Kagan was lauded for her ability to unify people when she was nominated for the Court nearly a decade ago.

For instance, on the question of statutory interpretation, Kagan declared a few years ago that “we are all textualists now” because of the influence of Gorsuch’s predecessor Antonin Scalia, whom Gorsuch greatly admired. For years, Gorsuch has declared that judges should interpret statutes based on “what ‘the words on the paper say’” and not their personal “views of optimal social policy or what the statute ‘should be.’” Now he has a chance to join Kagan and to stand by his principles.

And Kagan has known Kavanaugh for years since she hired him to teach at Harvard Law School when she was the school’s dean. When Kavanaugh was nominated for the Court, he thanked her for the opportunity to teach at the law school, and the two of them were seen laughing together on Kavanaugh’s first day at the Court.

The Justices’ words at oral argument provide only a glimpse at what they may be thinking about a case, and do not serve as an accurate predictor of how they may rule. We know that if the Justices abide by the creed engraved atop the edifice of the Supreme Court, “Equal Justice Under Law,” LGBTIQ people across the nation will soon be protected from employment discrimination.

Our Civil Rights Go Before the Supreme Court on October 8
October 3, 2019 

On Tuesday, October 8, the U.S. Supreme Court will hold oral arguments in pivotal cases addressing whether discrimination against LGBT people constitutes unlawful sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Title VII prohibits an employer from firing or otherwise treating adversely “any individual because of such individual’s … sex.” Long established Supreme Court precedent makes clear that an employer’s actions occurred “because of” an individual’s sex if the employer would not have so treated the individual “but for” their sex.

Our community’s arguments are straightforward. With respect to sexual orientation, if an employer fires a lesbian or bisexual woman because she is attracted to another woman, but would not have fired her if she were a man attracted to the same woman, the employer fired her because of her sex, plain and simple. The same would hold true for a gay or bisexual man attracted to another man. “But for” the LGB person’s sex, the employer would not have fired them.

With respect to gender identity, if a transgender woman, such as plaintiff Aimee Stephens, had been born anatomically female and lived openly as a woman, she would not have been fired. However, because Stephens was born anatomically male and now lives openly as a woman, she was fired. “But for” her anatomical sex at birth, Stephens would not have been fired.

Stephens analogizes her case to religious discrimination. Just as “firing an employee for intending to change her religion is religious discrimination” outlawed by Title VII, so too firing an employee because she sought “to change her sex is sex discrimination,” prohibited by the Act.

The Supreme Court has also recognized that an employer’s taking adverse actions against an employee because the individual diverges from sex stereotypes or generalizations about how the different sexes should look or act is unlawful sex discrimination under the Act. As Stephens explains, “even ‘unquestionably true’ generalizations about women and men as classes cannot be used to discriminate against ‘individuals.’”

With respect to sexual orientation, the assumption that men are romantically and sexually attracted only to women and women only to men is an entrenched sex stereotype and generalization. An employer who fires an LGB individual because they fail to meet this expectation violates Title VII. Even though the majority of men and women are attracted to people of a different sex, Title VII prohibits an employer from discriminating against an LGB individual when they are not.

The Supreme Court has held that an employer’s discriminating against an individual because they date or marry someone of a different race violates Title VII. So too, an employer violates Title VII when it discriminates against an individual who dates or marries someone of the same sex. Indeed, if Title VII were not so interpreted, an LGB individual could exercise their constitutional right to marry a person of the same sex on Saturday, and their employer could fire them Monday morning for exercising that right, instead of marrying someone of a different sex. It’s sex discrimination plain and simple.

Regarding gender identity, the stereotype and generalization that people “throughout their entire lives” will “identify, appear, and behave in ways seen as typical” of their anatomical sex at birth is one of the most pernicious stereotypes in American life. Although this generalization is true for many people, an employer who discriminates against a transgender person for failing to conform to this sex stereotype violates Title VII.

Opponents contend that Title VII does not forbid an employer from discriminating against LGBT people as long as it discriminates against both male and female LGBT people. They assert that only when an employer, for example, fires male LGBT people, but not female LGBT people (what plaintiffs term “double discrimination”), does it engage in sex discrimination. Firing them all is not sex discrimination.

Ridiculous as this argument may seem, the key legal reason that the opponent’s argument fails is because Title VII protects every individual employee against discrimination based on their sex, and does not require an employee to make a group claim. As plaintiff Stephens explains: “An employer who discriminates against a female employee because of her sex cannot insulate itself from liability by also discriminating against a male employee because of his sex … . Two wrongs do not make a right.”

Similarly, an employer who, for example, fired an employee for converting from Christianity to Judaism could not justify such firing by claiming that it would fire any employee who converted from one religion to another. The argument is nonsensical.

The opponents also argue that Congress did not envision Title VII applying to anti-LGBT discrimination back in 1964 when it passed the Civil Rights Act. However, the U.S. Supreme Court has established unequivocally that when a statute’s plain text is clear—as is Title VII’s proscription of any form of sex discrimination—the Court should simply follow the plain words of the statute and not look into the subjective expectations of the legislators who enacted it.

Indeed, the Court has repeatedly held that sexual harassment, including same-sex sexual harassment, violates Title VII—something that seems obvious today, but that members of Congress would never have imagined when they passed the law 55 years ago.

Opponents also claim that the myriad efforts to include sexual orientation and gender identity explicitly in Title VII show that Title VII does not encompass such discrimination now. But nothing about these efforts means that LGBT discrimination isn’t also sex discrimination prohibited by current law. Congress has never enacted legislation to exclude discrimination against LGBT people from sex discrimination that Title VII prohibits.

Opponents also throw up red herring arguments about workplace dress codes and, of course, bathrooms, but these distractions are irrelevant to the critical issue of workplace discrimination against LGBT individuals that is before the Court.

We’ll be paying close attention next Tuesday and will share our impressions in the next edition.

Forgetting History at Our Peril: The Foundation George W. Bush Laid for Donald Trump
September 5, 2019

A few days ago, a friend who is very active in the LGBTIQ rights movement quipped that things were so bad with Trump he almost wished for the “good ole days” when George W. Bush was president. Our friend’s not alone in this type of misplaced nostalgia.

Two years ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accidentally substituted Bush’s name for Trump’s in criticizing the president in a nationwide television interview. She quickly caught herself, exclaiming, “I’m sorry, President Bush,” and adding: “I never thought I’d pray for the day when George W. Bush was president again!”

But Pelosi was closer to the truth when she accidentally conflated Bush and Trump. Her 2008 assessment of Bush when he was still president summed things up more correctly. After wishing Bush well personally, Pelosi explained that, as president, he was “a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject.” Among many subjects we could add to that list are LGBTIQ rights, dignity, and equality.

We’ll never forget the evening when Bush attacked LGBTIQ people in front of the entire nation in his 2004 State of the Union address. After first saying that all Americans “must work together to counter the negative influence of the culture and to send the right messages to our children,” he laid into lesbian and gay people, without every saying the L or G word.

Referring to the Massachusetts decision finding marriage discrimination unconstitutional, Bush declared: “If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process. Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage.”

It felt like a dagger to the heart.

Weeks later, he went full-bore, announcing his support for a federal constitutional amendment “defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and woman as husband and wife.” He warned that “there is no assurance that the Defense of Marriage Act will not itself be struck down by activist courts,” and if they did, “every state would be forced to recognize any relationship that judges in Boston or officials in San Francisco choose to call a marriage.” Not just sex-same relationships—any relationship.

Bush and his key political advisor, the notorious Karl Rove whose own father was gay, devised a 2004 presidential campaign that exploited homophobia in order to divide and conquer. When Bush declared his support for the federal anti-gay amendment, a John Kerry spokesperson warned that Bush was using “wedge issues and the politics of fear to divide the nation.” She was right.

During Bush’s tenure as president, anti-marriage equality campaigns in 31 of the 50 states took their cue from Bush and used his anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric to deprive same-sex couples and their families of our basic human rights.

And Bush nominated Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, whom many consider to the right of Clarence Thomas, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Once on the Court, Roberts and Alito both voted to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act and vigorously dissented from the Court’s landmark decision establishing nationwide marriage equality.

So far, Trump has been able to nominate two justices who together mirror Roberts and Alito: Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch. And who nominated Kavanaugh and Gorsuch to the federal appellate courts, positioning them for elevation to the high court? George W. Bush.

Further, thousands of LGBTIQ members of the military were discharged under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell during Bush’s presidency.

The same year that Pelosi made her comments about Bush, Ellen DeGeneres interviewed Bush on her hugely popular talk show and positively gushed over Bush, dancing with him and exclaiming, “I’m so excited to have you here!” She asked him nothing about his record, even as Bush himself in the interview declared that “the nation needs a free and independent press … to hold politicians to account, including me.”

DeGeneres mentioned nothing about all of the harm that Bush had caused to LGBTIQ people, including his opposition to her right to marry, thereby denying her access to the approximately 1,500 rights and protections that come with marriage. She never asked him to take responsibility for any of his actions as president.

The ways that Bush’s presidency could be seen as laying a foundation for Trump’s go far beyond attacks on LGBTIQ people and cynical exploitation of prejudice against minorities for political gain. Recall Bush’s starting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that resulted in over a million casualties at a price tag of $4-6 trillion; his administration’s torture and inhumane treatment of captives, some of whom were completely innocent bystanders; Bush’s manipulating facts and misleading the public as to the basis for the Iraq invasion; his callous treatment of Hurricane Katrina victims, who were disproportionately poor people of color; and irresponsible tax cuts that, along with other flawed fiscal and financial regulatory policies, resulted in a worldwide economic crisis and the so-called Great Recession.

It is noble not to hate those who cause us harm. But if we fail to hold them accountable for their actions and forget history, we do so at our own peril.

Is Anger Useless?
August 22, 2019

Anger is one of the most powerful and compelling emotions that humans experience. It can engulf a person completely and become blind rage, derailing a person’s capacity to think or act responsibly. Anger can simmer quietly for hours, days or years, and intertwine itself with a person’s psyche or identity.

Anger can be repressed and manifested in how a person thinks, feels and acts without their even being aware of its presence. Anger often obscures difficult emotions, such as fear, sadness or loneliness that a person may not want to acknowledge or feel.

Anger can obscure our ability to see clearly and prevent us from understanding something true about ourselves or the way things actually are in the world that we wish were not so. I went to a long meditation retreat years ago in which a student asked for a teacher’s help in addressing anger at a dear loved one that had consumed him for days. The student was particularly disconcerted because there was no way that he and his loved one could resolve the problem together after the retreat. His loved one was dead.

The teacher suggested that the student consider if he had a belief that he should think only one way—positively—about his lost loved one. “De mortuis nihil nisi bonum.”  “Never speak ill of the dead.” The teacher wondered if, in fact, the student’s relationship with his loved one was more complicated and complex. Was anger obscuring him from opening up to such a truth?

Many people embrace what they term “righteous anger” and attest that it motivates them to fight for change in the face of injustice or harm. In a 1967 speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., prophesied that “with righteous indignation” a “true revolution of values” will illuminate the West’s exploitation of developing nations “and say, ‘this is not just.’”

More recently, the San Francisco Bay Times featured a photo of a participant in the 2018 San Francisco Women’s March proudly displaying their homemade poster that read: “MY ANGER CANNOT FIT ON ONE SIGN.”

But news outlets reported that a witness to last month’s deadly mass shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival said he heard someone shout at the shooter: “Why are you doing this?” And the shooter answered: “Because I’m really angry.”

Did the Gilroy shooter and countless others who share his political and social ideology believe their anger is righteous? Do they take pride in how they use their indignation as a motivating force for their political engagement?

Regardless of whether a person believes their anger to be justified, how they express it and act upon it makes a huge difference.  Anger, including political anger, can be lethal. A parent or partner’s physically or emotionally violent expression of anger can cause lifelong trauma to its victims, especially children, and can help to perpetuate generations of anger and violence.

In the 2018 documentary RBG, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained how she incorporated the directive that her mother gave her as to how to be a “lady” into her approach to practicing law. Her mother’s advice: Do “not be overcome by useless emotions, like anger.” When Ginsburg’s granddaughter was in law school, she counseled her that “the way to win an argument is not to yell.”

Ginsburg (and her mother) considered anger to be “useless” and an emotion that would “just zap energy and waste time.” As both a lawyer at the forefront of the movement for legal gender equality and a woman arguing numerous precedent-setting cases before countless male judges, Ginsburg had plenty of cause for “righteous anger.”

It’s noteworthy that Ginsburg’s mother did not tell her that she was wrong to ever experience anger; her advice was to recognize that anger was not useful and that people should not be “overcome” by it. Interestingly, Ginsburg is well known for her close personal friendship with the late Antonin Scalia, a man with whom she fundamentally disagreed on many things of vital importance to her.

Dr. King’s writings also articulate a perspective similar to Ginsburg: “You must not harbor anger… . You must be willing to suffer the anger of the opponent, and yet not return anger.” A person’s “destructive passion is harnessed by directing that same passion into constructive channels.”

Today’s world presents no shortage of injustices and harms to LGBTIQ and other oppressed people and all of those who are essentially powerless in the face of the impending climate crisis. Opportunities to fill oneself and the world with anger abound.  In the difficult days ahead, we must examine our anger when it arises, see for ourselves whether it is useful, and choose how to respond wisely.

The Kansas City Blues and Women’s Reproductive Freedom
August 8, 2019

When I was rummaging through old boxes from my childhood home recently, I came upon a decades-old newspaper that piqued my interest, not only because of its portrayal of an earlier time, but also because of its relevance today. It was the 1972 inaugural edition of The Symposium News, a free publication edited by Ken Kesey and published by the University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC) in conjunction with a student organized political symposium. I grew up in Kansas City, where both of my parents were college professors: my dad at UMKC, my mother at Rockhurst College. My dad had likely picked up the paper on campus.

As I flipped through the paper, I did a double-take when I came upon a poem written by Allen Ginsberg entitled “Troost Street Blues.” Troost Street?! That’s the location of Rockhurst, where my mother taught classical languages and history. I wondered what in the world Ginsberg could find poetic about Troost Street. I soon found out.

It seems that while my mother was drilling her students on Latin conjugations, Allen and his lover were enjoying conjugal delights of their own down the street.

However, the pair’s Troost Street lovemaking was a crime under state law. Missouri’s law criminalizing sex between two people of the same gender was overturned only in 2003 when the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated all such laws across the country.

I recently learned that upon orders from a university administrator, UMKC police had confiscated the paper from newsstands shortly after its publication because of Ginsberg’s explicit description of illicit homoerotic activities. It turns out that my dad had been very lucky to have grabbed a copy before the papers were whisked away.

Something else was illegal in Missouri in 1972: a woman’s right to make her own decisions regarding reproduction. Missouri banned all abortions; the U.S. Supreme Court did not overturn such bans until the next year, 1973.

Indeed, the newspaper devoted a 3-page spread to coverage of feminist activist and writer Robin Morgan’s participation in the conference. As Morgan aptly put it: “ … going one step further than the old Marxist dictum that workers must seize the means of production, we say women must seize the means of reproduction.”

She observed that “[t]he history books tend to be written by white, straight males,” and that women “have been oppressed longer than any oppressed group and, dig it, we are not the minority—we are the majority of the entire species.”

I was appalled to learn recently that today there’s nowhere in my hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, where a woman can legally have an abortion—46 years after it became legal. Indeed, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services is trying to shut down the state’s lone abortion clinic, located in St. Louis, as part of what Planned Parenthood considers a broader effort led by Missouri’s Republican Governor Mike Parson to restrict abortion.

Missouri is one of 6 states with only one clinic where women can fully exercise their reproductive freedom. In May of this year, Governor Parson signed legislation outlawing abortion in Missouri after the eighth week of pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest and an exception for medical emergencies only when a physician can prove that such an emergency existed.

Ginsberg’s poem “Troost Street Blues” is actually a lament because it, in fact, describes a return trip he made to Kansas City, this time after his lover had died—his beloved “belly’s in an ash urn.” Ginsberg is “back in Kansas City … Alone with my Alone.”

Ginsberg’s vocabulary in the poem often invokes his love of Kansas City’s rich African American musical heritage, which he had experienced in some of the community’s local jazz clubs. And he also observes that “[t]here’s frightened deafed white folks in Kansas City” and analogizes his personal loss to political ones, assessing: “Kansas City got the blues.”

Kansas City certainly has got the blues today when it comes to women’s reproductive freedom. Too many women find themselves “alone with their alone.”

But last month, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU sued to block Missouri’s new abortion law, which has not yet gone into effect. The St. Louis clinic is fighting to stay open.

The masthead of the 1972 symposium newspaper reads, “Press On. … Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

Forty-seven years later, we must continue to press on in the face of huge challenges that confront us now. When I return to Kansas City next, I hope to come back to place where women have more freedom than they do today. I hope to be singing a happier tune than the Troost Street Blues.

Marriage Equality Breakthroughs from Ecuador to Northern Ireland
July 24, 2019

Last week, Michelle Avilés and Alexandra Chávez tied the knot in the Ecuadorian coastal city of Guayaquil, becoming the first same-sex couple to marry in that South American nation. The pair was able to wed because the Ecuador Supreme Court in a 5–4 decision last month did the right thing and held that the nation was bound to follow the sweeping 2018 decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights requiring all 23 signatory nations to the American Convention on Human Rights to establish marriage equality.

The Ecuador decision is hugely significant because, although the holding of the Inter-American Human Rights Court was crystal clear, neither that Court nor any other body has the legal authority to compel member nations to comply with the order. Each nation must individually change its laws through its own legislatures or courts.

The Costa Rican judiciary had already mandated that this Central American nation must comply with the Human Rights Court order, but delayed implementation of its decision until May 2020, unless the national legislature acts earlier, which is considered unlikely in the generally conservative country. Nevertheless, over 100,000 Costa Ricans celebrated LGBTIQ Pride last month, with one activist observing that the massive attendance was unthinkable a decade ago when just 20 courageous queer activists marched and were harassed by opponents.

We hope that the victory in Ecuador spurs other Latin American nations to follow suit.

The other major marriage equality breakthrough came over 5,000 miles away earlier this month in the United Kingdom. As of 2014, three of the four constituent countries of the U.K. (England, Wales and Scotland) had all achieved marriage equality, but Northern Ireland, the fourth country, has not yet. But that might change soon.

A years-long, immensely complex political quagmire has so far prevented same-sex marriage from coming to Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland Assembly, the legislative body with the responsibility to govern Northern Ireland, has essentially been nonfunctional since early 2017 because member political parties cannot agree on a power sharing arrangement.

Northern Irish support for marriage equality appears strong. According to Amnesty International, 55 of the 90 members of the Assembly have publicly announced that they are in favor of the freedom to marry. A 2018 public opinion poll showed that 76 percent of the Northern Irish support marriage equality with only 18 percent opposed. The neighboring Republic of Ireland in 2015 became the first nation to pass marriage equality by popular vote, with 62 percent of voters in favor.

A few weeks ago, the U.K. Parliament said that, with respect to marriage equality, it had had enough with the delay in Northern Ireland caused by the political stalemate. By a 383 to 73 margin, Parliament voted that unless the Northern Ireland Assembly is restored and functioning by October 21, 2019, marriage equality will become the law of Northern Ireland as of January 2020, with the proviso that a later Northern Ireland Assembly could reverse or amend the law.

As we noted above, the political and procedural aspects of this process are enormously complex. They involve not only internal Northern Irish politics and the relationship between the U.K. Parliament and Northern Ireland governance, but also political maneuvering regarding Brexit. We must wait to see how the events unfold.

But Lord Hayward, who is leading marriage equality efforts in the House of Lords, believes that “equal marriage for Northern Ireland is now within touching distance” and Amnesty International’s Patrick Corrigan is “looking forward to New Year wedding bells in Northern Ireland.”

Hatred Does Not Cease by Hatred
July 11, 2019

As many readers may know, queer demonstrators protesting among other things police presence and corporate participation in this year’s San Francisco Pride Parade delayed the march for 50 minutes, one minute for each year after Stonewall. We were marching with the LGBT Asylum Project, a nonprofit organization that provides legal services to LGBTIQ immigrants fleeing persecution in their home countries and seeking asylum in the United States. The delay in the parade actually gave us the opportunity to have in-depth conversations with the queer asylees. Indeed, we learned of a most extraordinary attempt not by queer activists, but by far-right anti-LGBTIQ extremists to disrupt this June’s Pride March of Equality in Kiev, Ukraine.

As the asylees explained to us and we later confirmed on the website of Bellingcat (an organization that monitors right-wing movements in Ukraine, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan), anti-LGBTIQ extremists had hatched a depraved and despicable plot “to literally throw feces at Pride participants.” On the morning of the Pride march, the Kiev Police Chief announced that they had thwarted the plot, arresting nine people whom they accused of setting up what police called a “s–t-laboratory.”

According to the police, the extremists—whom many now refer to as “excremists”—“admitted that they had stolen four portable toilets filled with feces, set up a laboratory and stuffed approximately 200 condoms full of feces to throw at Kiev Pride marchers and police.” Police say they caught the extremists, who purportedly are associates of a “fiercely anti-LGBT Pentecostal pastor,” as they were driving toward the march in their van.

According to Bellingcat, another news source reported that not only had the right-wing fanatics “poured the feces” from the toilets into barrels “without respirators,” while being swarmed by flies, but also “[a]t times, apparently, the men themselves were covered in the filth from the toilets when some of the stuffed condoms burst.”

We and Ukrainians who immediately took to the internet to mock the extremists could think of no more fitting outcome for their efforts. The Kiev Pride March itself appears to have been a great success with only “a few minor incidents,” according to Bellingcat.

On both a political and personal level, the image of the hate-filled extremists covered in their own filth that they had stolen to hurl at others is a powerful metaphor for the destructiveness of anger and hatred not only on its innocent victims who are its intended object but also on the perpetrators themselves.

In the words of the Buddhist adage, “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but by not hating. This is the eternal truth.” Or in the words of Richard Nixon the morning that he was forced to resign the presidency: “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” And who can forget the “angel activists,” who spread their wings wide to shield Matthew Sheppard’s family from the vitriolic anti-gay messages of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church at the trial of Sheppard’s killers?

Not being consumed by hatred does not foreclose bold, passionate and timely action to stop harm. The Ukrainian LGBTIQ community is doubtlessly grateful to the police for foiling the plot in the nick of time and protecting the marchers. Indeed, in researching this topic further, we were horrified to learn that far-right protestors at a Baltic Pride event in Riga, Latvia, in the early 2000s successfully carried out a similar plot.

San Francisco ignited the marriage equality movement 15 years ago by boldly opening the doors of City Hall for LGBTIQ couples to marry, revealing queer love to the nation unlike ever before. We remember how some of the prominent anti-LGBTIQ opponents acknowledged that their words and actions had given the public the impression that they were mean. Indeed, they were—even as they professed not to be.

One of the great joys and reasons for the success of the marriage equality movement was that its primary focus was on what’s right about LGBTIQ people and our love, and not what’s wrong with someone else, as the other side argued over and over. Indeed, upon victory we were showered with love … far better than the alternative!

Celebrating Saying No to the Normal: Stonewall 50
June 26, 2019

In the NPR podcast White Lies exploring the civil rights movement in Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, African American activists recount the importance to the movement of awakening from an internalized belief that living in poverty and being deprived of basic human rights under the threat of violence was simply normal. Charles Mauldin, then a Selma high school student, describes how “we had been terrorized into staying inside of the box,” but then an organizer “began to ask [us] questions that we had never dared ask ourselves because it was just too threatening.” Maudlin describes how it “takes electricity to somehow shock you” out of “the normalcy of white supremacy … poverty … and lack of distribution of wealth.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his speech at the conclusion of the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, put it famously: “The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that recognizes the dignity and worth of all of God’s children.”

Fifty years ago, queer patrons of the Stonewall Inn also chose no longer to accept what was then perceived as “normal,” i.e., police raids on LGBT bars and other establishments and queer people living under a cloud of fear and repression. They too demanded a new normal based on their dignity and worth. The symbolic lightning bolt of the Stonewall riots electrified a burgeoning gay liberation movement that changed the world.

Recent Victories Around the Globe

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall at Pride this year, we look to recent victories around the globe: marriage equality coming to Ecuador, the first marriages of LGBTIQ couples ever in Asia taking place in Taiwan, a court in the southern African nation of Botswana striking down that country’s law criminalizing same-sex sexual activity that dated back to British colonial rule, and Bhutan’s national legislature voting to repeal a similar law in that Himalayan kingdom.

The court in Botswana proclaimed that anti-LGBTIQ laws “deserve a place in the museum or archives and not in the world” and that “[s]exual orientation is not a fashion statement. It is an important attribute of one’s personality.” Last year, Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi stated that “many people of same sex relationships in this country … have been violated and have also suffered in silence for fear of being discriminated. Just like other citizens, they deserve to have their rights protected.”

In Bhutan, the influential Buddhist teacher Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche explained that “if your meditation is not making you see the truth, you are basically rotting your butt,” and that “sexual orientation has nothing to do with understanding or not understanding the truth.” He continued that “you could be gay, you could be lesbian, you could be straight, we never know which one will get enlightened first.”

Refusing to Accept a ‘Normal’ of Discrimination and Repression

In the White Lies podcast, Bernard Lafayette, a young activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, recalls: “You had to have a great imagination [to believe] that any change was going to happen in Selma, Alabama.”

The queer people who fought back at Stonewall 50 years ago could hardly have imagined that the LGBTIQ rights movement would be fighting back and making gains over 7,000 miles away in Botswana and Bhutan today. Yet that is exactly what is happening today because people continue to awaken and refuse to accept a “normal” of discrimination and repression, and imagine a new normal of freedom and equality—just as activists did in the 1960s.

Today, we also reflect on how earlier this month as many as 2 million Hong Kong residents—possibly up to a quarter of the entire Hong Kong population—took to the streets in defiance of the Chinese government to protest a proposed new law that greatly threatened personal liberty. They refused to accept a new repressive “normal” that the Beijing government has been slowly trying to impose on Hong Kong through a series of measures. And as of now, the attempt to enact the new law has been suspended.

This week millions of Americans from New York to San Francisco will take to the streets to celebrate Stonewall 50, but we must do much more. We must stand up and refuse to accept any “normal” not grounded in the “dignity and worth of all”—and we must do so by the millions. Happy Pride!

Keeping the Pulse Alive
June 12, 2019

As we waited in line at Newark Airport to board our flight home to San Francisco after a recent trip back east, we struck up a conversation with a delightful and outgoing African American woman, who lives in New York but was returning home to East Oakland, where she grew up.

We soon noticed, however, that tears were welling up in her eyes.

Without hesitation, she revealed to us that she was coming home to bury her lifelong best friend, who ten days before had been murdered in East Oakland—shot in the head near her house by a stray bullet intended for someone else. “She didn’t deserve this,” said our fellow traveler over and over again.

She then told us how her friend’s adolescent son had dashed out of their house as soon as he heard the shot. The killer made a speedy escape, and minutes later, the son cradled his mom’s bleeding head in his arms as she breathed her last breath and he felt her pulse stop. The family waited a week to tell his 8-year-old sister that her mom had been murdered. They understood that the young girl would not immediately be able to comprehend that her beloved mother would not be coming home again.

Our new friend showed us a beautiful photo of her lost friend whose name was Hadiyah, and talked about their years growing up together. She then divulged that she had been unable to eat or sleep since she had learned of Hadiyah’s murder. She explained that, as soon as she got to Oakland and saw the children, she would simply embrace them, hold them tight and comfort them.  She had no words to console them in the face of their unspeakable loss.

Pulse—a mom’s pulse ceasing to beat as her young son held her in his arms. Pulse—a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where 49 mostly Latinx members of the LGBTIQ community were shot and killed, and 53 others wounded, three years ago in the wee hours of June 12, 2016.

It is staggering to consider the thousands of Americans killed or wounded by gun violence in the three years since the Pulse nightclub massacre. These include the headline-grabbing mass shootings, such as at Las Vegas, Parkland, Pittsburgh and Virginia Beach; police shootings, like Stephon Clark in Sacramento; and the murders of trans and other queer people, like Anthony “Bubbles” Torres, who was shot in the Tenderloin. There are thousands of people, like Hadiyah, whose names don’t make the headlines, but whose loss is felt keenly by their friends, families and communities.

A Japanese friend of ours visited us last week from Tokyo. Her visit reminded us that it doesn’t have to be this way. In all of Japan, with its strict gun control regulations, only three people were murdered and five others were wounded in gun violence in 2017.

We must not relent in making gun control in America a political priority and in remaining mindful of the harm that gun violence inflicts on Americans daily. Our fellow traveler reminded us of that reality as we waited together to board a plane together at Newark Airport two weeks ago. She spoke the truth about gun violence spontaneously and from the heart.

Every year, on the anniversary of the Pulse nightclub massacre, we recall the entreaties Christine Leinonen made in a live television interview as she desperately searched for her son Drew, whom she later learned was killed in the shootings: “We’re on this Earth for such a short time. Let’s try to get rid of the hatred and the violence, please … . [P]lease could we do something with the assault weapons … . I beg all of you, please.”

The heartbeat must become a drumbeat. We must keep the Pulse alive.

Rainbows Over Taiwan
May 30, 2019

The rain poured down from the sky on Taiwan’s national legislature building on the morning of May 17, 2019, as lawmakers inside debated whether to enact legislation to make Taiwan the first country in Asia with marriage equality. The past two years had been filled with enormous hope and joy, as well as great frustration and challenge for Taiwan’s LGBTIQ community. Tens of thousands of queer activists stood tall outside the legislature under the deluge that morning.

Nearly two years ago to the day, the LGBTIQ community led by attorney Victoria Hsu of the Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights (TAPCPR) won a stunning and sweeping victory at Taiwan’s Constitutional Court with a landmark decision mandating nationwide marriage equality and rendering anti-gay discrimination presumptively unconstitutional. The decision catapulted Taiwan ahead of the U.S. when it came to our constitutional rights. The LGBTIQ community was euphoric, and Taipei Pride 2017, which we were honored to attend as guests, was the largest gathering of LGBTIQ people in Asia ever. It was truly inspiring.

But there was a catch. The Court gave the national legislature two years to enact legislation to implement the decision. If the government did not act, LGBTIQ couples could begin marrying in late May 2019 under existing law.

Unfortunately, sympathetic legislators and Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, a marriage equality supporter, seemed frozen with fear and uncertainty as to how to respond to the Court’s powerful ruling. They equivocated and failed to act. Their delay enabled opponents to organize.

With massive support from notorious American anti-LGBTIQ groups, such as the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), opponents placed anti-marriage equality and anti-LGBTIQ referenda on the November 2018 national election ballot and ran a negative campaign that employed smear tactics and false and degrading messages akin to those of California’s Proposition 8 and many other anti-gay campaigns.

And they were successful. Seventy-two percent of the Taiwanese electorate voted to forbid the legislature from amending the Civil Code to permit same-sex couples to marry, although 61 percent supported same-sex couples’ rights being protected in some way other than amending the Civil Code.

The election results emboldened opponents, who used them to claim mass popular disapproval of marriage equality. The challenges facing the devastated LGBTIQ community and its supporters suddenly became much greater. But unlike Prop 8, the Taiwanese referenda did not reverse the Constitutional Court decision. That decision mandated the right to marry, not just some form of legal recognition. The community did not give up. TAPCR’s Hsu told us for the San Francisco Bay Times, “We won’t compromise on equal rights.”

After six more months of legislative wrangling and attempts to water down equality, such as considering civil unions for same-sex couples, the national legislature on the rainy morning of May 17 finally had to decide what it was going to do.

A friend of ours from the Weiming Taoist temple in Taipei, a temple dedicated to the centuries-old Taoist God Tu‘er Shen who protects LGBTIQ people, emailed us what happened next: The rain slowed, “the sun” began to “show,” and then “rainbows flooded in.” We “basked [in] the outcome of glory.” The legislature voted in favor of marriage equality, and on May 24, Taiwan would become the first country in Asia with marriage equality.

Longtime LGBTIQ activist leader Jay Lin described it as “a cliff-hanger thriller-drama down to the last vote.”

The legislation was not perfect. For example, some limits on adoption rights for same-sex couples remain. Some binational couples may face challenges, and pursuant to the referendum, same-sex marriage is in a separate legislative code, not the Civil Code. Hsu, in words echoed by other leaders, told us that they would not relent until “true marriage equality” was achieved.

But it is hard to overstate the significance of the marriage equality victory in Taiwan, years in the making. Our friend from the temple shared with us his “thrills” and “happiness.” Lin called it a “miraculous day” and now looks forward to marrying his long-term partner, with whom he is raising two children.

Upon the vote, President Tsai tweeted: “#LoveWon,” and, “We took a big step towards true equality, and made Taiwan a better country.” TAPCR described the victory as a “new page in history” not just for Taiwan, but also for Asia, and expressed its gratitude for the vote. The victory creates new momentum in Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand and other places in Asia for the freedom to marry and LGBTIQ rights.

It is traditional at a Taoist temple to write your wishes and aspirations on special paper to submit to the god to whom the temple is dedicated. We had completely forgotten that 18 months ago we had written something at the gay Taoist temple. But our friend had not, and he reminded us of our words: “LGBT FREEDOM LOVE EQUALITY RESPECT.”

As in the U.S., the path to complete LGBTIQ equality and dignity in Taiwan continues to unfold and the struggle is ongoing. But Taiwan has taken a huge step toward fulfilling this goal. The hope and inspiration that the victory engenders will propel us forward. Tu‘er Shen is smiling and there are rainbows in the sky above Taiwan.

Turning to Each Other and White Plum Blossoms
May 16, 2019

As I type, Stuart’s 95-year-old mom is approaching the end of life.

Stuart’s mom was always ahead of her time. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago and Marquette University, and was a professor of cross-cultural education and women’s studies at a time when teaching those subjects meant breaking down barriers. Stuart’s mom, who is Chinese American, and his dad, who is European American, were an interracial couple who married in the early 1950s when such marriages were illegal in much of the country.

Stuart’s mom has long been a big supporter of LGBTIQ equality, from joining with us in the Pride Parade to campaigning against Prop 8. As she sensed that Stuart might be gay when he was a teenager in the 1980s, she coaxed him on more than one occasion to come out to her, offering: “If there’s anything you want to tell me, I just want to let you know I will be very open and understanding … .”

Perhaps most strikingly, Stuart’s mom never really thought of herself as old. Several years ago, when I told my mother, who was a contemporary of Stuart’s mom, some of the things Stuart’s mom was doing, my mother was aghast. She exclaimed to me, “Doesn’t she understand that she’s old and should be preparing for the end of her life?” I can imagine Stuart’s mom responding, “Says who? And why?”

In spending time with Stuart’s mom and in coming to terms with turning 60 this year myself, I realized that we really don’t have 95-year-old or 60-year-old moments—or 30-year-old or 3-year-old moments, for that matter. We all just have the present moment, which we share together with each other right here and right now. And then comes the next present moment immediately following, whether we like it or not.

In life, we often really want something to happen and try very hard to make it happen in a given moment, or the next moment or even the next year. But ultimately, we don’t know what will come next and may not be able to control it despite all of our efforts and wishes. This is especially true when a cherished loved one is ill and is also true in our lives as activists.

Indeed, for all of us an ever-present process of change is taking place both in our external circumstances and in our subjective personal experience as we live our lives trying to make the world a better place.

The 18th century Japanese haiku poet Buson evokes this notion in a final haiku he composed from his deathbed. It’s entitled “Early Spring.” The haiku describes the flowers in his garden the very moment the dawn light first illuminates them:

In the white plum blossoms
night to next day
just turning.

Plum blossoms are the first flowers to bloom in the new year, actually coming out amidst the snow in the waning days of winter.  As such, they symbolize perseverance and beauty under adversity, as well as hope, renewal and transition. In Japanese, Buson’s words evoke the continuing nature of the process. Indeed, as the white plum blossoms give way to fresh green leaves, the early morning light will reveal continually changing images at slightly different times as the year unfolds and then repeats itself again and again. Importantly, how one attends to the garden can greatly influence what the dawn light unveils.

When a cherished loved one is in the final days of life, nothing is more valuable to all involved than the support of other loved ones near and far.

A favorite haiku of mine, written by the most revered Japanese haiku master of all, Basho—who was also queer—evokes the value of our recognizing the commonality of our experience. Long ago, a person living in Kyoto had painted a self-portrait depicting themselves with their face turned away, and asked Basho to compose a haiku to accompany the painting. Basho wrote:

You could turn this way,
I am also lonely
This autumn evening.

Basho’s verse suggests a way to relate to each other in times of need, not only as we are in the final days of Stuart’s mom’s life, but also more generally and as a community as we face social and political adversity. Perhaps Basho’s words also speak of a way to undermine the ignorance, hatred and greed that engender discrimination and other unnecessary suffering in the first place.  Stuart’s mom devoted her life to ending such suffering.

(English translations of the haikus come from Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson & Issa.)

Sticking Out and Standing Up in Japan
April 18, 2019

There’s a well-known adage in Japan: “The wood post that sticks out from the ground will get pounded down.” Its meaning:  Sticking out and standing up as different from the perceived norm is enormously challenging in Japan.

No one knows this better than the LGBTIQ Japanese. A few years ago, we were talking to a queer Japanese law professor friend about our experiences giving marriage equality talks and meeting with LGBTIQ activists in Japan. We told him how we as Americans marveled that Japan had no anti-LGBTIQ conservative Christian political movement. Our friend replied incisively, “Conformity and the need for harmony is a more powerful religion than conservative Christianity.”

His clarity pierced the air. We remembered his words earlier this month when the Japanese government announced that the forthcoming new Imperial era would be called “beautiful harmony,” whose Japanese characters could also imply “command” or “order.”

The last time we gave talks in Japan, we visited the Manshu-in temple in Kyoto. The temple features a stunning rock garden with a 400-year-old pine tree as it centerpiece. As we immersed ourselves in the garden, we saw on a wall of the temple the adage about the post that sticks out getting pounded down. But underneath it, we saw a striking rejoinder:

“The post that does not stick out will eventually rot in the ground.”

On Valentine’s Day this year, 13 same-sex couples across Japan decided to stick out, stand up and not let themselves “rot in the ground.” They filed historic coordinated lawsuits for nationwide marriage equality. They did so nearly 15 years to the day when over 4,000 LGBTIQ couples began flooding into San Francisco City Hall to marry after then-Mayor Gavin Newsom kicked opened the door for marriage equality here. Every time we have spoken to activists and audiences in Japan, we have told our story of how profound and life-changing participating in San Francisco’s Winter of Love was for us.

The Japanese lawsuit follows years of Japanese LGBTIQ people becoming increasingly vocal and visible in society in the face of significant social and familial pressures. The plaintiff couples represent a diverse cross-section of Japanese same-sex couples and provide lived examples of the need for equal protections and rights for LGBTIQ couples.

They also intend the lawsuit to help all LGBTIQ Japanese. Plaintiff Kenji Aiba told the Japan Times that the lawsuit “will let us share the hardships of sexual minorities with all people in Japan,” and his partner Ken Kozumi proclaimed they would “fight this war together with sexual minorities all around Japan,” the Associated Press reported.

Kozumi also stressed that “progress in Japan has been too slow.”

Japanese LGBTIQ activists have been using the facts that the world’s eyes will turn to Japan during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and that Japan is the only member of the G7 without marriage equality or civil unions to pressure for faster change. Two years ago, grassroots activist Kanako Otsuji became the first openly LGBTIQ elected member of the Diet (Japanese Congress). The LGBTIQ community has made much progress in Japanese businesses. Eleven locales, including major cities such as Osaka, Sapporo and parts of Tokyo, issue same-sex partnership certificates of largely symbolic value.

Plaintiffs in their lawsuit rely on sweeping human rights guarantees in the Japanese Constitution, drafted in 1946 during American occupation and, in part, by a Western feminist who had lived in Japan. The Japanese Constitution declares: “All of the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination … because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin.”  Further: “All of the people shall be respected as individuals. Their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness shall … be the supreme consideration in legislation and in other governmental affairs.”

The pivotal issue in the lawsuit will be how these guarantees shape present-day interpretation of the Constitution’s marriage provisions, enacted in 1946 to give women equality, autonomy and dignity in marriage for the first time. In particular, one provision ensures: “Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights of husband and wife as a basis.”

When this women’s rights breakthrough was drafted in 1946, no one was thinking about same-sex marriage. Neither this provision nor any other provision of Japanese law explicitly bans same-sex marriage. But no government entity has ever issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and the government has maintained that the Constitution prohibits it. Interestingly, the 1946 Japanese Constitution contains words in another marriage provision that seem almost prophetic today: “With regard to choice of spouse … laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes.”

Support for marriage equality is growing in Japan with recent polling showing 70 percent of people in their 20s and 30s in favor.  However, the road ahead for same-sex couples in the lawsuit is formidable. For example, Human Rights Watch reports that the Japanese Supreme Court has struck down only 10 laws as unconstitutional in over 70 years. It recently upheld an outdated and medically debunked law regarding transgender people.

We bow to the same-sex couples who are bringing this lawsuit and to all of the Japanese LGBTIQ people and their supporters who are taking the risk to be posts that stick out despite the fear of being pounded down.

The Struggle for a Room with a View
April 4, 2019

The views of the Pacific Ocean and Koko Head from the Queen Bedroom at Honolulu’s Aloha Bed and Breakfast were said to be breathtaking. But there was a catch: they were available only to heterosexual married couples, not LGBTIQ couples like us. Diane Cervelli and Taeko Bufford, a lesbian couple, learned that the hard way.

Several years ago, Cervelli and Bufford were looking for a place to stay near a friend they were coming to visit in Honolulu. As Cervelli was booking a room over the phone at Aloha B&B, the owner Phyllis Young asked if she and Bufford were lesbians. A shocked Cervelli answered truthfully. The owner then suddenly refused to rent them the room “stating she was very uncomfortable having lesbians in her house” and then hung up on Cervelli.

In ensuing legal proceedings, Young stated that “her religious belief is that same-sex relationships are ‘detestable in [her] eyes’ and ‘defile [our] land’” and that homosexuality “must be seen as an objective disorder.”

The Hawai’i Intermediate Court of Appeals rejected all of Aloha B&B’s justifications for denying Cevelli and Bufford the room, and in a victory for LGBTIQ rights the United States Supreme Court last month let that ruling stand.

The Hawai’i court’s decision was remarkably clear. It acknowledged that people are free to have their religious beliefs and generally have a right to be left alone in their homes. However, Young chose “to operate Aloha B&B from her home … for commercial purposes, [and] has opened up her home to over one hundred customers per year, charging them money for access to her home.”

As such, “she has voluntarily given up the right to be left alone.” When a person engages the public in a business enterprise to make money, that business must abide by laws prohibiting discrimination. Quoting the U.S. Supreme Court, the Hawai’i court stated that discrimination in public accommodation “deprives persons of their individual dignity” and injures their “sense of self-worth and personal integrity.”

Apparently, Aloha B&B had two single rooms without views that perhaps may have been available individually to LGBTIQ people. We can only imagine how disturbing it would be to be consigned to those second-class single rooms, while a straight couple upstairs relaxed in the “heterosexuals only” shared bedroom with its fantastic views. Indeed, the devastating personal and practical harms that second-class treatment wreak on LGBTIQ couples form the basis for the Supreme Court’s nationwide marriage equality decisions.

We hope that the Supreme Court’s declining to consider Aloha B&B’s appeal signals that it will not tolerate such overt anti-LGBTIQ discrimination as it claimed it would not in last year’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision. But we are cautious not to infer too much about the direction the current 9-member Court may ultimately be heading in cases pertaining to such discrimination. Another wedding cake case is already on the list of cases the Court is deciding whether or not to hear.

The Court’s declining to hear the Hawai’i case must be seen in the context of the overall strategy Chief Justice John Roberts appears to be pursuing at the Court. The New York Times Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak recently explained on The Daily podcast that Roberts likely has the power to win very conservative victories on many issues right now, but he also “wants to protect the Court’s reputation.” Roberts has “four conservative allies raring to go and his job is to kind of tap the brakes.”

Roberts appears to want to proceed somewhat slowly to “achieve conservative outcomes without doing harm to the Court’s prestige.” But Liptak believes that Roberts wants the Court to “dramatically lean right.” To say the least, what the long-term future holds for LGBTIQ equality and many other issues at the Court is uncertain.

We take heart that presidential candidates Beto O’Rourke, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand have followed Pete Buttigieg’s lead in voicing interest in possible institutional changes to the Court to reverse the recent partisan Republican politicization of the Court. Institutional change at the Court may be critical to protecting the civil and constitutional rights of countless millions of Americans, not just LGBTIQ people.

We were heartened to see new polling data last month from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) showing that majorities of every major religious group in the U.S. “support laws protecting LGBT people from discrimination in housing, public accommodations and the workplace.” That includes 70% or more of Catholics and Mormons, 54 % of white evangelical Protestants, and 53 % of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

PRRI has previously reported that only a slim plurality of the public believes that “wedding-based businesses” should be required to serve same-sex couples if doing so contravenes their owners’ stated religious beliefs. But despite that polling result, the public may be weighing in with its dollars. According to Newsweek, Masterpiece Cakeshop, the store that pressed the issue at the Supreme Court last year, has lost 40 percent of its business and has reduced its workforce by 60%.

We do not know how Aloha B&B will proceed in light of the Supreme Court’s actions. We hope that it will come to recognize our common humanity and remain open with a room with a view available to all.

Gay Presidential Candidate Takes Center Stage
March 21, 2019

By all accounts, openly gay Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg dazzled a national audience with his performance at a CNN town hall on March 10.

As marriage equality advocates, we were struck—and gratified—from the very start. Moderator Jake Tapper in a completely unsensational manner offered Buttigieg the opportunity to talk about his husband, Chasten Glezman. Tapper playfully asked Buttigieg about the slightly different ways that he and his husband guide their Twitter followers on the pronunciation of the family name Buttigieg (we like the ease of Glezman’s suggestion: “Buddha Judge”).

Tapper conversed with Buttigieg no differently than he would a straight person, beginning: “I don’t want to get in the middle of a marital squabble … .” And after bantering with the candidate for a few moments, Tapper applauded Buttigieg’s answer to the question as “very diplomatic. I feel like you said your way was right but then you did not throw your husband under the bus, which is—I guarantee you that is the right path.”

More seriously, Tapper gave Buttigeig the opportunity to talk about the support his father, who passed away recently after a long illness, gave to him personally and to his candidacy. Buttigeig described speaking to his dad when he was hospitalized and intubated: “So I said, you know, I hope I’ll make you proud. And he mouthed around the tube, ‘You will.’”

Buttigieg spoke eloquently at the town hall about the importance of LGBTIQ rights and what’s at stake personally for queer people. “I think the whole point of politics is everyday life. And part of how I understand that is that the most important thing in my life—my marriage to my husband—exists by the grace of a single vote on the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Crucially, Buttigieg discussed “policy options” to “stop the Supreme Court from sliding toward being viewed as a nakedly political institution.” Buttigieg described the “radical … shattering of norms that Senate Republicans have gone through in order to get the court to where it is today.”

One proposal “of many” that Buttigeig highlighted as deserving consideration was restructuring the Supreme Court by expanding the number of justices from 9 to 15, with 10 of the justices appointed under current procedures and the other 5 “seated by unanimous consent” of the other 10. According to Buttigeig, “those five by necessity will be those who command the respect of the other 10 across the ideological spectrum and can be counted on to think for themselves.”

We cannot overstate the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court to all aspects of LGBTIQ rights, and Buttigeig’s articulation of innovative ways to address the current crisis at the Court stood out to us.  His words gave us renewed hope for the future of the high court.

Buttigeig also made clear the “need [for] a federal equality act that would say that you cannot be fired just because of who you are or just because of who you love.”

And he condemned Trump’s attacks on transgender people. Buttigeig, himself an Iraq War veteran, pointed to Trump’s “picking on [transgender] troops, people willing to lay down their lives for this country” and transgender high school students. He was appalled at the message a vulnerable “transgender teen” gets when “the highest officials in the land can’t tell the difference between her and a predator and make it harder for her to go to the bathroom.”

Buttigeig further called out Vice President Pence on his hypocrisy in using religion to further his political goals. Buttigeig named the so-called “religious freedom” act that Pence championed as governor of Indiana for what it is: “really a license to discriminate,” using “your religion as an excuse for discriminating.”

More generally, Buttigeig wondered how Pence, who claims to be such a devoted Christian, could “allow himself to become the cheerleader of the porn star presidency?” He asked if Pence had “stopped believing in scripture when he started believing in Donald Trump?”

In describing the broad and bipartisan coalition that came together to oppose Pence’s discriminatory actions in Indiana several years ago, Buttigieg pointed to a shared belief in “just decency” as what brought people together to stand against discrimination.  We like the unintended double meaning of the phase “just decency”:  simple human decency and decency founded in justice.

Buttigeig credited that type of decency for his re-election as mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Buttigeig came out during the campaign and acknowledged that he was unsure how it would play “in a socially conservative community.” And to much applause from the town hall audience, he revealed: “I wound up getting re-elected with 80 percent of the vote.”

We have not yet decided which candidate we will support in the upcoming presidential election. But who knows? If Buttigeig’s entry on the national stage last week is a harbinger of what’s to come and “just decency” has a role to play, our nation could be inaugurating its first openly gay president in January 2021.

Standing with the Kenyan LGBTIQ Community
March 7, 2019

“To say we are disappointed would be an understatement.” So read the tweet from a leading Kenyan LGBTIQ rights group minutes after a Kenyan court announced last week that it was delaying until late May issuance of its much-anticipated ruling about the constitutionality of Kenya’s law criminalizing same-sex sexual activity.

Expectations for a favorable ruling in February had been high prior to the announcement. The Nairobi News reported that many LGBTIQ people turned out to be present in the courtroom when the hoped-for ruling was to have been announced. They “were all dolled up with makeup and wigs as dapper partners suited up and wore bow ties for the occasion.” People hugged each other, and couples held hands as they entered the courtroom. Author and activist Denis Nzioka tweeted: “Splash of color, fierceness, and beauty as LGBTIQ members showed up” for court.

At issue in the case is the constitutionality of Sections 162 and 165 of the Kenyan Penal Code, which subject LGBTIQ Kenyans to a 14-year prison term for penetrative sexual activity and gay men to 5 years in prison for other sexual activity—even in the privacy of their own homes.

According to Reuters, the Kenyan government arrested 534 LGBTIQ people under these laws from 2013 to 2017. The effect of the law’s sanctioning discrimination, hostility and violence against LGBTIQ Kenyans is far wider. One person described on Twitter: “What irks me is that homophobes will threaten my life and still get to go home to their families. Meanwhile my family & friends will worry for days that something bad will happen to me … .”

Kenyan LGBTIQ activists emphasize how the British government originally imposed the law on Kenya in 1930 during its colonial rule of the country. Author Shailja Patel tweeted before she entered the courtroom last week: “We’re here. Ready to overturn 89 years of colonial homophobia.” The British modeled the Kenyan law on a similar law it enacted in India back in 1860. Similar British colonial era criminal statutes became law in many of its colonies, including the present day African countries of Botswana, The Gambia, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Nigeria, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Swaziland, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The post-colonial Kenyan government has retained the law, and President Uhuru Kenyatta last year stated that homosexuality was currently “not acceptable” to “the people of Kenya” and “not an issue of human rights.” But the Kenyan LGBITQ community continues to fight back, by underscoring the law’s colonial roots. Writer Magunga JaKaruoth tweeted to the law’s proponents: “You inherited cruel laws from colonialists who went back to their country and changed them, yet you still cling on to them.”

In the face of such adversity, many LGBTIQ Kenyans have forcefully and eloquently stood up for love, equality and personal dignity and security. One activist explained on television: “I am someone’s daughter; I am loved from where I come from as a Lesbian, and I would want my fellow Kenyans to love us as we are because (we are) just like any other Kenyan.” Another person tweeted: “I am queer. I am femme. I am Kenyan. I am everything and yet I am made to feel like nothing. My love is not a phase. My love is not a sin. My love does not make me less of a human.”

Another activist spoke of the hypocrisy he perceived on the part of some Christians: “Whenever gay rights are brought up, every [C]hristian that drinks, smokes, fornicates, steals, covets, curses and uses God’s name in vain, is suddenly concerned with what the Bible says and permits.” Other advocates spoke of how sections 162 and 165 interfere with “providing healthcare services to the LGBTIQ community” and the country’s “achievement (of) global health targets outlined” by the government.

The personal toll that Sections 162 and 165 exact on all LGBTIQ Kenyans cannot be overstated. As one person put it: “[W]e are tired of the stigma, the blackmail, the threats, the struggle to live.” Sections 162 and 165 mean “you’re either out and scared for your life” or you’re “quiet and suffocating.”

Last year, the Indian Supreme Court overturned that nation’s anti-gay criminal statute dating back to 1860, holding that criminalizing a person’s “right to love” is “profoundly cruel and inhumane.” This month, a court in Botswana will hear a challenge to its similar law. The forthcoming ruling from the Kenyan court in May will be subject to appeal to an intermediate appellate court and the Kenyan Supreme Court, but its impact may ultimately be felt across the continent. As these cases unfold and activism and public education continue, activist writer Giramata wrote on Twitter:

“To my queer Kenyan friends,
Whose work I will never take for granted
Whose organizing will never go unnoticed
Whose love for community fuels me
Whose love of self holds me
I stand with you,
today and always!”

So do we.

Southern Baptist Church Abuse: From Anita Bryant to Today
February 21, 2019

The Houston Chronicle’s Feb 10, 2019, headline is unambiguous: “Abuse of Faith, 20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms.” Behind the headline are mug shots of some of the 220 Southern Baptist pastors, church workers and volunteers who were convicted of, or pleaded guilty to, sex crimes.

The paper reports that the sexual abuse victims included many adolescents and younger children as well: “Some victims as young as 3 were molested or raped inside pastors’ studies and Sunday school classrooms.”

The Southern Baptist church’s mistreatment of others is not confined to the Houston Chronicle’s recent revelations. The Southern Baptist Church’s abuse of LGBTIQ people in its preaching, theology and political organizing began decades ago. The now notorious Anita Bryant launched her anti-gay “Save the Children” campaign from her local Southern Baptist church back in 1977.

Bryant accused gay people not just of “recruitment” of children to “freshen their ranks” but also of child molestation—“outright seduction and molestation.” The Southern Baptist Convention praised Bryant’s “courageous stand against the evils inherent in homosexuality” to protect children from “devastating consequences.”

Over forty years later, we learn that the real danger of seduction and molestation children faced came from Baptist church leaders themselves. And we know that LGBTIQ young people being forced to sit in pews and listen to ministers condemn who they are and whom they love has devastating consequences on them.

In 2014, transgender youth Leelah Alcorn killed herself, in part, based on the callous treatment she experienced in her conservative Christian church community, according to the public suicide note she left. Alcorn recounted how “[I] go to church each week and feel like s–t because everyone there is against everything I live for.” Upon coming out to her mother, Alcorn said her mother replied, “God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong.” In her suicide note, Alcorn implored parents: “Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate themself. That’s exactly what it did to me.”

With respect to sexual abuse, the Houston Chronicle reports that “[i]n 2008 Southern Baptist Convention leaders rejected reforms to curb sexual abuse.” Meanwhile, the church’s anti-gay attacks continued unabated. That year, the Southern Baptist Convention passed an explosive resolution “wholeheartedly” supporting backers of Proposition 8 in California, “encourag[ing] all Christian pastors in California and in every other state to speak strongly, prophetically, and redemptively concerning the sinful nature of homosexuality and the urgent need to protect biblical marriage.”

All the while, the Convention’s leaders ignored urgent pleas to try to stop the “sinful”—indeed criminal—acts of some of its leaders. Former Pastor Hezekiah Stallworth, now serving “a 20-year sentence for aggravated assault of a child and indecency with a child” told the Houston Chronicle: “It doesn’t matter how much spirituality we have or that I have or any other minister has. But we are still human flesh. Flesh will do what flesh will do.”

Ten years ago, former President Jimmy Carter decided after 60 years he had finally had enough with the Southern Baptist Convention. In his 2009 essay, “Losing My Religion for Equality,” Carter severed his ties with the Convention over its second-class treatment of women. The subtitle for his essay declared that: “Women and girls have been discriminated against for too long in a twisted interpretation of the word of God.”

And now the Southern Baptist Convention, along with other conservative religious organizations, is engaged in a twisted campaign in the courts and legislatures to justify unlawful discrimination against LGBTIQ people and women under the guise of what they call “religious liberty.” In a recent legal brief pertaining to the matter, they state that not living “true” to one’s faith is “hypocritical and misleading” and “risks eternal consequences.” They quote a warning from the Old Testament God in the book of Ezekiel: “When … you do not speak out to dissuade them from their ways, that wicked person will die for their sin, and I will hold you accountable for their blood.”

Southern Baptist pastors, church workers and volunteers perpetrating sexual abuse against hundreds of people and the Convention’s perpetuating the abuse through their inaction is hypocritical and misleading. Abiding by laws that protect the public against discrimination is not. It seems that the Southern Baptists should pay more attention to the teachings they cite in their own legal brief. Indeed, the Houston Chronicle’s revelations and the church’s past and present anti-LGBTIQ actions lead us to wonder: Exactly what “religious liberty” does the Southern Baptist Convention seek to protect?

Happy 15th Anniversary of San Francisco’s ‘Winter of Love’
February 7, 2019

We awakened the morning of February 12, 2004, like any other morning. Stuart had a busy day ahead at his office. John had nothing unusual on tap, except for attending a midday rally on the steps of San Francisco City Hall to mark national Freedom to Marry Day. We had recently decided to get involved in the burgeoning marriage equality movement, and to begin, John would go to the rally and report back to Stuart that evening.

At that time 15 years ago, no same-sex couple had yet been able to marry legally in the United States. When John arrived at the rally and asked co-organizer Molly McKay what the plan for the rally was, she responded in the most extraordinary and unexpected way: “You can go into City Hall right now and get married!”

“What?!” John exclaimed. “We could get married, right now, today?!” McKay then described how San Francisco Mayor (and now California Governor) Gavin Newsom and the city had decided to open the doors of City Hall to same-sex couples to be able to marry.

After hearing President George Bush’s attack on same-sex couples in the State of the Union Address three weeks before, Newsom had decided to take action of his own. But he had to keep his plans quiet because he knew opponents would try to stop the marriages. Lesbian rights icons Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin became the first couple to marry, just minutes before John arrived at the rally.

But John had a problem—a big problem. He was by himself. And he feared that the opposition could be in court that very minute, trying to stop the marriages. He didn’t own a cell phone, and neither did Stuart. And Stuart quite possibly had already left his office for lunch. As he was starting to panic, a reporter noticed his demeanor, took pity on him and lent him his phone. John frantically punched in Stuart’s number.

Stuart was fortunately still at his desk and will never forget hearing John shouting into the phone: “GET HERE NOW!!! WE CAN GET MARRIED!”—perhaps the most urgent marriage proposal ever. Stuart dropped everything and bolted to City Hall.

When he arrived, we entered City Hall and got married—newlyweds after 17 years together. When we heard the words, “By virtue of the power in me vested by the State of California, I now pronounce you spouses for life,” we felt something transform within us. John felt chills go up and down his body. He felt those parts of him where he had unknowingly been holding the idea that he would always be “less than equal” as a gay person and that our love would always be “less than equal” dissolve and fall away.

We realized that this moment was the first time in our lives that we had experienced our government treating us as equal human beings as gay people and fully embracing and celebrating our bond of love. We kissed for what a San Francisco Chronicle reporter described as “for a long time,” and we held each other tightly.

During the next month, San Francisco’s “Winter of Love,” over 8,000 LGBTIQ people, their friends and families came to City Hall from across the country and around the world to get married. Many camped out in the rain and waited in long lines to marry.

Eventually, the California Supreme Court halted the marriages, and six months later invalidated them because the city had not gone to the high court first. It would take 11 years for marriage equality to become the law of the land nationwide.

Why should we still celebrate the Winter of Love now fifteen years later?

For one, because it was a magical, spontaneous celebration of love, joy and equality. It instilled in those who participated the tangible hope that “dreams that you dare to dream” really do come true. It was a unique manifestation of the adage: “be the change you want to see in the world.” It was righteous, political “direct action,” bathed in contagious happiness, love, generosity, friendship and family.

County Recorder Mabel Teng described San Francisco as the “happiest place on Earth.” We felt so euphoric that a friend had to remind us: “remember, homophobia has not come to an end.” But it kind of felt like it had; for that month, San Francisco was over the rainbow.

During the Winter of Love, things were just as they should be at San Francisco City Hall. All that LGBTIQ couples had to do was to walk through the doors of City Hall and we’d be treated equally. We didn’t have to file a lawsuit, lobby for legislation, appeal to voters or otherwise prove ourselves worthy. We just had to be ourselves.

We and others who joined the marriage equality movement at that time experienced something rare in a civil rights movement: a taste of the victory, the end goal, at the very beginning, for us the very first hour. For us, it meant our personal advocacy that lay ahead focused on how we wanted the world to be, not what was wrong with those in opposition.

We know that not all people experienced such joy during the Winter of Love—for example, couples denied the ability to marry when the California Supreme Court stopped the marriages and people who rejected marriage for any number of reasons. Years later, as we had told our wedding story at a public forum in Palo Alto, a crusty, elder French person in the audience responded: “I was married years ago, and I can tell you that marriage is for the birds.”

Ironically, the French person’s response underscored for us the most important aspect of the Winter of Love—our experience of equal dignity under the law as gay people. That heterosexual French person, who now rejected marriage, had had the freedom to get married and to decide for themselves, something long denied LGBTIQ people.

For us, the Winter of Love and the marriage equality movement was, and is, first and foremost about our dignity as LGBTIQ people, our common humanity, and the love, joy and self-realization that we all should be able to experience in our lives.

Happy 15th Anniversary of the Winter of Love, San Francisco. Happy anniversary to all.

Could a Gay Phoenix Rise from the Ashes in Poland?
January 24, 2019

On January 14, the nation of Poland was rocked by the horrific stabbing to death of Gdansk Mayor Pawel Adamowicz—on stage in front of thousands of people participating in the “Light to the Sky” ceremony, celebrating the culmination of an incredibly popular national charity event to raise funds for sick children.

The assassination shook Poles from all walks of life, but in particular the LGBTIQ community, immigrants, other minorities and their supporters. Adamowicz was an outspoken advocate for minorities, in the face of the rise of the far-right Law & Justice Party of President Andrzej Duda, who narrowly won election in 2015.

We traveled in Poland just months after Duda come to power, and we remember how LGBTIQ Poles feared his ascension. After the assassination, a Polish journalist friend of ours told us that the ruling Law & Justice Party has “brought the warmongering, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, homophobic, anti-EU narrative to a level Poland has not witnessed in this century.” In the face of such hostility, Adamowicz, who was not gay, boldly supported marriage equality and LGBTIQ rights and took the public step of marching in last year’s Pride Parade in Gdansk.

Although publicly available evidence to date suggests the assassin’s motives were not overtly political (media reports claim he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia), many believe the ruling party’s hate-filled rhetoric could have inspired the assassin’s violence. The day after the killing, thousands marched in cities across the country, urging an end to hate.

Poland, like America, the United Kingdom and a number of other countries, may be at a crossroads. Our journalist friend observed how some Poles believe the assassination sadly may signal a new level of violence in Polish society, while some “think it is high time for politicians to wake up and stop warmongering—that the assassination is a tragic wake up call.”

In the wake of these horrific events in heavily Catholic Poland, we learned of a seemingly unimaginable ray of hope that could lead the country out of this darkness: Robert Biedron, the first openly gay member of the Polish Parliament and then popular progressive mayor of the city of Slupsk, Poland. Many consider him to be a formidable potential candidate in the 2020 Polish presidential elections.

What? A gay president of Poland?!

Our journalist friend, who has interviewed the 42-year-old Biedron for her work, told us she thinks Biedron “absolutely has a chance” to become president. Former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski has urged Biedron to run, and a 2018 public opinion poll shows him third and within striking distance of President Duda. Our friend said Biedron could be the strong favorite of the relatively weak political left but also has “the capacity to win over the general electorate, too.” When Biedron won the Slupsk mayoral election, the “whole of Poland was stunned, except for Slupsk, where citizens stressed (that) he was the best candidate and he did his job.”

In our friend’s words, Biedron “has done a marvelous job coming from an activist background to become a nationally recognized politician.” She described how in the early 2000s, Biedron founded and led the LGBTIQ organization the Campaign Against Homophobia. The Campaign tracked anti-LGBTIQ hate crimes and initiated the “Let Them See Us!” campaign, which placed pictures of same-sex couples holding hands on billboards. Biedron marched in the first Polish Pride Parade as well as subsequent parades, one of which was banned by the mayor of Warsaw.

Biedron is credited with helping reduce homophobia in heavily Catholic Poland. Biedron has often recounted how several years ago, as an openly gay Member of Parliament, he was beaten up a number of times in public. He told Politico two years ago that he took this risk to raise the visibility of gay people in Poland to help change people’s minds.

Together with his partner for 16 years, Biedron is a strong marriage equality supporter. Last year he told the BBC: “It’s not fair that in 2018 two adults cannot get married if they love each other and are committed to each other.” And when Biedron conducts weddings for heterosexual couples, something he does often as a local mayor, “I’m extremely jealous because I see their happiness.” We and many other same-sex couples know that feeling as well, having gone to San Francisco City Hall with Marriage Equality USA for years to ask for marriage licenses only to be turned down.

Our journalist friend described the handsome Biedron as “charismatic, natural, and authentic. He walks to work and chats with people on the way.” And he is also very “professional” and strategic, while still exuding his earlier “activist enthusiasm and energy.” Some have likened his appeal to that which propelled French President Emmanuel Macron’s election. Biedron chose not to run for re-election as Slupsk Mayor to devote himself to building a national movement. He is currently on a national tour to solicit people’s input on their priorities. As mayor, Biedron sometimes took a red sofa out on the street to sit and listen to constituents.

Biedron’s rise to popularity to a level another Polish journalist describes as a “prophet” to some is testament to the power of “coming out.” His popularity in such a seemingly unexpected place as Poland illuminates the subtle, complex and seemingly contradictory ways the LGBTIQ movement progresses in different cultures—never giving up and always looking to rise from the ashes.

2019: An Historic Year for Marriage Equality Worldwide?
January 10. 2019

Nicole Kopaunik and Daniela Paier of southern Austria sure knew how to kick off the new year right when they became the first same-sex couple ever to marry in that country, tying the knot just minutes after the clock struck midnight on the 1st. As of 2019, the hills are alive with marriage equality in Austria, making it the 16th nation in Europe and 26th in the world with the freedom to marry. We look to 2019 to bring marriage equality or significant progress toward that goal to additional countries throughout the world.

Just over the border in the Czech Republic, activists hope their country will soon become the first former Soviet-bloc country to gain marriage equality. The Czech Republic has provided same-sex couples registered partnerships with substantial rights since 2006, and public opinion polling consistently shows substantial support for marriage equality.

Last year, 46 members of the Czech Parliament from a range of political parties introduced marriage equality legislation supported by the government, and Parliament had scheduled debate on the marriage equality legislation for October 31. The debate was postponed, however, with a vote possible early this year. If the bill passes Parliament, the more conservative Czech Senate must approve it and Czech President Milos Zerman, who has not publicly taken a position, must sign it.

LGBTIQ leader Czeslaw Walek told Human Rights Watch last summer: “The path is long and curvy, but we are hopeful” with the possibility “we will celebrate marriage equality in the Czech Republic during the Pride March of August 2019.”

On the other side of the world, Taiwan in May 2019 will in all likelihood become the first country in Asia with the freedom to marry by virtue of a 2017 Constitutional Court decision that provided two years for implementation. As we reported extensively in the December 6, 2018, edition of the San Francisco Bay Times, anti-LGBTIQ referenda passed late last year create uncertainty and possible challenges for achieving immediate, full marriage equality in Taiwan. Marriages will begin in May, though, and the breakthrough may have a huge impact throughout the rest of Asia.

The Philippines could beat Taiwan to the punch if its Supreme Court rules in favor of the freedom to marry in a potentially landmark case that is now fully briefed and argued. During the June 2018 oral argument, Justice Samuel Martires pointedly questioned the government’s attorney: “Why do we have to discriminate against same-sex marriage? … Are not gay couple(s), lesbians capable of loving like the heterosexuals? … Why are we allowing marriage between criminals, between a felon, murderer (but not same-sex couples)? … Why is the state still sleeping and not facing this reality that nowadays, there are individuals who would like to be happy like the gay people, lesbians, the transwoman, transmen? Why is the state so indifferent to the happiness of these people?”

And Justice Marvic Leonen asked: “Why do we interpret our laws and our constitution that we impose something on the freedoms and happiness of others, without showing a very viable reason except tradition? … Are we free to choose a portion in the past and make it tradition and exclude the other portions of the past?”

We do not know how representative these questions are of the views of the majority of the currently 14-member Philippine Supreme Court. Controversial Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte at times has even expressed support for marriage equality. If the Court rules in favor of equality, same-sex couples could possibly be able to marry in the Philippines later this year.

In Japan, LGBTIQ couples are also taking to the courts, with ten couples from different parts of the country announcing that on Valentine’s Day, they will jointly file a lawsuit for the right to marry under the “fundamental human rights” and equality guarantees of the Japanese Constitution. Lawsuits asserting same-sex partners’ inheritance and immigration rights are already pending.

The progressive Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP), the opposition party in the Diet (Japan’s national legislature), will also introduce marriage equality legislation early this year. Unfortunately, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe and the governing conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) will oppose both the lawsuit and the legislation, creating obstacles to immediate success. LGBTIQ leaders, however, are using the upcoming 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the fact that five of the G-7 countries have marriage equality and Italy has same-sex partnerships—but Japan has neither—to pressure for change now.

And in Thailand, the current military government announced its support late last year for civil partnership legislation that would provide same-sex couples substantial rights, but not full marriage equality. With elections for the lower house of the Thai Parliament anticipated in 2019, a vote and further action on the legislation may likely take place after the election. If successful, partnership recognition could come to Thailand this year as well.

In the Americas, we await Costa Rica very likely becoming the first Central American country with marriage equality in 2020 when a 2018 court decision takes effect. In Cuba, a vote will be held this year on a new constitution that leaves open the possibility of marriage equality in the future, but does not include the explicit guarantee that LGBTIQ activists, including Mariela Castro, daughter of Communist Party head and former President Raul Castro, had sought.

In Bermuda, the government of that British territory late last year filed with the Privy Council in London its final possible appeal attempting to roll back marriage equality in the territory. If the Council chooses to take the case and rules in favor of equality, the decision could have precedential effect not just in Bermuda, but also in other British territories.

Stay tuned—and engaged—for what we hope is an historic year for marriage equality progress worldwide.

‘Oy’ or ‘Joy’ to the World in 2019?
December 20, 2018

The end of one year and the beginning of the next provides us the opportunity—if we choose to take it—to reflect on how we relate to some of the most cherished human qualities and values: gratitude, generosity, connection, self-reflection, intentionality, justice, equality and nonviolence. As we bid farewell (or good riddance) to 2018 and welcome 2019, the two of us find ourselves both discovering “joy”—and exclaiming, “Oy!”

One dictionary definition of the word “oy” (short for “oy vey”) is: “a Yiddish exclamation used when someone is upset, shocked, disappointed, worried, etc.” For many of us, reasons to say “oy” on a political and global (and perhaps a personal) level are plentiful: the Trump Presidency, Brett Kavanaugh’s joining Neil Gorsuch on the U.S. Supreme Court, the California wildfires raging as the Trump administration continues to backtrack on efforts to address climate change—just to name a few.

And some joys easily come to mind: a progressive San Franciscan, Nancy Pelosi, set to resume her historic position as the first woman Speaker of the House; and the election of the nation’s first openly gay governor, Jared Polis, who along with his partner Marlon Reis, “Colorado’s first man,” will move into the Governor’s Mansion in January.

We experienced a personal and political “oy” moment last fall when, out of the blue, we received an email from a teenager who had apparently attended a talk we had given in China the year before. The email read:

“It’s Andrew—I’m an 18-year-old high school student. Yesterday I came out to my family, but it seemed like a disaster. With pieces of broken glass on the floor, I was forced to see a doctor whom I’ve not met. My mom wants to stop giving me money and interrupt my applying for colleges. I was insulted by my mom for 2 days. I’m sitting on the street, cuz I’m afraid to come back home. My mom will keep insulting me. I’m a Chinese, as u know, it’s not a ‘equal’ country, I’m not allowed to be an gay. But I want to be who I’m supposed to be.

I really don’t know what to do.

Thanks for listening.”

Sadly, that email—or much worse—could have come from anywhere in America or around the world, and our hearts go out to all facing such distress. We remember our own internal stress and the less dramatic challenges we faced as we came out.

From thousands of miles away, we responded to Andrew’s email with love, empathy, affirmation and support. We reminded Andrew that he was “a beautiful, loving person just the way you are” and offered practical suggestions as well. Months later, we heard back from Andrew:

“After struggling for a long time, the argu[ing] finally stopped, but I don’t know if my family is supportive … . I think it’ll take time. I’m fine now, and I hope my family will understand me someday. Thank you so much!!!”

We hope things will continue to get better for Andrew, but we really don’t know if they will. And for many people, living conditions and circumstances do not improve.

At the National AIDS Memorial Grove’s annual “Light in the Grove” event in December, outgoing Board Chair and Lifetime of Commitment Honoree Mike Shriver reminded those gathered that in our community’s long struggle with HIV/AIDS and in the experiences of those who lived with the disease in the bleakest times, it was not about death; it was all about life. Those of us who have taken part have had the chance to receive agonizing, bittersweet, intimate and inspiring gifts when we joined and witnessed people with AIDS living even as their tragic deaths approached. In Mike’s words that evening: “L’Chaim”—to life.

The first Buddhist practice precept is to abstain from intentionally killing any animate life. Those who find inspiration in this commitment may spend inordinate amounts of time and effort trying to rid their homes of such things as visiting flies, ants and spiders without swatting or smushing them. Ultimately, the idea is to do so, not pedantically, but to appreciate the vitality and vibrancy of life and to cultivate a heart that wishes no harm to anyone or anything.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner M.S. Merwin’s poem “Thanks” comes to mind:

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

“Oy” and “Joy”—and thanks—to the World and to all of the San Francisco Bay Times readers as we say goodbye to 2018, and hello, 2019!

Taiwan’s Prop 8
December 6, 2018

The Taiwanese LGBTIQ community on November 24 experienced the trauma of their own version of Prop 8 when conservative Christian political forces succeeded in passing anti-marriage and anti-LGBTIQ equality referenda. Having lived through Prop 8 a decade ago, we experienced the Taiwan election results like a bad case of déjà vu and PTSD as well.

As background, Taiwan’s Constitutional Court in May 2017 issued a landmark decision in favor of marriage equality, putting Taiwan on the path to become the first country in Asia with the freedom to marry. The only catch was the Court gave the government two years to enact legislation to implement the decision. If the government did not act, LGBTIQ couples could begin marrying in May 2019 under existing law. The government dawdled, allowing anti-LGBTIQ opponents time to organize petition drives to place the discriminatory referenda on the November 24 election ballot.

And the referenda passed by large margins. The first, stating that the Civil Code should exclude same-sex couples from marriage, garnered 72 percent of the vote. A second, urging the government not to enforce the nation’s comprehensive Gender Equity Education Act, which includes LGBTIQ curriculum in elementary and middle schools, passed with 67 percent of the vote. A third, stating that same-sex couples’ rights should be protected in some way other than amending the Civil Code, also passed with 61 percent of the vote.

The echoes of Prop 8 are unmistakable. The Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights (TAPCPR), lead counsel in the marriage equality litigation, explained how the LGBTIQ community faced “a monster with a war chest” (estimated at over U.S. $30 million) to finance “brainwashing campaigns to promote bias, fear and even hatred towards LGBTIQ people in Taiwan.”

Multiple news outlets report that support or funding came from notorious American anti-LGBTIQ groups, such as the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a significant supporter and funder of the Prop 8 campaign, and MassResistance.

Jennifer Lu, chair of the Taiwan Marriage Equality Coalition, told the Human Rights Campaign: “The National Organization for Marriage instigated the three anti-LGBTQ measures,” using “materials [that] are often carbon copies of the same messaging and scare tactics” employed in the U.S. and other countries.

Akin to the Prop 8 campaign’s reliance on manufactured fears about the well-being of school children and freedom of religion, the Taiwan campaign “tried every possible and scurrilous means” including “creating fake news” and “establishing ‘fake’ opponents … to exclude the real opponents from … public debates,” according to TAPCPR. Lu and other activists described how anti-LGBTIQ “smear messages” included “baseless claims,” such as that marriage equality will lead to Taiwan becoming “an island of AIDS.”

As during Prop 8, the hostile campaign messages and divisive atmosphere they created took a toll on the well-being of LGBTIQ people. In Prop 8, some children of same-sex parents feared Prop 8 would cause their families to be separated, and all LGBTIQ people faced the indignity of having millions of strangers vote on their basic human rights. In Taiwan, increased anxiety and depression, as well as two suicides of LGBTIQ people, were reported during the campaign. TAPCPR stated that the campaign subjected LGBTIQ people to “humiliation.”

However, Prop 8 and the Taiwanese referenda differ crucially in their actual legal effect. Prop 8 took away LGBTIQ Californians’ state constitutional right to marry. The Taiwanese referenda, malicious as they are, do not—and indeed cannot—reverse the Constitutional Court’s decision in favor of marriage equality, the highest law of the land.

Passage of the Taiwanese referenda brings uncertainty and potential challenges to achieving full equality. TAPCPR’s Hsu explained to The Guardian that the referenda will likely lead the legislature to create a separate legislative code for same-sex marriage apart from the existing Civil Code marriage provisions, with anti-LGBTIQ forces pushing for a “lightweight” version of same-sex relationship recognition.

But the sweeping Constitutional Court decision, mandating marriage equality and rendering anti-gay discrimination presumptively unconstitutional, gives Hsu and the LGBTIQ community powerful legal tools to demand full equality; we know they will use them.

Hsu told us for the San Francisco Bay Times, “We won’t compromise on equal rights.”

Perhaps the most destructive element of political campaigns such as Prop 8 and the Taiwan referenda is that, if they prevail, everyone loses—even the purported “winners.” The type of exploitation of fear the campaigns employ creates needless polarization, division and hatred. The sacrifice of integrity and the severance of human connection diminish everyone’s lives.  As with Prop 8, masses of Taiwanese people were not clamoring to take away marriage equality from LGBTIQ people; they only responded when a self-interested, manipulative political campaign was able to put the question on the ballot.

After Prop 8 passed, we asked ourselves the counter-intuitive question: “What’s the best thing that happened?” We believed the answer would likely point the way forward. Our answer: 6.4 million people, more than ever before, voted for love and LGBTIQ equality.

On election night in Taiwan, legendary activist Chi Chia-wei, who has been fighting for LGBTIQ and marriage equality for over 30 years, struck a similar tone: “Vote counts today are still inspiring to me. In the past, the LGBTIQ movement and political mobilization were unimaginable. Today, however, more than 2 million voters, including many heterosexuals, really understand and respect LGBTQ communities.” In the final vote, well over 3 million Taiwanese voters supported marriage equality.

Prop 8’s passage awakened the LGBTIQ community and its allies, and engendered an unprecedented outpouring of support against hate and bigotry in favor of love. On election night, Hsu and other LGBTIQ leaders maintained their dignity and their resolve. In the words of TAPCPR: “We pledge to use love to counter hate, use wisdom to shatter lies and to continue courageously making strides towards marriage equality, until it is fully realized.” We know they will.

Will We Be Celebrating with Michelle and Malia Next June?
November 29, 2018

We could not help but smile when we learned a few weeks ago that Michelle Obama and her daughter Malia snuck into the crowd of thousands of Americans cheering at the gates of the White House on the day the U.S. Supreme Court issued its nationwide marriage equality decision three years ago.

As the former First Lady told Ellen DeGeneres while promoting her new memoir Becoming, she became aware from inside the presidential residence that “thousands of people were gathering in front of the White House at that time to celebrate, and my staff was calling me, everybody was celebrating, and people were crying, and I thought, ‘I want to be in that.’”

Obama recounts in her book how she made it happen: “Malia and I just busted past the agents on duty, neither one of us making eye contact … . We made our way down a marble staircase and over red carpets, around the busts of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and past the kitchen until suddenly we were outdoors.”

As she told Ellen: “We stood along with all the cheering crowd—off to the side, mind you, so no one would see us” and “we just took it in. I held [Malia] tight, and my feeling was—we are moving forward. Change is happening.”

A few days after Michelle Obama made her revelation, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued an unusual pronouncement of his own concerning the current occupant of the White House. Recently, President Trump publicly derided Northern California District Judge John Tigar as “an Obama judge” as part of his criticism of Judge Tigar’s temporary stay of a new Trump policy restricting access to asylum for immigrants, including some fleeing anti-LGBTIQ discrimination.

The following day, Roberts fired back: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

We join in Roberts’ rebuke of Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric. More importantly, Roberts, Kavanaugh (the Court’s newest member), and the rest of the Republican-appointed Court majority must demonstrate that Roberts’ words are not merely empty rhetoric themselves. The Court majority must prove through actual legal rulings that we do, in fact, have an “independent judiciary” that provides “equal right to those appearing before them.”

Earlier this fall at a speech at the University of Minnesota, Roberts described the role of the Supreme Court: “We do not speak for the people, but we speak for the Constitution. Our role is very clear: We are to interpret the Constitution and laws of the United States and ensure that the political branches act within them. That job obviously requires independence from the political branches.” Roberts proclaimed: “Without independence, there is no Brown v. Board of Education,” the 1954 decision, declaring racially segregated public schools unconstitutional. “Without independence, there is no West Virginia v. Barnette, where the court held that the government could not compel school children to salute the flag.”

But Roberts omitted the fact that “without judicial independence,” there would be no Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark marriage equality decision that Michelle and Malia Obama had rushed outside the White House to celebrate three years ago. Indeed, the Obamas were celebrating the Supreme Court’s acting independently to enforce the freedom and equality guarantees of the Constitution over the discriminatory actions of elected legislatures and voter-enacted initiatives.

Roberts voted against same-sex couples’ constitutional right to marry in Obergefell. If Roberts had had his way, the Court would not have acted independently, would have ignored the Constitution’s Bill of Rights and deferred to the political branches. Millions of LGBTIQ people would have been deprived of full marriage equality for years.

Furthermore, Trump and the Republican Senate have been rushing to stack the federal judiciary with conservative ideologues. They have jettisoned the longstanding practice of negotiating with home state senators of the other party to agree on nominees. And Trump would never even have had the opportunity to appoint conservative Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court if Senate Republicans had not brazenly denied Obama his right to name Scalia’s replacement back in 2016.

On November 30, the Supreme Court is scheduled to confer on whether to decide key cases pertaining to workplace discrimination against LGBTIQ people. If they do, Roberts and his colleagues will be put to the test, and we will see if the Chief Justice means what he recently said. If there truly is “Equal Justice Under Law,” as the words engraved atop the Supreme Court read, we will have cause to celebrate with Michelle, Malia and millions of other Americans again next June.

‘Toto, We’re in Kansas and a Lesbian Will Be Representing Us in Congress!’
November 15, 2018

Who would have thought that of all places, Kansas would elect an openly LGBTIQ person to Congress before San Francisco did?  Certainly not I—having grown up in Kansas City, Missouri, in the 1960s and 70s, just a stone’s throw from the Kansas state line.

But that is exactly what happened with last week’s election of Sharice Davids, a Native American lesbian attorney (and also former professional mixed martial arts fighter), to represent Kansas’ 3rd Congressional District, which includes Kansas City, Kansas and the Kansas suburbs of Kansas City.

How ironic. I met Stuart 31 years ago at a house party here in San Francisco when openly gay Supervisor Harry Britt ran for an open seat in Congress against then newcomer Nancy Pelosi, who, of course, made history herself as the first woman Speaker of the House. But during Pelosi’s tenure, San Francisco has not had the opportunity to elect an LGBTIQ person to Congress for over three decades.

From early on growing up, I knew I wanted to venture out from Kansas City. But many of my high school friends have deep family roots in the Kansas City area and stayed—many, in fact, moving to the Kansas suburbs that elected Davids. One of them is my friend Alex, a gay man who lives in Overland Park, cares for his elderly parents and regularly gets together with his numerous local extended family members spanning multiple generations.

I was particularly repulsed back in 2012 when Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach declared, after four states voted in favor of marriage equality: “If a person wants to live in a San Francisco lifestyle, they can go there … . If they want to live a Kansas lifestyle, they can come here.” How dare he tell LGBTIQ friends like Alex that they weren’t welcome in their own home?

Last week, Kansas voters sent Kobach a message when they embraced a classic San Francisco value—judging people by the quality of their character, not their sexual orientation—and elected Davids to Congress and rejected Kobach’s bid to become Governor. Indeed, Governor-elect Laura Kelly defeated Kobach by over 20 percentage points in Davids’ Congressional district.  When I texted with Alex on election night, he exclaimed: “I’m ecstatic and beyond thrilled.”

Kelly’s election will have a direct positive impact on LGBTIQ Kansans. Back in 2007, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius signed a critical executive order prohibiting discrimination against LGBT state employees. But in early 2015, Governor Sam Brownback rescinded the order, just three months after same-sex couples began marrying in the state—in the words of a Kansas City Staropinion piece “for no good reason other than spite and pandering.” Out LGBT state employees, who had just celebrated their new-found freedom to marry, suddenly feared for their jobs and livelihood.

Two days after winning the election, Kelly announced she would reinstate the executive order immediately upon taking office, and if possible under state law, direct adoption agencies with state contracts not to discriminate against prospective LGBT parents.

Davids faced attacks based on her sexual orientation and race during the campaign. An elected Republican precinct committeeman wrote on Facebook to a Davids supporter: “Your radical socialist kick boxing lesbian Indian will be sent back packing to the reservation.”

Davids set a very different tone in her campaign, and the electorate embraced it. On election night, she declared: “There are so many of us who welcome everyone, who see everyone and know that everyone should have the opportunity to succeed … . The core of this campaign has been about trying to figure out ways to make sure that as many voices and experiences as possible … are being heard by our elected representatives.” Earlier this year, Davids told The New York Times, “I think it’s important that the lived experiences and the point of view of LGBT folks be included in conversations that affect all of us.”

The Kansas City Star reported that, during the campaign, Davids met with LGBT youth at a local queer space, where she shared her coming out story, listened to the young people’s stories of bullying and comforted them. Davids herself faced housing discrimination because of her sexual orientation when she worked in South Dakota several years ago. Cassandra Peters, the youth program’s director, told the Star: “She took time to hug each and every one of them and take a picture with them … . And it was just so comforting for them to think this person is a politician and cares about them.”

And Kansas elected its first two LGBTIQ representatives to the state legislature last week as well.

Davids’ election demonstrates how far we have come as a community nationally and quite possibly points to the way forward for advancing LGBTIQ equality in an era when many fear the federal courts will become less friendly with multiple Trump appointees. As we wait to learn if the Supreme Court will decide whether federal law forbids employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identity as unlawful sex discrimination, Davids will now a have vote in Congress to make such protections explicit.

On election night, Davids told her cheering supporters, “I’m so excited about the fact that we have the opportunity to reset expectations about what people think when they look at Kansas.” I’m feeling a lot of hometown pride myself. It’s profound to me to have this degree of acceptance in my hometown, a place where I never imaged being openly LGBTIQ growing up. Kudos to Davids and Kansas for this victory.

An Attack on One Is an Attack on All
November 1, 2018

We, like many others in the LGBTIQ community, were outraged when we learned of the Trump administration’s most recent shameless attack on transgender and gender non-binary people. As reported by The New York Times in late October, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services is leading an effort in essence to deny the very existence of transgender, intersex and genderqueer people and to enshrine discrimination against those who so identify into law.

According to the Times, the administration wants the following definition of sex to apply to enforcement of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination in educational programs that receive federal financial assistance: “Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth … . The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

This latest development comes on the heels of the Trump administration last year reversing the Obama administration’s protections for transgender students to be able to use the bathroom that matches their gender, and the Trump administration’s attempt to institute a ban on transgender Americans participating in the military.

Last month, the Trump administration also announced revocation of visas to unmarried partners of foreign LGBTIQ staff of diplomatic missions, the United Nations and other international organizations—even though these LGBTIQ people in many instances face horrific discrimination in their countries of origin. And Trump’s first appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court has already sided twice with opponents of LGBTIQ rights.

These actions not only further the destructive and divisive policy priorities of Trump, Pence, and other administration officials, but they also appear to be calculated political ploys to appeal to conservative evangelical voters and moneyed interests, essential to Trump and Pence’s political power. With the midterm elections just days away, the latest moves mirror the Bush administration’s 2004 efforts to energize their base through inflammatory attacks on marriage equality.

Most disturbingly, Yale Professor Jason Stanley has pointed to Trump’s efforts to rollback LGBTIQ rights as an example of what Stanley describes as fascist political tactics in his new book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

In recent interviews with Democracy Now and other news outlets, Stanley describes how “fascism is an ideology based on power and loyalty” to one “hypernationalist” group, creating “divisions between ‘us and ‘them’” and “fear of the other.” By contrast, “liberal democracy is based on liberty and equality” that “require truth.” Stanley explains that “to attack liberal democracy and replace it with power, you need to smash truth,” and require loyalty to a single “hypermasculine and hyperpatriarchal” leader, who “represents that group.” As such, fascist tactics are “harshly homophobic.”

Stanley identifies ten pillars of fascist political tactics: 1) an appeal to a “mythic past”; 2) propaganda where actual news is “fake news”; 3) “anti-intellectualism,”; 4) “unreality” that leaves only “loyalty”; 5) hierarchy; 6) “victimhood,” where “the dominant group are the greatest victims”; 7) “law and order” where the “out group” are criminals; 8) “fomenting fear about sexuality” and creating “panic around the threat of rape perpetrated by out-group men against in-group women”; 9) “Sodom and Gomorrah,” where “the real values come from the heartland” and the urban dwellers are “decadent”; 10) a social-Darwinian notion that the out group is “lazy” and inferior. In sum: “It’s all about winning” and “power is more important than the truth.”

Applying Stanley’s analysis, the latest Trump administration effort to define transgender people out of existence under Title IX is a naked effort to “smash truth” and persecute “the other,” whom Trump’s followers could easily see as “decadent” city dwellers, but in reality, of course, pose no threat to anyone. The Trump administration’s effort appears to appeal to a “mythic past,” where LGBTIQ people were neither seen nor heard. It denies scientific fact, reality and the humanity of transgender and gender non-binary people, reinforcing the notion of the asserted superiority of the “hypermasculine” leader, Trump.

Trump’s actions are part and parcel of decades-long efforts to portray opponents of LGBTIQ dignity and equality as “victims”—be it Anita Bryant’s efforts to “Save the Children” from gay people “recruiting” them; the Prop. 8 campaign’s scaring voters into thinking that their children would be “forced” to learn about “gay marriage” in public school; conservatives’ current attempts to foment panic that transgender people using the restroom that matches their gender will result in attacks on children; or current attempts to characterize people who refuse services to LGBTIQ people under the guise of religion as “victims.”

Many Republican and other conservative leaders have laid the groundwork for Trump’s current words and deeds. Indeed, nothing describes Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s political approach better than Professor Stanley’s insights: “It’s all about winning” and “power is more important than the truth.”

But perhaps the gravest danger Stanley warns against is the normalization of fascist political tactics, writing that normalization “transform(s) the morally extraordinary into the ordinary.” Now is the time to continue naming and speaking up in every way against every element of Trump’s fascist political tactics to amass power and authority.

Which LGBTIQ Case Will Reach Brett Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court First?
October 18, 2018

We, like millions of Americans, were deeply disturbed and disillusioned by the U.S. Senate’s confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. And as we’ve previously discussed in this column, the fear that Kavanaugh—who replaced Justice Kennedy, author of all the Court’s landmark gay rights decisions—could undermine LGBTIQ rights for a generation is unsettling, to say the least.

Kavanaugh may be put to the test very soon. Indeed, in the current 2018–2019 term, three cases the Court could hear concern an issue of enormous nationwide importance: whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identity as unlawful sex discrimination covered by the Act.

The first case the Court could take is Bostock v. Clayton County and pertains to Gerald Bostock, the former Child Welfare Services Coordinator for the Clayton County Georgia Juvenile Court System. Bostock claims that he was fired on trumped up charges when the County learned he was gay. Bostock’s Supreme Court petition describes him as “a dedicated social services professional who has for many years been committed to ensuring that abused and neglected children have safe homes in which to live and grow.” A three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals threw out his case because it held that Title VII does not prohibit employers from terminating employees because they’re gay. Bostock asked the high court to hear his case.

The second case, Altitude Express v. Zarda, raises the same issue and was filed on behalf of Donald Zarda, a now-deceased New York skydiving teacher who alleged that he was fired from his job for being openly gay. Last year, the Second Circuit en banc (meaning all judges of that appellate court, not just a typical 3-judge panel) reached the opposite conclusion to the Eleventh Circuit, allowing Zarda’s case to go forward and holding that Title VII prohibits dismissing an employee based on sexual orientation. (Last year, the Seventh Circuit en banc reached the same conclusion.)

The Supreme Court was scheduled to discuss whether or not to take the Bostock and/or Zarda cases at its September 24 internal conference, but postponed the question probably, in part, because of the vacancy on the Court and possibly because of a third pending case, briefing of which should be completed this fall.

The third case, Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC, was brought by Aimee Stephens, a funeral director at Harris Funeral Homes, who was fired after she informed her employer that she was transgender and would be transitioning. The Sixth Circuit held that Title VII proscription on sex discrimination prohibited Stephens from being fired based on her gender identity. The funeral home seeks Supreme Court review of the decision.

The federal circuit courts have diverged significantly as to the scope of Title VII’s application to sexual orientation and gender identity, two related but different issues. We don’t know whether the Court will take up either or both issues or leave them for another day, giving time for other circuit courts to issue additional opinions or for Congress to amend Title VII to include sexual orientation and gender identity explicitly.

In dissenting from the Eleventh Circuit’s refusal to reconsider the Bostock case en banc, Judge Robin Rosenbaum termed earlier circuit court cases holding that Title VII did not apply to sexual orientation as having “the precedential equivalent of an Edsel with a missing engine”—referring to the late 1950s monumental flop of a car sold by the Ford Motor Company.

At Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, Senator Cory Booker asked him whether it would be wrong to fire someone because they’re gay. Kavanaugh volunteered only, “In my workplace, I hire people because of their talents and abilities. All Americans.”

Booker pressed: “There are a lot of folks who have concerns that if you get on the court—folks who are married right now really have a fear that they will not be able to continue those marital bonds. We still have a country where, if you post your Facebook pictures up of your marriage to someone of the same sex, we still have a majority of the states where if that employer of yours finds out that you’ve got a gay marriage and that you’re gay, in the majority of America states, you can fire somebody because they’re gay.”

Kavanaugh refused to respond to the concerns directly, citing the pending cases that he might be in a position to decide.

In response to questioning from Senator Kamala Harris as to whether he believed Obergefell, the Court’s nationwide marriage equality decision, was correctly decided, Kavanaugh refused to answer, but declared that the Court had decided that “the days of discriminating against gay and lesbian Americans, or treating gay and lesbian Americans as inferior in dignity and worth, are over … . That’s a very important statement.”

Many are skeptical of Kavanaugh’s commitment to that statement when it comes to specifics—and more fundamentally agree with former Justice John Paul Stevens that Kavanaugh should not even be on the Supreme Court. But like it or not, Kavanaugh likely holds the deciding vote on whether Title VII protects LGBTIQ people from being fired because of their sexual orientation or gender identity if the Court takes up the issue. Now is the time to do everything we can to hold him to his words.

The Historic Indian Supreme Court Ruling: Embracing ‘Infinite Shades of Love and Longing’
October 4, 2018

On September 6, 2018, India, the world’s largest democracy, finally shed the British colonial-era law that for over a century and a half has been used to criminalize and denigrate the lives of LGBTIQ Indians. In a 495-page ruling that included four separate opinions, the Supreme Court of India declared the law, known as Section 377, unconstitutional. The 1.3 billion citizens of India no longer live in a country where for LGBTIQ people “the physical manifestation of their love is criminal.” Instead, love may manifest itself “unhindered.”

Many passages of the Justices’ opinions sing both in their eloquence and their insight. We are not Indian law experts, and the Indian Supreme Court differs significantly in structure from the U.S. Supreme Court, e.g. panels of 3 to 5 or more Justices out of 31 total Justices hear different cases. Instead of in-depth legal analysis, we share with you highlights from the opinions that stood out for us. As we read the words of the Indian Supreme Court, we couldn’t help but reflect on the current confirmation hearings for the U.S. Supreme Court, and ways in which the words of supreme courts can either affirm or deny the truth of our very lives:

The Indian Constitution is an “organic and breathing document with senses which are very much alive to its surroundings”—“a living, integrated organism having a soul and consciousness of its own and its pulse beats … can be felt all over its body.”

“Section 377 (the ’unnatural offences’ statute), is based on a moral notion that intercourse which is lustful is to be frowned upon. It finds the sole purpose of intercourse in procreation. In doing so, it imposes criminal sanctions upon basic human urges, by targeting some of them as against the order of nature.”

“The natural identity of an individual should be treated to be absolutely essential to his being. What nature gives is natural.”

“Homosexuality has been documented in almost 1500 species,” and a recent article “notes that ‘no species has been found in which homosexual behavior has not been shown to exist, with the exception of species that never have sex at all, such as sea urchins … .’”

“‘What makes life meaningful is love. The right that makes us human is the right to love. To criminalize the expression of that right is profoundly cruel and inhumane.’”

Quoting queer poet Vikram Seth:
“To sneer at love, and wrench apart
The bonds of body, mind and heart
With specious reason and no rhyme:
This is the true unnatural crime.”

“Denial of self-expression is inviting death … . Identity is equivalent to divinity.”

“[O]nly when each and every individual is liberated from the shackles of … bondage and is able to work towards full development of his/her personality that we can call ourselves a truly free society.”

“We have to bid adieu to the perceptions, stereotypes and prejudices deeply ingrained in the societal mindset so as to usher in inclusivity in all spheres and empower all citizens alike without any kind of alienation and discrimination.”

Section 377 has turned LGBT people into social “pariahs” and “has become an odious weapon for the harassment of the LGBT community by subjecting them to discrimination and unequal treatment.”

A person may choose to live alone, “but no one, and we mean, no one, should impose solitude on him/her.”

Section 377 has “subjugated” LGBT people “to a culture of silence and into leading their lives in closeted invisibility.”

This forced “closeting” produces “the ‘hegemonic heterosexual’—the ideological construction of a particular alignment of sex, gender and desire that posits itself as natural, inevitable and eternal.”

“What links LGBT individuals to couples who love across caste and community lines is the fact that both are exercising their right to love at enormous personal risk and in the process disrupting existing lines of social authority.” The struggle to overcome “limits imposed by structures such as gender, caste, class, religion and community makes the right to love not just a separate battle for LGBT individuals, but a battle for all.”

“By attacking … gender roles,” LGBT people “build communities and relationships premised on care and reciprocity” and thus challenge “the idea that relationships, and by extension society, must be divided along hierarchical sexual roles in order to function.”

“The choice of sexuality is at the core of privacy. But equally … the public assertion of identity founded in sexual orientation is crucial to the exercise of freedoms.” “If one accepts the proposition that public places are heteronormative, and same-sex sexual acts partially closeted, relegating ‘homosexual’ acts into the private sphere, would in effect reiterate the ‘ambient heterosexism of the public space.’”

“The right to privacy may be construed to signify that not only are certain acts no longer immoral, but that there also exists an affirmative moral right to do them.”

“An individual’s sexuality cannot be put into boxes or compartmentalized; it should rather be viewed as fluid, granting the individual the freedom to ascertain her own desires and proclivities.”

“The Constitution protects the fluidities of sexual experience. It leaves it to consenting adults to find fulfillment in their relationships … in infinite shades of love and longing.”

“For people to attain the highest standard of health, they must also have the right to exercise choice in their sexual lives and feel safe in expressing their sexual identity.”

“The right to health is not simply the right not to be unwell, but rather the right to be well.”

“The LGBT persons deserve to live a life unshackled from the shadow of being ‘unapprehended felons.’”

“History owes an apology to the members of this community and their families, for the delay in providing redressal for the ignominy and ostracism that they have suffered through the centuries.”

“For those who have been oppressed, justice … committed to human freedom, has the power to transform lives.”

At this pivotal time in American jurisprudence, we hope that the members of the U.S. Supreme Court read and heed the wisdom of the Indian Supreme Court.

At Stake in the Kavanaugh Nomination: Exclusion and Separation
September 6, 2018

Few matters could be more important to the lives of LGBTIQ Americans than defeating the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. Today we look at one issue: businesses attempting to deny service to LGBTIQ people in the name of religion—most often conservative Christianity.

When people choose to open businesses to make profit off of the public, the law requires them to put aside personal religious or other views that would exclude members of the public whom anti-discrimination laws protect. The ability to be served just like anybody else at businesses ranging from overnight accommodations to food establishments to myriad service providers is crucial to the dignity, health and wellbeing of LGBTIQ people, other groups that face discrimination and our society at large.

Pandering to his evangelical Christian political base, President Trump, who nominated Kavanaugh, would like to have it otherwise—declaring on “Religious Freedom Day” that no business “should be forced to choose between the tenets of faith or adherence to the law.” And last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced creation of the so-called “Religious Liberty Task Force,” in the face of what he claims is “a dangerous movement, undetected by many” that “is now challenging and eroding … religious freedom.”

There’s a reason the movement is “undetected”—there’s actually no such movement at all. The rhetoric is part of a years-long campaign to instill fear, particularly in conservative Christians, as a means to raise money from them and to get them to vote for conservative candidates and measures, thereby furthering the political power of particular conservative organizations, leaders and officeholders. Indeed, Trump, in an August 27 closed door meeting, told evangelical Christian leaders that the midterm elections are a “referendum on your religion” and that opponents “will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently.”

These types of tactics, used in many different forms for decades to oppose LGBTIQ rights along with women’s rights and other civil liberties, have recently gained prominence again in relation to LGBTIQ issues because of successes such as marriage equality. The U.S. Supreme Court will play a critical role in determining the degree to which these conservative efforts affect public policy, and thus people’s lives.

The Supreme Court largely sidestepped the issue in this June’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision regarding a baker’s refusal to bake a custom wedding cake for Charlie Craig and David Mullins, a same-sex couple engaged to be married. However, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, joined by conservatives Roberts, Alito, and Gorsuch, included significant language in support of LGBTIQ rights.

Observing that “[o]ur society has come to the recognition that gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth,” Kennedy stated that personal “religious or philosophical objections” do not generally “allow business owners and other actors in the economy and in society to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services.” With respect to marriage equality, any such objections must be “sufficiently constrained, lest all purveyors of goods and services who object to gay marriages for moral and religious reasons in effect be allowed to put up signs saying ‘no goods or services will be sold if they will be used for gay marriages,’ something that would impose a serious stigma on gay persons.”

Yet Kennedy also opined that disputes regarding LGBTIQ people’s right to receive services in the face of religious opposition also “must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs.” And although we take some encouragement that three conservative justices signed on to the majority’s LGBTIQ supportive language, concurrences from Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch suggest that they might support sweeping exceptions to laws that protect LGBTIQ people from discrimination.

Justice Roberts characteristically held his cards close to his vest and was the only justice other than Kennedy who merely signed on to the majority decision without expressing his views further. However, in his strongly worded dissent from the 2015 nationwide marriage equality decision, Roberts stated that the decision “creates serious questions about religious liberty.” That’s why the person who replaces Kennedy on the Court could likely have a crucial fifth vote on the issue.

Cases raising issues similar to Craig and Mullin’s are percolating in lower courts or commissions around the country and could someday reach the high court. They include similar refusals to provide custom wedding cakes: a florist refusing to provide custom designed flower arrangements; and a stationery and calligraphy store, graphic design company, videography business and wedding venue all attempting to exempt themselves from state and local anti-discrimination laws.
Other cases include a Hawaii bed and breakfast’s refusal to provide a room to a lesbian couple, a transgender person’s right to have a custom designed cake to celebrate their transgender birthday, and a screen printer’s refusal to make t-shirts for an LGBTQ Pride celebration—again all in violation of state or local anti-discrimination measures.

Out of curiosity, we looked at online reviews of the Hawaii bed and breakfast involved in one of the cases. One reviewer described how one of the bedrooms “looked right out on the ocean and Koko Head.” Another reviewer described the hosts as “truly gracious, friendly and unobtrusive.” We were particularly disturbed by the idea that the two of us would not be permitted to enjoy the amazing views from the B&B that heterosexual couples could and that the hosts described as so welcoming would not welcome us.

The marriage equality movement has enjoyed enormous success because of the personal connections LGBTIQ Americans have made with other Americans. It seems tragic that religious views or ideology would stand in the way of that human connection. We want a Supreme Court that does not endorse such exclusion and separation.

Marriage Equality Delayed Is Marriage Equality Denied
August 23, 2018

Six months ago, we reported on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ groundbreaking decision in favor of marriage equality. That court has jurisdiction over the 23 Latin American and Caribbean countries who are currently active parties to the American Convention on Human Rights. The ruling was unambiguous: only marriage equality, not a lesser alternative such as civil unions, suffices.

The ruling, however, did not produce marriage equality overnight throughout Latin America and the Caribbean as the U.S. Supreme Court decision did across this country three years ago. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights lacks the enforcement power to compel member states to comply, although those countries are still bound by the court’s interpretation of the human rights treaty to which they are signatories. The bottom line is that each member nation must change its laws through its own legislatures or courts to abide by its treaty obligations, and they face no binding timeline to do so.

This month Costa Rica, the country that requested the Human Rights Court opinion, became the first country to take a major step toward meeting its commitments when its Supreme Court ruled that excluding LGBTIQ couples from marriage was discriminatory and unconstitutional. But, unfortunately, that court gave the national legislature 18 months to implement its decision. If the legislature fails to act, the court’s order will take effect and marriages for same-sex couples will begin in early 2020.

We believe that 2020 is too long to wait. We remember that during the California Supreme Court’s hearing 14 years ago on the legality of the San Francisco marriages of February 2004, Justice Joyce Kennard of the California Supreme Court asked the city: “What’s the rush?” We immediately thought of Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, both over 80 years old and together for over 50 years, the first couple to marry in San Francisco. They and many thousands of other couples like ourselves had waited long enough. Indeed, every day that goes by in which an LGBTIQ person is denied equality is a day lost, leaving them vulnerable to harmful discrimination and denying them their dignity under the law.

In Costa Rica, not one but two courts with jurisdiction have found that the law violates LGBTIQ people’s constitutional rights, allowing an 18-month delay in implementation that appears untenable. Costa Rican activist Margarita Salas told the Tico Times, Costa Rica’s leading English-language newspaper: “It’s a judicial aberration for a state entity to recognize that discrimination exists, and at the same time allow that discrimination to continue for 18 months more.”

Such waiting periods do not appear to result in a country’s becoming more accepting of a final, binding judicial decision or in opposition subsiding. They seem to have the opposite effect. Opponents have time to devise strategies to undermine the decision, confuse it, or to delay it further, thereby denying citizens their rights and diminishing respect for the court in the eyes of the lawmakers and the public.

Indeed, the Constitutional Court in Taiwan ruled in favor of full marriage equality 15 months ago, but instead of giving its decision immediate effect, it allowed the government two years to implement. If the government fails to act, marriages will begin in May 2019. The legislature has so far not acted, and the delay has given opponents of equality time to organize petition drives for referenda seeking to undermine the court’s decision on the November 24, 2018, national election ballot.

As of press time, the referenda have yet to have been certified for the ballot and what, if any, legal effect they might have given the primacy of the Constitutional Court’s decision is unclear. The possible referenda and resulting confusion, however, may give the Taiwanese public the impression that LGBTIQ’s people’s constitutional rights are still up for grabs. And if passed, the referenda could weaken resolve to enforce the 2017 decision or further embolden opponents. No one knows better than we Californians the horror of having our fundamental constitutional rights and our marriages put up for a popular vote. This November marks the 10-year anniversary of the passage of Proposition 8, which took 5 years in the courts to overturn.

We are thankful that the U.S. Supreme Court did not give individual states across the country 18 months or 2 years to implement its 2015 marriage equality ruling. Local communities all across the country, from Maine to Hawaii, Alaska to Florida, witnessing happy LGBTIQ couples tying the knot has increased support for marriage equality nationwide, and not sown division. A July 2018 PRRI poll showed nationwide support for marriage equality at a record 64 percent, up a whopping 9 percentage points from 3 years ago when the Supreme Court issued its decision.

Opposition has fallen to 28 percent. Significantly, a May 2018 PRRI poll showed that majorities in 44 states now support marriage equality, with Alabama the lone state with majority opposition. Still, 41 percent of Alabama residents support equality, and support is near majority in North Carolina (49%), Louisiana (48%) and West Virginia (48%), with 46% support in Tennessee and 42% support in Mississippi.

We salute the Costa Rica Supreme Court for ruling in favor of marriage equality, but LGBTIQ couples should not have to wait another year and half to marry. High courts and legislatures in other signatory countries in Latin America and the Caribbean should cease delay as well.

Homeless Gay Valedictorian Helps to Make the ‘Impossible Possible’ for LGBTIQ Youth
August 12, 2018

We, like many other LGBTIQ people, were heartened to learn of the outpouring of financial support from the community for the Jacksonville, Florida, high school valedictorian Seth Owen that will enable him to attend Georgetown University after his parents kicked him out of the house and refused to support him because he was gay. As Owen’s struggle received extensive national media coverage, nearly 2,500 donors contributed over $135,000 on the GoFundMe page that his high school biology teacher and mentor Jane Martin, other teachers and his fellow students organized—far surpassing the initial goal of $20,000.

On the site, Martin described the struggle Owen faced:

“Earlier this year (after a year of attempted conversion therapy), Seth’s parents gave him an ultimatum. He would either continue to attend the church that outwardly attacked him and his sexual orientation or he would need to leave home. For his own well-being and safety, Seth chose the latter. He’s been living with friends and working to sustain himself since financially. His parents have refused to support him emotionally or financially because they deem his sexual orientation inconsistent with their religious beliefs. Throughout this all, Seth held his head high and continued to work almost full-time while finishing high school at the top of his class as the co-valedictorian.”

In an NBC News video, Owen, who was also his high school’s swim team captain and leader of its gay-straight alliance his junior and senior years, described how his father told him that “biblically, we have the right to stone you” for being gay and forced him to go to a Christian conversion therapy counselor to “fix” him.

Martin explained on GoFundMe that Owen was admitted to Georgetown for college, but the university based his financial aid on the erroneous assumption that his parents would support him. Even after Owen appealed the decision with extensive accompanying documentation, Georgetown refused to alter its decision, leaving Owen $20,000 short. As they continued to try to convince Georgetown to change its decision and policies, Martin and others initiated the GoFundMe fundraising appeal.

Owen told NBC News: “I can truly say I felt unconditional love” from his teachers and fellow students—something his parents seemed unable to provide.

As support poured in, Owen responded to his supporters with immense gratitude: “I simply cannot say thank you to you all enough … . I am forever grateful to you all for making my lifelong dream of attending college possible.”

And Owen revealed how he understood it was about much more than just him: “Since this story became public, I have had numerous people reach out to me and say that they are going through similar situations.” While Owen found that the “passionate response” to his plight “reassure[d]’ him that “Jacksonville (and our country) will not tolerate injustices towards the LGBTQ+ community,” he pleaded for all of his supporters to “continue to be allies in whatever capacity, not just for the LGBTQ+ community, but for all marginalized groups.”

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the California Supreme Court’s historic May 15, 2008, ruling establishing marriage equality in California before Proposition 8. As one of the plaintiff couples in the case, we remember joining the other plaintiffs and hundreds of LGBTIQ supporters on the steps of the California Supreme Court that morning when at 10 am—the hour state Supreme Court opinions are announced—Kate Kendall, Esq., of the National Center for Lesbian Rights bounded out the doors of the Court proclaiming that justice had prevailed.

Cries of joy rang out and carried all the way to the top floor of the Supreme Court building, where the opinion’s author Chief Justice Ronald George could even hear them as he recalled in an interview later. As we hugged each other and all of those around us, Stuart’s cell phone suddenly rang. It was his mother, and she had just one question: “When’s the wedding?!”

That night, as we made our way home through the Castro, we joined thousands of people, celebrating in the streets until the wee hours.

The victory for the dignity of all LGBTIQ people when it comes to marriage was huge. Thanks to that ruling, all Californians enjoyed a fundamental state constitutional right to marry the person they loved—regardless of their race, religion, creed, national origin, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity. A person’s fundamental right to marry and to have the highest state recognition and protection for their relationship depended upon their humanity—and their humanity alone—and not on any external factor as to the class of people to which they could be categorized.

Every LGBTIQ person, regardless of which initial described them, could marry the person they chose because the state was not in the business of excluding couples from marriage based on who they are or whom they love. The state did not even ask marriage license applicants their gender. All LGBTIQ Americans now have this fundamental right by virtue of the United States Supreme Court’s 2015 decision. The California Supreme Court led the way.

As if that weren’t enough, those celebrating on May 15, 2008, had something of even broader importance to cheer in the Supreme Court’s opinion. The California Supreme Court did not just make a narrow ruling as to marriage equality (as the Massachusetts Supreme Court had done four years before). It made a sweeping declaration that lesbian, gay and bisexual people, just like other groups who have historically faced discrimination, are entitled to the highest degree of protection under the state constitution. State and local laws that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation are presumptively unconstitutional and can stand only if the state demonstrates a most compelling reason, narrowly tailored, for the law—just like laws that discriminate on the basis of race, religion or gender.

This ruling applies to every way in which California state and local governments and their officials and employees relate to lesbian, gay and bisexual people, and the Court recognized that marriage was just the particular example of discrimination before it. The Court held that, under state law, excluding same-sex couples from marriage “marks” lesbian, gay, and bisexual people as “second-class citizens.” The same would be true of any law that unjustifiably treats lesbian, gay, and bisexual people differently from everyone else. This aspect of the Court’s ruling protects lesbian and gay people if a public school, police department, or any other California state or local governmental entity discriminates against them.

The status of being a protected class under the state constitution is an invaluable protection—something for which the community had fought for decades. Just as the California Supreme Court ten years ago became the first state supreme court to declare that LGBTIQ people had a fundamental right to marry, it was the first to recognize sexual orientation as a protected class. Establishing this status at a federal level for all LGBTIQ people is a top legal priority. The United States Supreme Court in its 2015 marriage equality decision laid the groundwork for such a future decision, but it did not go that far.

In reflecting on the decade since the California decision, we realized we have become accustomed to having our state constitutional rights, and it feels good. It affects the way we are able to live our lives, and it feels natural to embody that dignity.

We are not complacent. We know there are ongoing threats to our rights, and much more remains to be done in California, across the nation and around the world.

The California Supreme Court wrote ten years ago that every Californian should have the “opportunity to live a happy, meaningful, and satisfying life as a full member of society” and the state constitution “guarantee[s] this basic civil right to all individuals and couples, without regard to their sexual orientation.” Everyone everywhere should be able to live their lives with this dignity and hope. The Supreme Court’s decision will remain an important legal precedent and continue to inspire us as we move forward together to realize that dream.

‘Chinese Stuart’ and ‘Chinese Tom’: Every Label Tells a Story
May 3, 2018

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and this year I’ve been reflecting on what it was like to attend summer camp in Wisconsin in the early 1970s. A friend and I were the only two kids of color at camp, and the other kids began calling me “Chinese Stuart” and my friend “Chinese Tom.”

Singling us out in this way was strange and alienating, but it was particularly confusing for Tom. I am mixed race Chinese and English/Irish, but Tom wasn’t Chinese at all. He was Mexican American.

Although I was not a very “cool” kid, the other kids decided after a while that I was OK when I won the camp knot-tying contest. They stopped calling me “Chinese Stuart”—they started simply calling me Stuart. But Tom, who never gained acceptance, remained “Chinese Tom” to the bitter end—much to his bewilderment.

It was at that point I realized that, to the other kids at camp, the word “Chinese” just meant we were outsiders, that as kids of color we were “other”—which is how Tom could remain “Chinese” without regard to his actual racial or ethnic identity. The camp counselors and adults did nothing to intervene when the other kids started calling us “Chinese.” Ironically, this all took place at a camp where we were often asked to pretend we were “Indians,” even though there were no Native Americans among us.

Fast forward 40 years, and my husband John and I decided to try a cozy little European restaurant near our neighborhood, which is heavily Asian American. As the owner welcomed us to his restaurant, he was particularly delighted when we told him we lived in the neighborhood nearby because he lived here too, just a few blocks away from us. He exclaimed, “It’s really great to meet neighbors who are not Chinese!”

As we greeted his excitement with silence and disturbed looks of surprise on our faces, he quickly added: “Nothing against the Chinese—I’m just excited to meet neighbors I can talk to.”

This caused me to think back on what it had been like growing up in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin—a Milwaukee suburb that was sometimes nicknamed “Whitefolks Bay.” I was only one of the three kids of color in elementary school, and even though I was mixed race, the other students thought I looked incredibly Asian. Later, when I moved to California during high school, our school was much more diverse, and to my surprise, the other students often did not realize I was half Chinese—just as the restaurant owner did not recognize that I was part Asian when he made his pronouncement.

As a boy, I think what I took from being labeled “Chinese Stuart” at camp was that I wanted to be just Stuart—with no labels or identifications. Being “other” hurt. But as an adult, I want to be just Stuart and I want people to know my story—my “labels”—so that they can understand and appreciate the many aspects of my background and experience that contribute to who I am. I want the restaurant owner to know that I am one of “them” after he makes a blanket statement against Chinese people.

When labels are not used to divide, they can be the means by which we learn each other’s stories so that we can find connection and community with others who share our experiences, as well as bring richness and diversity to the broader community.

I am delighted to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage month this May, and LGBTQ Pride next month in June. And this May, John and I salute the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance (GAPA) as it celebrates its 30th anniversary as a cornerstone of the community.

I am both simply Stuart, and am proudly gay Stuart and Chinese Stuart. Happy Asian Pacific American Heritage month!

A Fantastic New Exhibit and Book About Our Shared Humanity:
hapa.me – 15 years of the hapa project
April 19, 2018

How many times has a stranger on the street asked you the question, “What are you?”—as if you looked like you were from outer space? In fact, many people of mixed race like me are asked this question repeatedly throughout our lives—by friends, neighbors, classmates, and even strangers. Years ago, at a party, people thought it would be fun to play a guessing game regarding my racial identity. One person told me with conviction that I was an “Aleutian Eskimo.” In reality, I am mixed race Chinese and English/Irish—or Hapa—a broad term referring to people of mixed Asian ancestry.

For the last 15 years, I have been proud to be part of UC Santa Barbara Professor Kip Fulbeck’s The Hapa Project. In 2001, Fulbeck had the brilliant idea to reclaim the “What are you?” question and create a book and travelling art exhibit, entitled Part Asian, 100% Hapa. In the book and exhibit, Fulbeck displayed original photographs of many Hapa people and our handwritten responses to “What are you?” on our own terms.

A few weeks ago, a beautiful new art exhibition, entitled hapa.me – 15 years of the hapa project, opened at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibit and recently published book of the same name feature then and now portraits of many of the participants and new answers to the “What are you?” question alongside those of 15 years ago.

Fifteen years ago, I answered the question in two words in all caps: “QUEER EURASIAN.” I wanted anyone viewing the book or exhibit to know that both my race and my sexuality were queer and to be aware of the existence of queer Hapas. Indeed, when the exhibit went up at a university in Georgia, staff told Fulbeck that he would have to remove my portrait and words from the show at their school. To his great credit, Fulbeck told them that if my photo and words went, the entire exhibit would go. They relented, and my portrait and words remained proudly part of the show.

In 2018, I answered the question very differently. I talked about the parallels between my parents’ experience of being able to marry in California in the 1950s only because the California Supreme Court overturned the state ban on interracial marriage, and all that my husband John and I have experienced over the last 15 years as part of the marriage equality movement. I described how wonderful it was for my parents to walk me down the aisle when John and I married in 2008 after our community’s historic victory for marriage equality at the same California Supreme Court. This time I wrote in all caps: “LOVE IS LOVE!” and “EQUALITY♥.”

In our own way, queer people also have to answer the “What are you?” question over and over again. We do this when we come out. Of course, all too often politicians, preachers, our own family members, and many others have imposed their own ignorant or misguided answers on us and on society, to our great detriment. But the world is changing because millions of queer people and our supporters are answering the question on our own terms, articulating the truth of our lives from our hearts and living openly and honestly—just as The Hapa Project invites Hapa people to do.

Something else that queer people and Hapa people often have in common is that our parents do not share our experience—my parents weren’t queer or mixed race. We have to discover, investigate, and come to understand our identities for ourselves and in community with each other.

When I attended the opening of the hapa.me exhibit two weeks ago, I was struck by how happy, safe, and at home I felt surrounded by hundreds of other mixed-race folks, our friends and families. As the day went on, it became not only an opening of an art exhibit but also a festival of spontaneous storytelling as well. Seemingly everyone wanted to tell their story and to hear everyone else’s.

Indeed, the exhibit was bringing out the very best in people, as if everyone suddenly wanted to get to know everyone else in a celebration of all that we share as well as the ways we differ. We all have a story to tell. And as we have learned so profoundly through the marriage equality movement, our personal stories have the power to open hearts and to create change.

hapa.me – 15 years of the hapa project is on view at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles until October 28, 2018 (http://www.janm.org/exhibits/hapa-me/).

For more information or to participate in the project, please visit: http://hapa.me

The Untold Story of the Robert Kennedy Funeral Train
April 5, 2018

It was 8 am on the morning of June 5, 1968. I was 9 years old and sat at the kitchen table in our house in Kansas City, eating my breakfast before going to school. When my dad returned home from taking my older brother to school, he told my mother and me the news that he had just heard on the car radio: Robert Kennedy had been shot in the wee hours of the morning after winning the California presidential primary the night before. We were shocked. At age 9, I was already a political geek, following the presidential primaries and convention delegate counts, like some children memorize train or airplane schedules.

A few days later—on the evening of Saturday, June 8—I remember my dad making me my favorite food, a homemade chocolate milkshake with chocolate ice cream. Together, our family then watched on television Kennedy’s graveside service and burial, next to his brother at Arlington National Cemetery. The service had been delayed for hours because so many people had come to pay respects to Kennedy’s funeral train as it made its way from New York City to Washington, D.C.

Sitting on the floor in my favorite bean bag chair, I remember holding the straw, but unable to sip my beloved milk shake because I was so moved by what I was watching. I held back tears.

Last week, Stuart and I viewed a small but stunning new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, called The Train: RFK’s Last Journey. The exhibition features photographs that a renowned photographer took from the train that bring to life the faces of the multitudes of people who came to view the funeral train on its trip. The exhibition also includes a new film reenactment of the view from the train, and actual film footage and photos that spectators took 50 years ago.

While listening to a recent radio program about the exhibition, I learned something I had not known: two spectators had been killed during the train’s trek to Washington.

I was taken aback. Two people lost their lives while paying their respects to the slain Kennedy. I didn’t know their names or their stories. And after they died, they had neither funeral trains where over a million people turned out to mourn their deaths, nor burials on national television. Yet their lives were just as important to them and their families as that of Robert Kennedy.

I wanted to know who they were, and it took a bit of online searching to find out. They were Antoinette Severini and John Curia, both in their mid-50s and apparently a couple. They, like thousands of others, had come to the Elizabeth, New Jersey, train station to catch a glimpse of the funeral train. The crowd was so large that it spilled onto the nearby tracks.

Unbeknownst to them, the regular train from Chicago to New York was heading north as the Kennedy train was making its way south. The northbound train blew its whistle, slowed and tried to stop, but it couldn’t do so in time. As onlookers rushed to get out of the way, Curia tried to pull Severini, who was holding her 3-yr-old grandchild in her arms, out of harm’s way. But as Severini hurled her grandchild to strangers on the platform, she and Curia were dragged to their deaths under the wheels of the train.

Secret Service Agent Paul Levine, who witnessed the accident from the Kennedy train, described “shrieks of horror over screeching steel” and “the indescribable smell of death.” Those shrieks and smells had filled the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just three days before.

When Robert Kennedy’s widow Ethel, herself pregnant at the time with the couple’s last child, learned the news, she reached out to the families of those injured or killed, sending a stuffed animal to Severino’s granddaughter while the young girl was recovering in the hospital.

A few weeks ago, Naomi Wadler, an 11-year-old African-American student, and her classmate Carter Anderson organized a walk-out from their elementary school to honor those shot and killed in Parkland, Florida—and to honor Courtlin Arrington, an African American girl who was shot and killed March 7 at her high school in Alabama. Wadler gave an unforgettable speech at the March for Our Lives on the mall in Washington in which she proclaimed:

“I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper, whose stories don’t lead on the evening news. I represent the African American women who are victims of gun violence, who are simply statistics instead of vibrant, beautiful girls full of potential … . I urge everyone here, and everyone who hears my voice, to join me in telling the stories that aren’t told.”

Robert Kennedy would be 92 today if he had not been shot to death by a .22 caliber revolver. Antoinette Severini and John Curia would not have been killed in the train crash had Kennedy not lost his life to an assassin’s bullet.

I remember becoming choked up 50 years ago, not by the “what ifs” of the political implications of Kennedy’s untimely death, but by the human tragedy of a family losing two sons to gun violence in less than 5 years. I believe Robert Kennedy would have embraced Naomi Wadler’s call to action. In the words of Bobby’s famous older brother, “the torch has been passed to a new generation”—or rather, Wadler and her fellow activists have grabbed the torch and will not let go until we all cross the finish line of ending the scourge of gun violence.

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way: Marching for Our Lives
March 22, 2018

When I learned about the upcoming “March for Our Lives” to end gun violence and shootings in schools, I reflected back on when gun violence first affected me in any type of personal way. What came to mind was an evening in 1966 when I was 8 years old. My grandmother and my great aunt, who was like a second grandmother to me, were visiting our family in suburban Kansas City where I grew up. When my great aunt was out of earshot, my grandmother told my family about a letter she had recently received from her nephew Jack, my great aunt’s son, who was like a brother to my dad. At the time, Jack was a colonel in the U.S. Army combat forces in Vietnam.

Jack’s letter described how his roommate had left their barracks to go eat dinner when a Viet Cong soldier had appeared out of nowhere, shot him dead, and then quickly disappeared into the night. My grandmother wanted to share with my dad how much danger Jack was in, and I’ll never forget her admonishing us: “Don’t you ever tell your great aunt because she will become overcome with worry.”

The war in Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia and Laos resulted in the deaths of millions of civilians and military combatants. March 16 marked the 50th anniversary of the infamous My Lai massacre in which members of the American military murdered as many as 504 unarmed civilians in a village in South Vietnam.

The American military initially misreported and covered up this mass murder. Eventually, General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in the war in Vietnam from 1964–1968, admitted that it was, in fact, “the conscious massacre of defenseless babies, children, mothers, and old men in a kind of diabolical slow-motion nightmare that went on for the better part of a day, with a cold-blooded break for lunch.”

At the court martial of Lieutenant William Calley, the only person convicted for the massacre and who served only 3 and a half years under house arrest, Private Dennis Conti testified to part of what he witnessed. Private Conti described an incident in which Calley and another private “fired directly into” a group of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, who had been rounded up and pushed into a rice paddy. “There were bursts and single shots for two minutes,” he said. “It was automatic. The people screamed and yelled and fell. I guess they tried to get up, too. They couldn’t … . Lots of heads was (sic) shot off, pieces of heads and pieces of flesh flew off the sides and arms … . [The other private] fired a little bit and broke down. He was crying. He said he couldn’t do [it] anymore.”

The bloodbath only ended because three American soldiers not only refused to participate in it, but also stood up to stop it. Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson and his two crew members, Glenn Andreotta and Lawrence Colburn, discovered the ongoing massacre as they were flying a helicopter reconnaissance mission in the area. Most dramatically, they landed the helicopter next to where American soldiers appeared ready to murder ten Vietnamese civilians, and Thompson ordered his crew to shoot any American soldiers who fired upon the civilians while Thompson and his crew rescued the civilians to safety.

Thompson and his crew reported the massacre multiple times to officers in higher command. He tried to save as many people as he could and evacuated as many of the injured as possible to medical care.

My cousin Jack survived the war and returned home, but he witnessed so much carnage in Vietnam that, for the rest of his life, he could not bear to witness any living being, including a small animal, suffering in physical pain. In the early 1980s, I worked with Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees from the war and listened to numerous survivors tell of the violent deaths of their loved ones at the hands of guns and other weapons.

Of course, gun violence has destroyed countless lives on American soil as well. Varnado Simpson, who admitted to murdering Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, including a 2-year-old child, returned home to Jackson, Mississippi, after the war. In 1977, Simpson’s own 10-year-old son was killed in random gun violence while he was playing outside of his house. Simpson recalled, “He died in my arms. And when I looked at him, his face was like the same face of the child that I had killed.” Simpson shot himself to death 20 years later after suffering for years with PTSD. In my most recent personal connection to gun violence, a neighbor who lives a block and a half from us in San Francisco was shot in front of his house in the middle of the afternoon three weeks ago in a drive-by shooting.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In 2014, a total of 33,599 Americans died in gun violence. In Japan, the total for the entire year was just six. In the U.S., there are an estimated 101 guns per 100 residents; in Japan, the number is 0.6.

Hugh Thompson and his crew were initially vilified for their efforts to stop the mass murder at My Lai 50 years ago. It took 30 years for the American military to give Thompson and his crew (one posthumously) appropriate credit for their leadership in stopping the killing. Thompson later counseled, “Don’t do the right thing looking for a reward, because it might not come.”

Today, high school students are on the forefront of a movement to end gun violence. Like Thompson, they are doing the right thing, not for a reward, but to save lives. We look forward to joining them at the March 24 “March for Our Lives” and beyond.

The Power of Being Extraordinarily Ordinary
March 8, 2018

On my first day of law school 35 years ago, each member of my small group section of twenty students was asked as part of an ice-breaker exercise to share something interesting about themselves. The first person to speak, a young man named Mark, replied in the most friendly, matter-of-fact, and unselfconscious manner: “I’m a gay rights advocate.”

Mark’s saying those words changed my life. I had not yet come to relate to my own sexuality in an authentic way, but I remember thinking to myself: “I want to get to know him.” I now realize that what I was really thinking was: “I want to get to know myself.”

Mark was the first gay person I met who articulated his experience openly. He offered himself to his classmates as a way to get to know a gay person as a peer in a welcoming way—something that was not that common 35 years ago.

We soon became close friends, as we remain to this day, and Mark was the first person to whom I came out. Mark’s quiet confidence and willingness to take a risk—indeed, the very ordinariness with which he presented himself and his activism—made all the difference to me.

Ironically, as I watched new gay superstars Adam Rippon and Gus Kenworthy take the world by storm at the Olympics, I found myself thinking about what Mark did 35 years ago. Amidst the wild media frenzy and their extraordinary athletic performances, and even Rippon’s oversized personality, what struck me most about Rippon and Kenworthy was how ordinary—and quintessentially fabulous—they were as gay men.

Rippon and Kenworthy seem like people I could imagine hanging out or sassing it up with at a bar or at a party. In addition to Kenworthy’s wonderful, televised kiss with his boyfriend at the end of his ski competition, Kenworthy and Rippon did not shy away from hugging each other and physically demonstrating their affection for each other as gay friends. They didn’t try to control their gestures, intonation, playful joking, or choice of words. In a Washington Post interview, Kenworthy responded to something Rippon had just said, “Aw, good, the Whitney’s on!” invoking gay icon Whitney Houston, assuming (and seemingly not caring) whether the non-gay component of the audience would get the joke.

I loved how Rippon quipped to reporters that he didn’t want to be just “America’s gay sweetheart,” but “America’s sweetheart,” pure and simple. Rippon’s performance on the ice was gender bending as well with his signature “layback spin,” the most recognizable image of women’s figure skating.

The first time I heard Rippon interviewed shortly before the Olympics, I remember saying to Stuart, “Wow—he’s the real thing.  He’s not trying to fake it or pretend at all.” On NBC’s Today show, Rippon explained, “I came here being authentically myself and sharing my story and being gay is part of that.”

But Rippon and Kenworthy didn’t just joke around in their interviews. They articulated the struggles they faced as a result of being gay. In particular, Kenworthy described how, four years ago at the Sochi Olympics, “I was very much in the closet and very much ashamed of who I was, and I actually didn’t get to appreciate the medal that I won because of that.”

Both men spoke of the pressure they felt to be at their very best when they came out, perhaps reflecting the enduring relevance of the “Best Little Boy in the World” hypothesis, which posits that some gay men compete to achieve extremely high external success in response to their lacking healthy internal self-worth because of societal homophobia.

Kenworthy told The Washington Post: “When I came out, I felt like I needed to be the best, because that was what I thought it would take to be accepted. No one can talk s— on you if you’re the No. 1 ranked in the world … so I made sure that the season before I came out, I was the No. 1-ranked guy in the world.” Rippon continued, “I actually feel exactly the same, where I made sure that when I came out, I was skating very well, so that I would be taken seriously.” Both men talked about the psychological pain, stress, and exhaustion of being in the closet and the power, joy, and ease they have felt now that they are out.

Perhaps most importantly, Rippon articulated on the Today show what I perceive both he and Kenworthy embody: “It’s important that if you are given the platform, to speak up for those who don’t have a voice.” As young, accomplished, attractive, charming, clever, and articulate white men, they have more of a voice than many others—and they appear to want to use it for everyone. Rippon was fearless when he told the Today show: “I feel that Mike Pence does not stand for anything I was taught when I grew up.”

Kenworthy, speaking of racial, gender, and all other types of diversity, told The Washington Post of his optimistic vision of an Olympics, twenty years from now, where “anyone can be exactly who they want to be … like a complete rainbow.” Rippon told reporters, “I want to inspire other young kids, no matter what their background is or where they’re from or anything like that.”

In coming out and unapologetically being themselves for their own well-being and the betterment of others, Rippon and Kenworthy are partaking of the LGBTIQ movement at its best. I was the beneficiary of such ordinary activism 35 years ago. I am confident that many others will be beneficiaries of Rippon and Kenwothy’s extraordinary ordinariness.

Time for “Me Too” in Women’s Healthcare
February 22, 2018

It’s Lunar New Year, and every year at this time our thoughts turn to our cousin Jackie, one of Stuart’s cousins on the Chinese side of the family. Jackie was a strong, independent woman and a maverick, given that she became a successful Chinese American female dentist decades ago, at a time when the profession had few women.

And Jackie was a matchmaker of sorts for us. Stuart was living in Jackie’s extra basement bedroom in her Diamond Heights home, when Stuart and I met 31 years ago. I met Jackie shortly after Stuart and I started dating, and the next time I saw Stuart he told me: “Jackie has decided she likes you.” After Stuart and I had been together for nine months, Jackie told Stuart he needed to move out of her spare bedroom because her elderly parents were coming for an extended visit. I always thought she had actually decided it was time for us to move in together.

Jackie was an amazing dentist and a great older sister too, inviting her younger brother to join her practice after he finished dental school. Our trips to the dentist were a family affair and an opportunity to share and catch up on family news, all while we got our teeth cleaned or cavities filled. One visit 24 years ago was particularly memorable because Jackie, her dad, Stuart and I had decided we should start an annual family Chinese New Year party with all the many relatives, where we savored the family’s traditional New Year recipes, passed on from generation to generation.

Jackie and I decided we would cook the dinner together. I’ll never forget how—with my mouth wide open in the dental chair and Jackie poking at my teeth and gums with her instruments—Jackie explained many elaborate New Year recipes with myriad ingredients, such as ginkgo nuts, wood-ear fungus, dried oysters, lotus root, and two types of fermented tofu. These were recipes that Stuart’s grandmother had passed on to Jackie’s mom, then to Jackie, and now to me. Our 24th annual family gathering will be this weekend.

But unfortunately Jackie will be there only in spirit. Several years ago, Jackie began having persistent digestive problems that responded to none of the treatments her physicians prescribed. Jackie’s physicians told her she had irritable bowel syndrome, explaining that she worried too much. Many months passed and Jackie’s symptoms continued to increase. As Jackie continued to urge her physicians to investigate her symptoms more fully, they finally discovered the truth. Jackie had late stage ovarian cancer that had metastasized to surrounding tissues. The cancerous tumors were putting pressure on her digestive system and causing the symptoms.

When I learned the news, I realized that Jackie was not the first of our women friends to have unexplained digestive symptoms that physicians dismissed and misdiagnosed, but in fact were serious ovarian medical problems. A middle-aged friend complained of digestive problems to her physicians for months, and as with Jackie, her physicians dismissed her concerns, telling her she fretted too much. Eventually, they discovered a non-malignant ovarian tumor “the size of a grapefruit” was causing the problems. Fortunately, after it was removed, she was fine.

The teenage daughter of another friend had severe abdominal pain with nausea, and when she went to the emergency room, physicians repeatedly asked her, among other things, if she were pregnant (which she was not). Much later, she finally got the correct diagnosis: one of her fallopian tubes was twisted, causing the severe pain and damaging an ovary.

In all three cases, physicians marginalized or dismissed the concerns of women, aged 14 to 70, who all ended up having serious ovarian-related medical problems. As an LGBTIQ person, I could empathize from my own personal experience, having had physicians not understanding or taking my health concerns seriously.

After Jackie got the diagnosis, she asked me to be her health care power of attorney, attend doctor appointments along with her brother, and be with her during the final stages of the disease. Jackie was a very strong person. Indeed, she took no pain medication during her disease (except after surgery) until the last hours of her life. She lived each day to the most. I learned a lot from her.

One time during the later stage of the disease, Jackie, who also held a degree in public health, lamented to me that ovarian cancer is not a subject of sufficient public education and does not get enough media exposure. This is because of the fact that too many women are diagnosed with the disease in its late stages and do not have the time and energy to organize and advocate for better awareness, treatment, and diagnosis.

We agree. Because of Jackie, whenever I meet physicians, I urge them to investigate ovarian issues when women patients report digestive or abdominal problems that evade easy diagnosis.

We can do much more, too. I recently heard a caller to a public radio show remark: “I was blown away by the power of women raising their voices together with ‘Me Too.’ Maybe we should keep calling out the patriarchy and say ‘Me Too’ to all of the other injustices we face as women. I would love to see a ‘Me Too’ movement about how women are mistreated by doctors.”

When I heard the remark, I immediately thought of Jackie and our other friends. In the words of the movement, “Time’s Up” for the medical profession marginalizing women’s health concerns and costing lives.

What Is the Sound of Two Hands Clapping?
February 8, 2018

Perhaps the most famous Zen koan (a seemingly nonsensical or paradoxical question that Zen students are instructed to contemplate) is the koan: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Zen students may spend countless hours turning the question back and forth in their minds, trying to find a logical explanation of how one hand could clap by itself. At some point, students may exhaust themselves trying to reason their way to an answer, and instead learn simply to “become” the koan, holding it and embodying it both in meditation and daily life.

The koan then points students to a more direct experience of life firsthand, unfiltered or distanced by personal conceptualization, abstractions, and judgments. In a famous old Zen story, a young student Toyo repeatedly tries to answer the koan to no avail by reporting to his teacher sounds he had heard during meditation. Finally, Toyo’s mind opens, and he reports, “I could collect no more” sounds, and then “I reached the soundless sound.” Toyo realized the answer to the koan through his direct experience.

A few weeks ago, Stuart’s step-mother Tish, his father’s second wife of many decades and mother of Stuart’s three half-siblings, passed away from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS after a four-year struggle with the affliction. This unforgiving disease rendered Tish—an outgoing, fun-loving, energetic, engaged, vibrant, and verbal person—severely limited in her ability to eat, breathe, move her body or utter sounds, much less speak. Throughout the disease, Tish maintained an indomitable spirit and ability to live with joy in the moment whenever possible. One of her favorite activities when she had energy was cranking her high-tech wheelchair to its fastest speed and racing her adult kids through the streets of the retirement community where she and Stuart’s dad lived.

I’ve played piano since I was a small child. For years, on weekend family visits before Tish became ill, I’d play piano for her in the living room while she and others chatted and prepared dinner in the kitchen. She loved hearing me play and looked forward to it whenever we visited.

After Tish became ill and she and Stuart’s dad moved to a retirement community, I brought my music with me when we visited, thinking it would be nice to play for her. Tish, however, had become very sensitive to sound, and each time I tried to play for her, she would gesture for me to stop. When we visited last fall, I almost didn’t even bother to bring the music with me, but at the last minute decided to do so, thinking I might have a chance to play if everyone were out of the house.

It was late on the last evening of our visit and time to say goodnight. As Stuart and I interacted with Tish seated in her wheelchair, she looked at me and suddenly gestured with her two hands as if she were playing the piano and a brightness and smile came over her face. We asked her if she’d like for me to play, and she nodded enthusiastically. Tish’s daughter, who was responsible that evening for the hours-long process of helping her mom get to bed, agreed to one song, and I dashed to get my music.

As I began to play, I began to hear joyful utterances coming from Tish, whose face was beaming with happiness. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw Tish moving her lower legs up and down, over and over to the music. Her black Labrador Zoe awoke from her slumber and lifted her head and began to bark playfully. And Tish did one of the few things that she could still do with her arms and hands. She started clapping. First to the beat of the music, and then as vigorously as possible after each song (we didn’t stop with just one). Everyone else joined in clapping, too.

We exchanged many hugs and kisses, and when I finally stopped playing, Zoe came up to me and licked my hands and arms without stopping for a long time. We all were alive, in the moment, without words—just music, hugs, kisses, barks, licks—and clapping. It was the last time we saw Tish alive.

As I went to bed that evening, my mind turned to the famous Zen koan, and I came up with a new one: What is the sound of two hands clapping? From subsequent researching I did, I learned that the full, proper translation of the famous koan is: “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?” And I wondered if the sound of one hand clapping and the sound of two hands clapping could actually be the same. Had we together that night touched the soundless sound that young Toyo heard centuries ago?

Major Advance for Marriage Equality and Gender Identity Rights in Latin America
January 25, 2018

Two weeks ago, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a path-breaking decision in favor of marriage equality and an individual’s right to self-determination of one’s gender identity under the law. LGBTIQ activists across the Americas were thrilled by the decision. Although the decision could ultimately bring full marriage equality to 19 additional countries throughout the Americas, if you were like us, you may have been a bit confused as to the decision’s exact meaning and impact and even as to what the Inter-American Court of Human Rights is.

In 1979, the Organization of American States (OAS), itself founded in 1948 to promote security and cooperation amongst the nations of the Americas, established the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to interpret and enforce the American Convention on Human Rights, which came into force in 1978. The Convention obliges all countries that ratified it to conform their domestic laws to its provisions, which guarantee essential human rights. The Court issues both adjudicatory decision and advisory opinions, in which signatory countries seek an interpretation as to how the Convention applies to particular legal issues in their countries. The Court has jurisdiction over the 23 Latin American and Caribbean countries that are currently active parties to the Convention. (Neither the United States nor Canada, for a variety of reasons, are parties to the Convention.)

In 2016, Costa Rica asked the Court for an advisory opinion as to how the Human Rights Convention applied to two issues: 1) determination of gender identity on government identification documents and 2) the economic rights of same-sex couples. And this month, the Court issued a sweeping opinion strongly in favor of LGBTIQ rights and freedom. The Court reiterated the Human Rights Convention’s protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and that debate about these issues within member countries did not permit the countries to perpetuate historical and structural discrimination against LGBTIQ people.

With respect to gender identity, the Court recognized that a person’s gender identity was an individual and internal experience that may not coincide with gender assigned at birth and that a person’s right to self-determination of their gender identity was essential to a person’s freedom and their right to give meaning to their existence. Respect for each person’s gender identity was critical to their access to health, education, employment, and housing and their ability to live free from violence, torture and other ill-treatment. Accordingly, the Court ruled that identity documents must reflect a person’s self-perceived gender identity, that governments could not require such things as surgery or medical certification of gender change as a prerequisite to changing documents, and that procedures for changing gender identity must be simple, confidential, and efficient.

The Court was equally unequivocal when it came to marriage equality. The Court recognized that same-sex couples may form a family bond just as heterosexual couples do, and that the Human Rights Convention did not prescribe any particular form of family. The Court opined that only the freedom to marry provided equality, and that lesser alternatives such as civil unions carried a stigma of inferiority, and thus were unlawful discrimination.

Addressing religious opposition to marriage equality, the Court articulated how—as the Convention proscribes—in democratic societies, religious and secular spheres must co-exist peacefully without one imposing itself on the other, and how religion cannot be used to perpetrate discrimination based on sexual orientation. Just as self-determination of a person’s gender identity is central to their humanity, the freedom of a person to choose with whom they form a marital bond is intrinsic to deeply intimate aspects of their life and to their essential human dignity. Far from devaluing the institution of marriage, providing equal rights and protections in marriage, regardless of sexual orientation, confers human dignity on people who had faced historic oppression and discrimination.

The Court made clear that the Convention binds all countries that are party to the Human Rights Convention to follow the Court’s decision both in their legislatures and courts. Four such countries (Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, and Uruguay) and parts of Mexico already have marriage equality. The decision is thus particularly critical to attaining full marriage equality throughout Mexico and in 18 other Latin American and Caribbean countries: Barbados, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Grenada, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Suriname.

However, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights does not have the same ability to order signatory countries to comply with an advisory opinion the same way that the United States Supreme Court and lower federal courts had the power to ensure compliance in all 50 states and U.S. territories with the Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage equality decision. Each member nation to the Human Rights Convention must still change its laws through its own legislatures or courts. Indeed, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in its opinion recognized that governments may encounter both institutional and political difficulties in changing laws and the process may take time, while recommending that countries issue temporary decrees to implement the opinion during the process of enacting permanent laws.

Embrace of the Court’s decision by leaders of two countries, Costa Rica (who brought the issue to the Court) and Panama, was swift, although as of press time, marriages of same-sex couples had not yet begun in those or any of the other additional signatory countries, and may require legislation or court decisions. Although the landmark decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights did not produce full marriage equality overnight in 19 countries, the decision stands as a compelling declaration of LGBTIQ rights, a testament to the extraordinary dedication and work of thousands of LGBTIQ people and human rights advocacy organizations, and a powerful tool for these activists to make marriage equality, transgender rights, and full LGBTIQ equality a reality throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Will Chile Be the First Nation to Win Marriage Equality in 2018?
January 11, 2018

As the new year begins, we look to Chile in hopes that the South American nation will become the first country to achieve marriage equality in 2018. If successful, Chile will join Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay and the territories of French Guiana and the Falkland Islands as the seventh country in South America with the freedom to marry.

It appears, however, that the national legislature must act quickly if marriage equality is to become the law in the most straightforward manner. Chile just held Presidential and national legislative elections in November and December. Former President Sebastián Piñera—who introduced Chile’s civil union bill in his prior term of office, but who opposes full marriage equality—defeated Alejandro Guillier, the pro-equality candidate whom outgoing President Michelle Bachelet, a marriage equality supporter, hoped would succeed her.

President-elect Piñera and the new legislature, a majority of whom support equality, will not take office until March 11, however, making it conceivable that the current legislature could pass and Bachelet could sign marriage equality legislation into law before she leaves office. The Bachelet administration is also pushing for immediate passage of gender identity legislation.

President Michelle Bachelet first announced her support for marriage equality in her successful 2013 campaign for president. In 2015, the nation adopted civil unions for same-sex couples. They provide many, but not all of, the rights and responsibilities of marriage. In 2016, the government agreed to drop its opposition to marriage equality and to introduce pro-equality legislation as part of an agreement pertaining to an ongoing lawsuit seeking marriage equality that LGBTIQ rights advocates had filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2012.

In August 2017, Bachelet finally introduced marriage equality legislation, saying: “We can’t let old prejudices be stronger than love. We do this with the certainty that it is not ethical or fair to put artificial limits on love, or to deny essential rights just because of the sex of those who make up a couple.” The legislation also provides equal adoption rights for same-sex couples. Public opinion polls have shown over 60 percent support for marriage equality. Legislative action on the measure began in November.  Over 100,000 people marched in Santiago in support of swift passage of marriage equality and transgender rights two days before the legislature began work on the bill.

According to the PanAm Post, President Bachelet’s spokeswoman Paula Narváez said that the administration would make marriage equality and gender identity legislation priorities in the remaining weeks before March 11. The Post quotes Narváez as saying, “In the case of marriage equality, we want to open a legislative body that will allow the debate to continue further” and “the Gender Identity bill is very urgent.”

If these bills do not become law before Bachelet leaves office, LGBTIQ supporters vow to continue pressure for passage when Piñera and the new legislature take office. Although The New York Times reports that President-elect Piñera promised in the campaign to prevent the marriage equality legislation from going forward in order to appeal to more conservative voters, pro-LGBTIQ equality legislators appear to hold majorities in the new legislature. In addition, LGBTIQ advocates argue that the new Chilean government would be obliged to abide by its prior international agreement to implement marriage equality legislation.

We—and the world—will keep our eyes on Chile. The time for full marriage and LGBTIQ equality is now.

Marriage Equality Triumphs Around the World
December 21, 2017

As we approach the end of the year, we are happy to report that 2017 brought major marriage equality victories in such diverse countries as Taiwan, Germany, Malta, Australia and Austria, with successes in the latter two nations coming just three weeks ago.  In these places, separated by thousands of miles and oceans, constitutional courts and national legislatures recognized a principle that transcends cultural differences and national boundaries: human respect and dignity mandate equality and freedom for LGBTIQ people.

Earlier this year, we reported extensively on the breakthroughs in Taiwan, Germany, and Malta. This week we focus on Australia and Austria. In our July column celebrating the German victory, we described how Chancellor Angela Merkel—under pressure from opposition parties—finally permitted a “free conscience” vote in Parliament after years of obstruction. We advised that “Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who claims to support marriage equality but is blocking a free conscience vote in the Australian Parliament despite clear public support for equality, would do well to follow Merkel’s example.” On December 7, Turnbull did exactly that, and the Australian Parliament passed full marriage equality legislation nearly unanimously with just four votes in opposition.

Turnbull for years had blocked such a vote because of internal political pressure from the most socially conservative members of his party. Still buckling under pressure, Turnbull this summer authorized putting marriage equality up to a popular vote through a non-binding national referendum to be held by mail in the fall. When the plebiscite showed over 60 percent of the public in favor, Turnbull quickly allowed the free conscience vote in Parliament. After the vote, Turnbull exclaimed, “What a day! What a day for love, for equality, for respect! Australia has done it! Today we’ve voted for love, for equality. It’s time for more marriages, more love, more respect. This belongs to us all. This is Australia.” He learned first-hand how much better it feels to be on the right side of history than on the wrong side.

The Australian referendum, however, eerily echoed some of the most disturbing elements of the 2008 Proposition 8 campaign in California—for one, having millions of people you don’t know vote on whether or not you should have your basic civil rights.  Out lesbian Senator Penny Wong told TheNew York Times: “It is a hard thing to have others judge whether you deserve to be equal. And it is an even harder thing to have your family and your children besmirched by those who want to perpetuate discrimination.” We in California know exactly what she’s talking about. Indeed, Australian equality opponents employed anti-LGBTIQ smears reminiscent of those of the “Yes on 8” campaign. “Our very identity [was] the subject of public scrutiny and public debate,” said Wong in her floor speech.

The Parliamentary victory gave LGBTIQ people the opportunity to experience the same sense of dignity and respect that the U.S. Supreme Court recognized as crucial in Obergefell.  The U.S. Supreme Court observed that denying LGBTIQ people the full freedom to marry “disparage[s] their choices and diminish[es] their personhood” and held that the Constitution guarantees us “equal dignity in the eyes of the law.” A 22-year-old Australian gay man who witnessed the Parliamentary vote live described to The New York Times how the victory “alleviated a life of shame and embarrassment of who I am” and “validated everyone’s love here and around Australia.”

In fact, during his floor speech, gay Parliament member Tim Wilson proposed to his longtime partner Ryan Bolger, who did not hesitate in responding “yes” from the public gallery. On the day of the victory, Wilson said that the vote sent “a strong message to every kid that is questioning their sexual orientation or gender identity that you do not need to be afraid.”

In our July column celebrating the German victory, we also wrote about how activists in neighboring Austria hoped that momentum from the victory would bring equality there. Just three days before the Australian Parliamentary victory, the Austrian Constitutional Court ruled that Austria’s current relegation of same-sex couples to unequal “registered partnerships” instead of marriage violated the nation’s constitution. Marriage equality will become the law on January 1, 2019, unless the legislature repeals the current exclusion earlier.

The Court held that the differential treatment “violates the (Austrian constitution’s) principle of equal treatment, which forbids any discrimination of individuals on grounds of personal characteristics, such as their sexual orientation.” The lawyer for the lesbian couple who brought the lawsuit noted that ruling made Austria the first European country to establish marriage equality through a court recognizing it as a “fundamental human right,” rather than through the political process. The Austrian Court seemed particularly concerned about the discriminatory message that the separate laws for same-sex and different-sex couples sent and the ongoing risk of discrimination that LGBTIQ Austrians face.

Not everywhere in the world saw marriage equality advances this year. The British territory of Bermuda may suffer a legal setback for marriage equality soon, and as we have discussed in previous columns, LGBTIQ people fear for their lives and physical safety in many places around the world. Our hope is that this year’s marriage equality victories will further the cause of LGBTIQ equality in all of its aspects, and that next December, we will report on more victories for dignity and equality around the world.

International Activist Hiker Chiu Helps to Lead the Way on Intersex Social Justice
December 7, 2017

When Taiwanese and international intersex activist Hiker Chiu as a teenager saw their childhood medical records for the first time, one question kept resounding in their mind: “Am I a monster?” It was Chiu’s reaction to reading the Chinese dictionary translation of the word “hermaphrodite” as “a female and male in the same body.” Chiu saw no hope for the future, and thought there must be no “other people like me in the world.” Chiu had an even more terrifying thought: “You are a person that nobody loves” because “you’re like a monster.”

But life had something different in store for Chiu. Chiu embarked on a years-long journey that brought them out of despair to become the first Taiwanese intersex person to “come out publicly and intentionally” and as an international LGBTIQ activist.  We had the great fortune to meet and interview Chiu at this year’s Taipei Pride celebration.

Chiu was raised as a girl, but as an adolescent felt as if something “kind of weird” was going on when they didn’t develop breasts or have a period and, in fact, grew “some moustache” and a male Adam’s apple. Not menstruating was particularly difficult because of Chinese cultural pressures on women to marry and have children, and Chiu again wondered, “If a woman cannot have children, could she be loved by someone else?”

As a young person, Chiu vowed simply to give up on love for self-protection, but something unexpected happened. “Cupid targeted me, and, yes, I was caught! If you intend not to believe in love, it doesn’t mean that love wouldn’t come to you.” Chiu fell in love with a young woman, and felt “all kinds of excitement.”

Chiu became part of the gay and lesbian community and initially found welcome and acceptance. But after a ten-year relationship, Chiu’s lesbian partner said she wanted to break up because, as she put it, “You are too much like a man.” Chiu felt “kicked out by the lesbian community” and asked if “I’m too much like a man” then “what can I do?”

Chiu might have wanted to become part of the gay male community, but horrific surgery performed on Chiu at age six—and without consent—foreclosed that possibility. “I was born with … ambiguous genitals,” Chiu said. “But I was a healthy baby. But people, doctors, think you have to be ‘either or.’ If you are a girl, you cannot have such a large clitoris, which looks like a penis.  No. So, they removed it without my consent.”

After the relationship breakup, Chiu felt isolated and alone. But in 2008, a friend told Chiu “there’s a word—intersex—that describes your situation.” Chiu saw the Argentinean movie XXY, which is about an intersex teenager. Chiu’s reaction was: “Oh my god, there’s someone else like me!”

Chiu then discovered Organization Intersex International (OII) online, and was shocked to learn that there was “not just one person like me; there are so many!” OII was very “empowering” for Chiu. They conversed with other intersex people through the organization and thought, “Maybe I am one of them. This is my community.”

Chiu “really wanted to communicate with other intersex people who speak Chinese,” and founded OII-Chinese, and translated the website into Chinese. They still had not met any other intersex people in person, however, and knew of no such person in Taiwan.

They decided to remedy that by traveling to San Francisco and other parts of the United States to meet intersex activists, including local activist David Cameron Strachan. The face-to-face meetings were transformative. “It was very powerful,” Chiu said. “Very powerful.” Chiu found them to be “all excellent people.” Perhaps most importantly, Chiu experienced their love. “I got so many hugs from them.”

The American activists taught Chiu that “you have to share your story to reach out,” both to enable other intersex people struggling with their identity to find community and to educate medical professionals about intersex people. Chiu returned home and decided to come out as intersex at the Taipei Pride parade as a way “to show my gratitude to those intersex activists in the U.S. who teach me and hug me and help me. I wanted to share their love.”

Chiu now feels they belong, not just to the intersex community, but also to the lesbian, gay, and “maybe” heterosexual, and other communities as well. Indeed, Chiu said, “Now I find my community in the world.” Chiu often gives talks and is co-chair of ILGA–Asia (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association). As one of the early Asian intersex people to come out, Chiu is “working on reaching out to people in Asia to make the voice in Asia heard.” When the ILGA-Asia regional conference was held in Taipei in 2015, Chiu “gathered for the first time in history six or seven intersex activists from Asia and we came out publicly in the Taipei Pride parade.” This December, Chiu will continue this work at the ILGA-Asia conference in Cambodia.

Reflecting back on adolescence, Chiu said, “I think my body insisted to be a naturally intersex person.” This describes who Chiu is. As we listened to Chiu’s story, we identified with much of it, even though we are not intersex. Meeting LGBTIQ people who confront formidable challenges and then use their lives to make the world better for others never fails to inspire us and give us joy.

Chiu’s story in a testament to the power of resilience, persistence, love, connection, international organizing, books, movies, the internet, cross-cultural understanding, empathy, gratitude, benevolence, and hugs. We feel lucky to have shared hugs and much more with Chiu, and in gratitude we share their story and love.

A Look at LGBTQ Life in Taiwan
November 30, 2017

Taipei Pride

It seems only fitting that San Francisco and Taipei, sister cities since the year of Stonewall, 1969, host the largest LGBTQ Pride marches and celebrations in North America and Asia. This year’s Taipei Pride was “the largest LGBTQ gathering of any kind ever in Asia,” explained Simon Tai, head of the organizing group.

In the last issue, we reported on the community’s efforts to make the Taiwan constitutional court’s promise of marriage equality a reality now. Today we report on Taipei Pride itself, and other wonderful aspects of Taiwan’s distinctive queer community.

Taipei Pride is a place where Taiwanese and other LGBTQ Asians can come together and be surrounded by love, support, and community. The joy is palpable—as is the community’s commitment to attaining full legal equality and social acceptance in Taiwan as well as in other Asian nations.

We personally met participants not just from Taiwan, but also from mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Thailand, and Myanmar (Burma). Just before the march was to begin, a huge LGBTQ flag made its way through the crowd like a rainbow dragon.

Taipei Pride is very down-to-earth and community-based. It is entirely volunteer run with over 500 volunteers taking part, according to head organizer Tai. We were struck how nearly everyone participated in the march rather than standing on the sidelines just to watch. While some organizations had floats or trucks, most of the 160 groups simply marched together as contingents on foot. Anyone could join in and hold a sign with whatever message they chose.

In addition to the push for full marriage equality, defending and expanding LGBTQ education is public schools was a major theme of Pride. In 2004, Taiwan enacted the groundbreaking national Gender Equity Education Act, mandating gender education in public schools from early ages through high school. Activists credit such education, which has included LGBTQ curriculum, as a significant factor in broadening public acceptance of queer people. They seek expansion of LGBTQ education under the act, whose implementation they view as having been too slow and too variable by region.

After losing the marriage equality court decision, however, anti-LGBTQ forces—particularly several conservative political Christian groups—are attempting to remove LGBTQ education from schools, thereby preventing students from learning about the true diversity of Taiwan’s population.

By contrast, Taipei Pride illuminated the beauty of our community’s diversity. LGBTQ Christians, people living with HIV, transgender people and many others proudly and exuberantly made their presence known to the broader society through the 75 media outlets present. They also felt the embrace and acceptance of the community. The Tongzhi Hotline, a prominent LGBTQ service and advocacy organization, distributed thousands of cards and stickers reading “HIV+ OK” as they have done at many other events.

Also experiencing embrace and acceptance were LGBTQ people from other parts of Asia who came to Taipei Pride to be completely openly queer because it may not be safe to do so in their home countries—be they Pakistan, Singapore or mainland China. Two months ago, we visited Destination Bar and community center in Beijing, China, where Pride marches and rallies are banned and living as an openly gay person can be very difficult.

Soon after we arrived at Taipei Pride, we were amazed and delighted to see that perhaps the biggest float in the entire parade was that of Destination Bar—topped with muscular gay dancers from Beijing, strutting their stuff to the great pleasure of the crowd—something they clearly could not do in a parade at home. It was a powerful image of oppression and freedom, frustration and hope, repression and joy.

Indeed, Taipei Pride is becoming a place for Asian LGBTQ activists and leaders from diverse parts of the continent to come together to meet, share ideas and experiences, strategize, and gain support and inspiration from each other that they take back to their own countries. Some aspects of Asian cultures—such as social conformity and the importance of family responsibility—overlap, while other elements diverge. Activists in some Asian countries face enormous barriers to building LGBTQ communities and making gains for LGBTQ legal rights, and it is easy for them to feel isolated. Coming together in Taipei with international activists enables everyone to feel connected and part of a worldwide LGBTQ movement and community.

Taiwan International Queer Film Festival

In the days leading up to Pride, the Taiwan International Queer Film Festival showcased an impressive lineup of queer films from across Asia and around the world. With the theme of “Queer and Camp,” this year’s 4th annual festival made good on its promise to provide audiences the opportunity to “unapologetically let their inner self shine through.”

The festival is also becoming a meeting place for international filmmakers and artists, just as Taipei Pride is for activists and the community at large. This year, the Asian Pacific Queer Film Festival Alliance, a consortium of 25 LGBT oriented film festivals in the region, held its first in-person meeting at the Festival, called the Asian-Pacific Film and Culture Forum.

Jay Lin and other founders of the Taipei queer film festival are bringing the best of the festival and much more to the world through their new platform: GagaOOLala (https://www.gagaoolala.com/en/home), which they have termed a “Gay Netflix” for Asia, if not the world. GagaOOlala boasts the largest collection of LGBTQ film in Asia, and features movies, short films, documentaries, series and original content.

Spectrosynthesis: A Groundbreaking LGBTQ Art Exhibition

In addition to queer film, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, this fall hosted the first-ever major LGBTQ-themed exhibition at a government museum in Asia. The path-breaking show featured artists from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore, as well as other places.

Patrick Sun, Executive Director of the Hong Kong-based Sunpride Foundation, co-host of the exhibition, expressed his pride at being “part of this beautiful, beautiful country” in which people are “very warm and accepting.” He said the museum was “totally behind” the exhibition from the beginning, and that the museum and the government gave them a “free hand” with “no censorship.”

We loved many pieces in the exhibition, and Sun explained that a “recurring” theme of the show is “acceptance and tolerance.” “The essence of what we are trying to say” is that “if we take apart all the external features … maybe we can have a better look at the essence of oneself. Who are we? And for me the message is that if we are not that different inside, why is there discrimination?”

“One of the most touching moments” for Sun happened when he was at the exhibition one day and he “saw a mother bringing her son who was 5 or 6 years old. And the mother was explaining to her son that in this world there’s man loving woman, woman loving woman, woman loving man, and man loving man. That’s just a fact of life. And the son just looked up and said, ‘Yes,’ and nodded. That to me makes it all worthwhile.”

The Only LGBTQ Taoist Temple in the World

With respect to queer spiritual and cultural life, Taiwan is also distinctive. Over two-thirds of Taiwan’s population identifies as Taoist or Buddhist, and Taiwan boasts as far as we know the only Taoist temple in the world specially dedicated to serving the LGBTQ community. According to founder Taoist Master Lu Wei-ming, thousands of LGBTQ people have come to the temple since its creation in 2006.

The temple, called Wei Ming Tong (Hall of Martial Brilliance), is dedicated to the centuries-old Taoist God Tu‘er Shen (Rabbit God), who originally oversaw gay “love and relationships,” but now protects LGBTQ people in all aspects of their lives. According to an account from the early Qing dynasty, a man named Hu Tianbao fell in love with an attractive male inspector and was caught peering at the inspector through a bathroom wall. Hu confessed his same-sex love and attraction to authorities, who then executed him by beating him to death. Thereafter, Hu became the God Tu’er Shen to compensate for the injustice of being killed for being gay. Master Lu explained that Tu’er Shen suffered because of who he was and whom he loved, and thus can empathize with challenges LGBTQ people face today.

Master Lu also described how queer people have been a part of Chinese history and culture, and how being LGBTQ is a natural part of Taoism. According to Master Lu, “in ancient China, the culture didn’t see gay people as much different from others. They were looked at equally as normal people.” Indeed, texts report instances of young male couples marrying and being recognized by each other’s families in the Ming and early Qing dynasties in Fujian Province of China, where many early Chinese Taiwanese came from.

As Master Lu explained, Yin and Yang—how seemingly opposite aspects of life are actually deeply interconnected to form a whole—is central to Taoism. In the famous circular symbol, a dot of Yin appears in Yang, and a dot of Yang is represented in Yin. In Master Lu’s words, nothing “exists alone,” and LGBTQ people “are natural in the world,” represented by the circle. “Woman is normal inside man, and man is normal inside woman.” In Chinese temples, Guan Yin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, is depicted as both male and female and neither male nor female—free of the constraints of gender—able to offer compassion for all.

Patrick Sun echoed these ideas in his vision of Spectrosynthesis: “In all of us, it’s not like black and white, binary gender. There’s a woman living in [a man, and] a man living in [a woman]. We have a masculine side and a feminine side, and probably many, many more sides that we have not explored yet.”

Coming Out in Taiwan

Taiwan is one of the safest countries in the world as far as street crime. Although anti-LGBTQ violence exists, we were struck by how comfortable some young people seemed to be expressing their sexuality. During our visit, we noticed young Taiwanese gay couples and trans people simply being themselves openly at such ordinary places as the subway station and Taiwan’s famous night food markets. Many people told us they did not have to hide amongst their friends and community.

This represents change. Arthur Chang, a long-time volunteer at the Tongzhi Hotline, told us that originally most callers were LGBTQ people in distress about their sexuality. Parents also called upset when their child had come out to them. Now, Chang says many callers are LGBTQ people wanting to talk about romantic or relationship problems.

Coming out is not easy for all, however, and perhaps especially for older adults. Chang told us of an annual weekend bus tour for older gay men that has enabled many closeted gay men who are married to women to have a few days to be who they really are. Despite the fact that employment discrimination is prohibited nationwide, coming out on the job can be risky. Although Chang noted significant changes in hotline calls, many activists told us that when it came to coming out to parents, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was the unspoken rule.

One person who is responsible for change and who passionately wants more children to come out to their parents and be accepted is the extraordinary woman known as Guo Mama, head of Loving Parents of LGBT, Taiwan. Guo Mama herself sets a powerful example for other parents of LGBTQ people. When she suspected that her own daughter was queer, she encouraged her to come out, and her daughter did as a lesbian. But Guo Mama thought that something else was going on and encouraged her daughter to consider whether she was transgender. Guo Mama’s daughter soon thereafter came out as her son. Her child’s grandparents were so supportive that they insisted that the genealogy engraved on their family gravestone be changed to identify that that they had a grandson and not a granddaughter.

Guo Mama told us that she has personally helped over 500 parents to accept their children’s coming out to them over the last 13 years, and she has devised practical steps for LGBTQ people and their parents in the coming out process. Her underlying message to parents of young people struggling with their sexuality and coming out: “Your child needs your help now more than ever.” Her message to LGBTQ Taiwanese about parents: “We don’t throw our kids away.” Through her work, she has found that parents are willing to do things for their children “beyond their children’s imagination.” Guo Mama’s dream is to bring families closer together and to remove the stress of “living double lives” and “telling lies.”

Final Evening at Taipei’s Natural Hot Springs

As we reflected on our experience of LGBTQ life in Taiwan, our last evening in Taipei seemed almost metaphorical. The city of Taipei boasts marvelous natural sulfur hot spring spas along the banks of a steaming river in the hills on the outskirts of town. On a Saturday evening, we went with friends to visit Emperor Hot Springs, a venue very popular with gay men.

The spa is gender segregated, and we soaked in the soothing waters with over two hundred others. The atmosphere was relaxed and casual with many folks hanging out and chatting with friends, while others soaked silently. In one pool, you could lie down with your head resting on a piece of wood made soft by the warm mineral waters. We felt as if we could float there forever.

Afterwards, bathers dress and join each other—gay and straight together, straight families with small children and groups of friends—to savor pots of warm rice soup and other delicious Taiwanese food. It doesn’t get much better than this.

Actually, it does get better, and it will—when the Constitutional Court’s promise of marriage equality and the dignity that comes with it become a reality—and as progress toward full LGBTQ equality and inclusion continues. Taiwan’s amazing LGBTQ community, with its inspiring activists, leaders and allies, is doing everything it can to make that dream come true. We hope to be planning a return visit soon.

Taiwan Activists Say Now Is the Time to Fulfill the Promise of Marriage Equality
November 9, 2017

This past October, we were thrilled to attend Taipei Pride, the largest annual gathering of LGBTQ people in Asia. We also then witnessed the extraordinary synergy taking place between the political, social, and cultural elements of the Taiwanese LGBTQ community.

This year’s Pride in Taipei was by far the biggest ever with over 123,000 attendees. Excitement and anticipation were sky high with May’s historic Constitutional Court victory promising marriage equality within two years and also granting broad constitutional protections for gay people that are even stronger than we have in the U.S. We loved Taiwan, and it was a great place to visit as an LGBTQ traveler. We’ll share our experiences and report on the status of the LGBTQ movement in Taiwan in this and upcoming issues.

Community leaders at Pride rallied the crowds with inspiring messages about the importance of making the Court’s promise of full marriage equality a reality now. The Constitutional Court gave the government two years to implement its decision and “discretion” as to “the formality” of how they do it. If the national legislature fails to act in two years, same-sex couples will be able to marry then under current procedures. So far, the legislature has not acted.

Activists are concerned that the legislature might duck the issue over the next 18 months, or pass a bill that deprives married same-sex couples of important rights such as adopting children, access to fertility clinics and other equal treatment with respect to parental rights, and equal access to immigration. Anti-equality political groups have been lobbying against full equality in implementing the Court’s decision.

“Don’t be so happy yet,” cautioned Jennifer Lu of the Tongzhi Hotline, a leading LGBTQ organization and one of the leaders of the Taiwan Marriage Equality Coalition, as she and other activists inspired marchers to urge legislators to finish the job by passing a full marriage equality bill as mandated by the Court decision by the end of the year.

In a Facebook message to attendees of Taipei Pride, President Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s first female president and a marriage and LGBTQ equality supporter, affirmed that the Constitutional Court’s ruling “is binding on all,” but did not address specifics, and noted that “we also have a responsibility to ensure social cohesion.” From the stage at Pride, Lu responded that she supported social cohesion, but made clear that there could be no unity when one group of people, namely LGBTQ people, continues to face discrimination under the law.

Among the crowd at Pride was Jay Lin, a Marriage Equality Coalition member; he and his partner are proud parents of two small children and want to get married. Lin’s wish for his family is simple, yet profound: “I hope that we will be able to get married with our boys as the flower boys. The wedding doesn’t need to be big or fancy, but it is significant for us to be able to show our commitment to each other, to our families, and to society at large.” We met many LGBTQ people who, even if they didn’t want to get married now, spoke of how important marriage equality was to their sense of dignity as LGBTQ Taiwanese.

Advocates are passionate in their quest to make Taiwan’s dream of full equality come true.

The night before Pride, we had the opportunity to meet legendary LGBTQ activist Chi Chia-wei, whom some call the “Harvey Milk” of the Taiwan LGBTQ movement. Chia-wei has been fighting for LGBTQ and marriage equality for over 30 years, and was a party to last May’s landmark lawsuit. Through a translator, Chia-wei told us that marriage is the only “true equality” and that no country has gone backwards from marriage equality to something less.

His attorney in the case, Victoria Hsu, co-founder of Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights and herself an icon of the Taiwanese LGBTQ rights movement, explained: “The government has the constitutional duty to fulfill the Constitutional Court’s ruling … . The government should pass a full, comprehensive bill.” Hsu vowed to go to court on behalf of deprived LGBTQ families to enforce the Court’s decision if the government did anything less. She emphasized that “waiting two years is simply too long. A lot of LGBT couples can’t wait that long,” referring to couples who “are suffering because of illness and accident.” Some members of couples have already passed away while they wait. “It is the government’s responsibility to repair this human rights violation as soon as possible,” said Hsu.

Some may ask: Why Taiwan? Why does Taiwan have some of the most progressive laws on LGBTQ rights in the world? For example, same-sex relations have never been illegal there, nationwide laws prohibit discrimination in employment and public accommodations, and LGB people have been able to serve in the military since 2002.

Jason Tsao of the Tongzhi Hotline and the Marriage Equality Coalition points to the fact that in the twenty years since the end of martial law in Taiwan, “people have learned to express their expectation for changes through elections.” This political engagement has enabled “the vigorous development of civil society and the political participation of the young generation.”  Community mobilization through public rallies and other events garners media attention. Tsao also pointed to the path-breaking 2004 national Gender Equity Education Act, which he says has enabled more young people to understand LGBTQ and gender issues, but is unfortunately under attack now from anti-LGBTQ political forces.

Taiwan appears to be a country in which democracy is growing and strengthening. The vibrant, engaged and ever-growing LGBTQ movement is truly inspiring. If as LGBTQ activists seek, the government enacts full marriage equality now and does not retreat on LGBTQ education in schools—Taiwan will unquestionably be a leader of the LGBTQ movement not just in Asia, but also in the world.

Justice and Desserts
October 26, 2017

Cousin Lisa and her fiancé Mike’s engagement party last month was a delightful affair. We’ve known Lisa since the day she was adopted 30 years ago, and she and Mike make a great couple. One of the joys of our participation in the marriage equality movement is that we now perform weddings for other couples. When Lisa and Mike slipped us a handwritten note at the party asking, “Will you and the love of your life help me marry mine?” we, of course, replied with an enthusiastic, “Yes!” And we marveled at the “save the date” cookies Lisa and Mike bought at a local bakery that were topped with an icing calendar showing their upcoming wedding day in July 2018.

As we admired the cookies, however, we found that our thoughts soon turned to another couple, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, who were engaged a few years ago and had gone to a bakery in suburban Denver, Colorado, with Charlie’s mom to order a wedding cake for their upcoming nuptials. The bakery told Charlie and David point blank that it would not bake them a wedding cake because they were gay. As reported in The Denver Post, the bakery owner simply told Charlie and David simply: “Sorry guys, I don’t make cakes for same-sex weddings.” They did not even discuss the design of the cake, and according to the bakery owner, the entire “conversation was just about 20 seconds long.”

Charlie and David were stunned. Colorado law prohibits businesses from discriminating against customers on the basis of disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry. The bakery’s denying Charlie and David service because of their sexual orientation was a clear violation of the law. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission and the Colorado Court of Appeals agreed, and the Colorado Supreme Court saw no need to review the case. But earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court took the case to decide whether the bakery could claim rights to freedom of speech and religion that could permit it to ignore the state’s anti-discrimination law when it comes to LGBT couples like Charlie and David. The Court will hear oral argument in the case on December 5, 2017, and will likely rule by the end of June 2018.

It then occurred to us that if the Supreme Court permits the Colorado bakery to discriminate, the local bakery that baked Lisa and Mike’s engagement cookies could conceivably refuse to provide services to us and other LGBT couples it if were our engagement party. We soon realized the bakery might also be able to refuse to make the same cookies or a wedding cake for Lisa and Mike themselves. Lisa is a person of color, and a bakery that wanted to discriminate against her on that basis could assert that the laws prohibiting race discrimination did not apply to them because of freedom of religion or speech. And further, Lisa was born overseas and adopted when she was a few weeks old, so the bakery could try to ignore the laws prohibiting national origin and ancestry discrimination.

It doesn’t stop there. Lisa and Mike are an interracial couple, and the bakery could try to deny them service on that ground as well. After all, if a business owner’s personal religious beliefs allow the business to ignore anti-discrimination laws, still more injustice is possible. Consider that the trial court judge in the U.S. Supreme Court case that struck down laws banning interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia, stated:  “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents … . The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

If the Supreme Court rules against LGBT people like Charlie and David, the decision could have implications for many businesses, and not just bakeries. The Denver Post reports that the bakery owner has often been asked, “What would Jesus do?” His response, “Well, you know, in my opinion—Jesus was a carpenter. I don’t think he would have made a bed for their wedding … .”

Putting aside the fact that the emphasis of Jesus’ teachings is love and that he never addressed homosexuality, much less marriage for LGBT people, the bakery owner’s answer illuminates how sweeping a negative decision from the U.S. Supreme Court could be. It could open the door not only for businesses to refuse to sell beds or, for that matter, anything else to LGBT couples, but also for restaurants to turn away LGBT diners. Myriad other businesses could refuse to serve LGBT people, and all based on claims that doing so violated the owners’ religious beliefs.

The marriage equality movement is about our common humanity, our common need for dignity and respect, and our common inclination to love. Discrimination demeans and stigmatizes those people who are its objects. But it ultimately harms those who practice it, too, because it deprives them and those around them of the opportunity to understand and appreciate diversity and to recognize our common humanity.

An unusually large number of high profile mass tragedies have taken place in our county over the last few months. Amidst the human suffering, stories emerge of people instinctively and spontaneously helping strangers—from rescuing them from flood waters to covering their bodies to protect them from bullets to helping them escape approaching flames—and all before their minds had a chance to categorize the stranger and to evaluate whether or not they wanted to help them.

Our laws against discrimination are a vehicle for people to act everyday with those highest intentions—for jobs, housing, and businesses to be open to everyone, regardless of who they are or whom they love. We look to the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2018 to affirm our laws against discrimination—just in time to celebrate at Lisa and Mike’s wedding.

LGBT Life in China:  Obstacles and Inspiration
October 5, 2017

We realized that things would be a bit different on our recent trip to China to talk about love, marriage, and LGBT equality when organizers of our first event told us that they would not be publicizing it on the internet for fear the government would shut it down.  Yet people came, and we talked honestly and openly about our lives and our hopes for the future – and the importance of our dignity as LGBT people.  Homosexuality was first documented in China over 2,600 years ago; yet today coming out is very difficult, and homosexuality is something that many Chinese do not know or talk about.  An extraordinary group of LGBT activists is working to change all of that and improving the lives of Chinese LGBT people in critical ways.

China decriminalized homosexuality 20 years ago, and in 2001 the country removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. There are gay bars and LGBT community organizations in larger cities, and Shanghai Pride held its 9^th annual celebration this year.  Victims of conversion therapy have won two recent lawsuits against the institutions that inflicted it upon them.  Last year, a gay couple brought an unsuccessful marriage equality lawsuit that garnered significant publicity.  The sixth annual AIDS Walk Great Wall (the only AIDS walk you can see from outer space) took place this fall.

However, China is currently undergoing a period of extensive repression in which those is power are attempting to exert more control over people’s lives and the internal workings of the government.  One activist even termed it a “second Cultural Revolution,” referring to the period from the 1966-1976 led by Mao Zedong in which millions of people were persecuted for failing to conform to party ideology.

A number of activists explained to us that the crackdown is not aimed particularly at LGBT people – it’s a broader effort to exert social and political control – but it’s hurting the LGBT community, especially given the current importance of public education, outreach, and building community.  The government in the past year has forbidden depictions of homosexuality among many other things in television, films, and online broadcast media.  New regulations severely hamper the work of foreign NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in China, including those who support local LGBT organizations.  Government security has interfered with public LGBT events.  One activist told us that they had to “play Tai Chi” with the government, referring to the centuries-old Chinese art of movement that involves sensing what’s going on around you and knowing how and when to assert and when to yield.

The Tai Chi metaphor may apply more generally to LGBT life in China given how queer people articulated to us the particular challenges with respect to family expectations and social conformity they had to negotiate.  Many people in telling their personal stories illuminated how difficult it was to come out because of the society’s lack of familiarity with what it means to be LGBT, limited means of getting information, and strong cultural and familial pressures to marry a person of the opposite sex and have children.  After all, as America in the 1960s and 70s was undergoing the sexual revolution and the Stonewall riots marked the symbolic beginning of the modern American LGBT movement, the repressive Cultural Revolution was taking place in China, and Chinese people have not had fully open access to media and information in the years since.

One person put it starkly, saying that he believed the majority of Chinese people simply fulfill expected roles in their lives – father, mother, son, daughter – and lacked the ability to exercise agency over their lives.  In one discussion group, a gay man who had once found love with a high school classmate until his parents cut off the relationship, seemed saddened and resigned as he talked about possibly giving up on coming out and instead entering into a heterosexual marriage to please his parents.  Many in the group seemed to understand exactly why he would do that. Coming out to parents seemed particularly formidable even for some leaders of LGBT organizations, and more than one person told us that if they came out to their parents, their parents might have a heart attack and die.  In this environment, coming out in the workplace in the face of possible stigma and discrimination can be very challenging as well.

One leader likened internalized homophobia to the severe air pollution for which many big Chinese cities are infamous. He exhorted the group:  “We must cleanse ourselves of the pollution of homophobia, just as we need to clean the air we breathe.” The facilitator of that meeting asked us to lead a simple call and response, repeating:  “It’s great to be gay.  It’s great to be just the way you are.”  The amazing Beijing LGBT Center and other organizations are working tirelessly to train counselors, therapists, and other health care professionals so that they can help LGBT clients rather than shun them.

Yet other LGBT people told very different stories, and people’s lives seemed to differ widely based on where they lived, their education and employment, and their access to international travel and media.  A middle-aged gay man who had been married to a lesbian for years to please their parents told us he had finally come out to his sibling and moved in together with his boyfriend.  Others described family coming out experiences that sounded very similar to successful American coming out stories.  Another man and his partner were anticipating the birth of their first child through a surrogate in America and would soon be traveling to the States to marry when the child was born, although China would not recognize the marriage.  His parents were looking forward to having a grandchild, and he seemed unconcerned about what his neighbors might think.  In fact, we met the founder of a Chinese business that arranges for couples, both gay and straight, to have children through surrogates living outside the country.

We also met with members of PFLAG China, a vibrant nationwide organization with active groups in big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu, as well as in more remote areas of the country.  Earlier this year, hundreds of LGBT people and their parents took part in the 10^th Annual PFLAG China National Conference held on a ocean cruise between China and Japan, that featured the marriage of nine LGBT couples and many other colorful and meaningful events. Eleven brave PFLAG moms earlier this year also came to Shanghai’s famous “marriage market,” where every weekend parents of heterosexual children gather in a famous park with photos and resumes in hand to matchmake. The PFLAG moms decided to come to try to find mates of the same sex for their gay children.  Other parents started a contentious argument, causing security to come and force the PFLAG moms to leave.  But it was an amazing act of bravery and LGBT visibility through the power of parental love and acceptance.  We met another activist who had been held by the police because he was a leading a public event where people were simply offered the opportunity to express love and support for LGBT people.  The stress of all of this can take an emotional toll on participants.

During our visit, a short film we made screened as part of a queer film series, and we got to know members of China’s film and arts scene, many of whom have created and run LGBT-themed film and arts organizations that bring much sought after queer content to LGBT audiences.   Many seemed to be living life full tilt and leading very international lives, coming and going as they attend overseas film festivals and at times living abroad for arts fellowships or higher education.  One person – far from fearing not conforming to his parents’ expectations – emancipated himself from them overseas.  Another spoke of the need to explode marriage and most other societal institutions, perhaps not surprisingly given how oppressive they currently can be to LGBT people in China.  Another artist had the guts to sue the government when his LGBT public education film had been removed from the internet a couple years ago.  The entire film program in which our film was screened needed to be reviewed by the government before it could be shown.  And a number of artists and activists were actively seeking to leave China because of the oppression.

Above all, we treasure the human connections, mutual support and camaraderie we built with the people we met. Unlike other places we have given presentations, groups in China were particularly interested in hearing how we have kept our relationship together for three decades:  What was our biggest conflict?  How did we resolve differences?  Have we ever considered breaking up?  We ended up telling audiences things we had previously only shared with close friends.  And in discussion groups, participants gave each other the opportunity to be heard and to witness each other’s struggles and aspirations. In setting up one of our presentations and discussion groups, we worked closely with wonderful people who lead Chinese groups of radical faeries.  This type of sharing and support are the core of faerie heart circles.

The current nationalistic policies of the American and Chinese governments may tend to separate its citizens, but what we share as LGBT people connects us across oceans and national boundaries.  We feel part of one movement. Chinese activists told us that the marriage equality victory in America and the gains for LGBT rights here were helping change things in China.  And as we witnessed firsthand the dedication, energy, courage, creativity and intelligence of Chinese LGBT activists in the face of government repression, we left inspired by what they have achieved and convinced more than ever that we in the LGBT community in America must use our freedom to the utmost.  Their work is testament to the power of grassroots, person-to-person education and community building. In the end, we educated and inspired each other – which is exactly what the LGBT community can do when it’s at its best.

Previous Columns:

A Love Affair with Edie Windsor
September 21, 2017

Although we met Edie Windsor only once, we’ll never forget the moment. It was on the steps of the United States Supreme Court back in March 2013, just minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court had concluded oral argument in Edie’s landmark lawsuit challenging the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”).

Edie had just finished a formal press conference, but she really wanted to be where her heart was: with all of the LGBTQ people gathered outside the Supreme Court that historic day. Edie was not to be denied—either before the Justices of the Court or with the LGBTQ community on the Court steps. As her legal team attempted to marshal her off the Supreme Court plaza, Edie, like the 84-year-old lesbian fireball of spirit, energy, and joy she was, stretched out her arms—really her entire body—to be part of all those gathered, including us.

When Time magazine honored Edie as Number 3 on its 2013 “Person of the Year” list, she responded: “The gay community is my ‘person of the year.’” She explained, “I am just one person who was part of the extraordinary and ongoing fight for marriage equality for all our families. There are thousands of people who helped us come this far and we still have a lot more work to do … . I look forward to continuing to fight for equal rights and educate the public about our lives alongside my gay brothers and sisters and our allies.”

Edie was a long-time grassroots activist. She was an early active member of Marriage Equality New York, then Marriage Equality USA (MEUSA), the grassroots organization with which we worked for many years. Always feisty and outspoken, Edie recounted in the new anthology The People’s Victoryhow, when an LGBT leader at a community meeting urged patience in seeking marriage equality, she raised her hand and demanded: “I’m 77 years old and I can’t wait!! What do we have to do?”

A key reason for urgency on Edie’s part was that her partner of over 40 years, Thea, was very ill with advanced multiple sclerosis.  A tireless fighter, Edie went to every rally or event she could. At an organizing meeting, Edie met MEUSA leaders Michael Sabatino and Robert Voorheis, who made the connection that led to Edie marrying Thea in Canada.

Michael and Robert recount in The People’s Victory how Edie and Thea flew to Toronto, Canada, and were married by Canada’s first openly gay judge, Justice Harvey Brownstone, in May 2007. “Thea required assistance to get on and off the plane and to disassemble and reassemble her wheelchair. Edie recalled, ‘I couldn’t put a ring on her finger without someone holding her hand out because Thea was no longer able to lift her hand herself.’”

When Thea died, Edie had to pay over $363,000 in federal estate taxes because they were lesbians and the federal government would not recognize their marriage. Edie wanted to rectify this injustice through a federal lawsuit. When a number of LGBT leaders and organizations believed that her case was not the best one to challenge DOMA, Edie persisted and found private counsel to bring the case. Eventually, everyone—including the U.S. Justice Department itself—worked to achieve victory at the Supreme Court.

The Court found Edie’s story and the multitude of harms that DOMA inflicted on thousands and thousands of same-sex couples compelling, and declared DOMA unconstitutional. Justice Ginsburg later described Edie and Thea’s relationship as a “grand partnership.” At oral argument in Edie’s case, Justice Ginsburg opined that while heterosexual couples have “full marriage,” DOMA relegated same-sex couples like Edie and Thea to a second class, “skim milk marriage.”

The Supreme Court’s Windsor decision is powerful. In striking down DOMA, Justice Kennedy wrote: “DOMA instruct[ed] all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage [was] less worthy than the marriages of others.” DOMA’s purpose was to “injure” and “disparage” married same-sex couples and to make them “unequal” to everyone else. As such, DOMA violated the constitutional rights of LGBT couples.

Whenever we give presentations about marriage equality, we tell Edie and Thea’s story. On one memorable occasion, a middle school student, upon hearing how unfairly DOMA had treated Edie, yelled spontaneously in front of an entire school assembly, “That’s bulls–t!” Edie would have loved it.

Edie’s story is testament to the importance of standing up and speaking out over and over again. Her story is filled with love—and inspiration, and hope for LGBTQ people in the face of adversity. Edie embodies the power of our everyday personal stories and grassroots activism to change hearts and minds all across America all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Edie once described her experience after the Supreme Court victory to The New Yorkermagazine as follows: “I don’t know how to say it that’s not corny as hell—I’ve been having a love affair with the gay community” and “I think Thea would love it.”

As we honor Edie at the time of her passing away, we are confident that the community—and America’s—love affair with Edie will live on for generations to come.

From Naughty to Nice
August 24, 2017

When I first came out as gay to my family over 30 years ago, my mom was wonderfully accepting. She already knew. For weeks before I actually told her one summer evening while I was home from college, she kept saying to me: “If there’s anything you want to tell me, I just want you to know that I will be very accepting … .” And so, one evening, I came out to her, and we had a great conversation. When she met John a few years later, I asked her what she thought of him, and she responded: “He’s nice.”  But quickly realizing that could sound like damning by faint praise, she exclaimed: “Nicer than nice!” She thought he was great, and quickly loved him as one of her own.

As news about my being gay spread through my mother’s side of the family, however, word got back to me that a few in my extended family didn’t necessarily think it was so “nice” that I was gay. I learned that one of my Chinese aunties said she’d heard through the family grapevine I was “naughty.” In general, there was a feeling among some of the family that we don’t talk about sexuality, love, and relationships. We don’t even know how to talk about such things. We don’t even do so with respect to straight people, and we certainly don’t know how to do so with respect to people who might be “naughty.”

Over the decades, John became completely integrated into my large extended family. He has planned family reunions, supported family members through illness and death, and cooked our traditional family dishes for our annual Chinese New Year celebrations. When John and I first married during San Francisco’s February 2004 “Winter of Love,” the date coincided with our family’s annual New Year gathering. The 2004 marriages were so spontaneous and joyful that my family toasted us with champagne and showered us with congratulations at that year’s annual family gathering.

The initial reticence on the part of some of my family to talk about LGBT life has been reflected in the broader society in varying ways in different cultural contexts in America, Asia, and other parts of the world. Last week, however, John and I spoke about marriage equality and LGBT issues to university students from Taiwan, China, and Japan studying this summer at Stanford University as part of the Volunteers in Asia program.

If these students’ interest and excitement in learning about, and talking about, marriage equality and LGBT life—and their support for LGBT people—is any indication of things to come on a broader level, then enormous change is taking place in Asia, just as it did in my own family years before. The students’ thirst for knowledge about LGBT people’s lives was palpable. Our presentation began at 7:00 pm, and three and a half hours later at 10:30 pm, many students were still actively engaging with us with many insightful questions and comments about LGBT life in America and their home countries. We could have gone on all night.

The Taiwanese students beamed with pride when we and they talked about the historic court decision in favor of marriage equality in Taiwan, making it the first country in Asia with marriage equality. Students from all of the countries applauded the victory. One student spoke about her activism as a Taiwanese lesbian. Another added, “I was there!” when we showed a photograph of the massive celebration the day of the victory. A 2014 poll found that 70 percent of Japanese in their 20s and 30s support full marriage equality. Many students asked perceptive questions about LGBT physical and mental health, legal issues about relationship and employment discrimination, and ways to improve life for LGBT students in schools.

Speaking with us at Stanford were our friends, the Tan Mercado family, two moms and their twin sons now in college, who were leaders in the fight against DOMA and discrimination against bi-national LGBT couples. Eight years ago, ICE arrested one of the moms in the wee hours of the morning at their home. Today, they are a legally married couple, with one of their sons a Stanford undergraduate and one of the coordinators of the Volunteers in Asia summer program. The entire family came and told their story of standing up for their family and those of many others, and of overcoming adversity. They shared the message that love makes a family. Their very presence allowed students to learn about LGBT families directly, and to see firsthand how terrific children of same-sex parents can turn out. After the formal presentation ended, the students surrounded them with support and questions about their lives.

By far the question the most students asked us was the best one: “When we go back to our home countries, how can we help?”  It’s the question that gives us the most hope and inspiration—that together, LGBT people in Asia and America are moving forward on the ongoing journey from “naughty” to “nice” … even nicer than nice!

The Power of Love
August 10, 2017

Three months ago, a young gay couple in their 20s in Aceh, Indonesia, was caned 83 times before a jeering crowd outside of a mosque after a Sharia court convicted them of the “crime” of the physical expression of their love for each other. According to news reports, vigilantes stormed the couple’s home and found them in bed together. BBC News described the scene of their torture: “The (gay) men stood on stage in white gowns praying while a team of hooded men lashed their backs with a cane … . A large crowd of observers cheered as the caning took place. ‘Let this be a lesson to you,’ one of the men watching cried out. ‘Do it harder,’ another man yelled.”

A BBC reporter who witnessed the flogging described how “you could definitely see … [the victims’] emotion[s]” on their faces, how “they were gripping their hands tightly” and how “extremely frightened and shaken” one of them was. The caning took place after the men survived two months in a prison with many homophobic inmates. The BBC reported that one of the men was in the final years of medical training to become a doctor, but that his university has now expelled him.

In addition to the obvious trauma these actions inflicted on the couple, the flogging spread fear across the LGBT community in Indonesia—as have anti-LGBT atrocities spread great fear in Chechnya. Recently, 141 people were arrested at what Indonesian police called a “gay sex party” in the nation’s capital Jakarta.

The arrest and flogging horrified us as it did millions of other people around the world, as has the shocking oppression taking place in Chechnya. We felt a visceral connection to the couple, and imagined how terrified we would be if vigilantes broke into our bedroom in the middle of night as we rested in bed together. We reflected on the threat to the men’s lives in prison and the physical pain and indignity they suffered at the flogging. We wondered if we would have the fortitude to survive such an imprisonment and flogging as they did.

Although we have never endured anything remotely comparable to what this young couple did, we identified personally with their experience because we, like many other LGBT people, have feared for our physical safety and faced public shaming because of who we are and whom we love. Indeed, no other aspect of our being able to marry legally was more powerful than the sense of dignity it gave us as citizens. As the final words of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark nationwide marriage equality decision reads, LGBTQ people “ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law” and “the Constitution grants them that right.”

But perhaps the most important connection we experienced to the couple was that of love. Amidst all that happened to them, we thought about how much these two gay men loved each other. They risked everything for their love, and the physical and emotional tenderness of their care for each other was more than the vigilantes, the torturers and the taunting crowds could bear. For years, we marched down Market Street as part of marriage equality contingents in the annual Pride Parade, shouting to the crowds, “It’s all about love! It’s all about pride!”

This young gay couple in Aceh inspires us. Our hearts go out to them and are with them. We dare to hope that their love survives. We dare to dream that someday “love wins” in Aceh and in the rest of Indonesia and the world.

Celebrating 6/26 Now and in the Future
July 27, 2017

We title our column “6/26 and Beyond” because, for the last fourteen years, June 26 has been the day the U.S. Supreme Court issued its key pro-LGBT equality decisions. 2017 was no exception. On June 26, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Pavan vs. Smith made even more explicit what it had already made clear before: When it comes to marriage, government must treat same-sex couples the same as different-sex couples.

In some ways akin to a number of states’ resistance to integrating public schools in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, a handful of states have tried to evade the clear dictates of the U.S. Supreme Court’s two landmark marriage equality decisions—Obergefell, recognizing the freedom to marry nationwide, and Windsor, striking down federal government discrimination against married same-sex couples.

One such state is Arkansas, where the state Department of Health in 2015 refused to put both same-sex spouses’ names on birth certificates for children conceived through artificial insemination as the department does for different-sex couples. Last year, a divided Arkansas Supreme Court upheld this discrimination. Last month, however, the U.S. Supreme Court said “no way”—in Pavan, a per curiam decision, issued without even the need for full briefing or oral argument. Per curiam decisions are “reserved for cases where ‘the law is settled and stable, the facts are not in dispute, and the decision below is clearly in error,’” and the Court found that Pavan was one of those cases.

In the opening line of the opinion, the Supreme Court repeated loud and clear its holding in Obergefell: “the Constitution entitles same-sex couples to civil marriage ‘on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.’” The Court went on to explain that Arkansas’ “differential treatment [of same-sex couples] infringes Obergefell’s commitment to provide same-sex couples ‘the constellation of benefits that the States have linked to marriage.’”

The Court further stated: “Obergefell proscribes such disparate treatment. As we explained there, a State may not ‘exclude same-sex couples from civil marriage on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.’” And the Court pointed out that birth certificates were one of the specific examples the Obergefell court gave of “the ‘rights, benefits, and responsibilities to which same-sex couples, no less than opposite-sex couples, must have access.”

Sadly, newly appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Justices Thomas and Alito, filed a groundless and unprincipled dissenting opinion. In a 2016 speech turned law review article submitted to the Senate for his confirmation hearings, Gorsuch addressed the importance of precedent in the American legal system. He said: “[E]ven when a hard case does arise, once it’s decided it takes on the force of precedent, becomes an easy case in the future, and contributes further to the determinacy of our law. Truly the system is a wonder and it is little wonder so many throughout the world seek to emulate it.”

What truly is a wonder is how Gorsuch could not see that Obergefell is undeniably precedent and Pavan was an easy case. Significantly, Chief Justice Roberts, who strongly dissented in the Obergefell decision, did not join Gorsuch’s dissent. Per curiam decisions have no named author, and individual justices are not required to indicate their votes on such decisions. Roberts’ decision not to dissent by name, however, may mean he respects Obergefell as precedent, even though he disagrees with it.

Pavan should send an unmistakable message to other states and lower courts who might attempt to sidestep the clear constitutional protections of liberty and equality that Obergefell and Windsor afford LGBT couples. Just four days after Pavan was decided, however, the Texas Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision, allowing a lawsuit to proceed that challenges whether local governments must provide health insurance and other spousal benefits to married same-sex couples when it does so to different-sex couples. And even after Pavan, Indiana continues to defend in court its differential treatment of same-sex couples with respect to birth certificates.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s enforcement of the Constitution’s guarantees of liberty and equality for LGBT people remains critical to our lives. The composition of the Supreme Court is vital to future success. We still need more 6/26 victories in the future. With rumors abounding as to whether Justice Kennedy, the author of all of the Court’s landmark gay rights decisions, may retire as early as next year, many who support LGBT equality, women’s rights, and myriad other concerns are anxious.

Doing everything we can to flip the U.S. Senate in 2018 to a chamber that will only confirm a Justice who respects the constitutional and other legal rights of LGBT people is a strategic priority. Everything we as LGBT people have done for decades to win the hearts and minds of millions of Americans helps us inside the courtroom. Now, more than ever, is the time to engage.

A Victory for Love 120 Years in the Making
July 13, 2017

When Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and other gay rights pioneers founded the first LGBT rights advocacy organization in the world in Berlin, Germany, in 1897, did they envision revelers at Berlin’s famous Brandenburg Gate, just meters from the Reichstag, the seat of the German government, celebrating the attainment of marriage equality in Germany 120 years later? Perhaps they actually did. Back in 1919, Hirschfeld prophesied: “Soon the day will come when science will win victory over error, justice a victory over injustice, and human love a victory over human hatred and ignorance.”

A century later, Maik Beermann, one of the 393 German Parliamentarians voting in favor of equality put it simply: “As a father, I want my daughters to grow up in a country where they enjoy the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else, regardless of whether they love men or women.” And Thomas Oppermann, the parliamentary leader of the Social Democratic Party proclaimed: “If the Constitution guarantees one thing, it is that anyone in this country can live as they wish.”

Marriage equality in Germany is hugely significant for many reasons. Today, Germany plays an increasingly leading role in maintaining a unified Europe and, in recent years, has accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East, North Africa, and other places. Full marriage equality conveys the importance of dignity and respect for LGBT people to the rest of Europe and to new immigrants arriving from around the world.

Activists hope that momentum from the victory in Germany will bring equality to neighboring Switzerland and Austria, both German-speaking countries. Kathrin Bertschy of Switzerland’s Green Liberal Party told the TagesAnzeigenewpaper that with the German vote “[m]arriage for all is now unstoppable internationally.” Cédric Wermuth of the Swiss Social Democratic Party tweeted: “Switzerland must follow suit NOW. Discrimination is the only thing that is perverted.” Thousands of people also recently marched demanding marriage equality in Northern Ireland, the only part of the United Kingdom without equality. The country of Malta is poised to enact marriage equality in July.

Further, the German victory underscores the importance of strategic political organizing by proponents of LGBT rights, even when they do not hold parliamentary majorities in government. For years, marriage equality was stalled in Germany because German Chancellor Angela Merkel refused to let the issue come to a vote in Parliament, despite the fact that a January 2017 Federal Anti-Discrimination Bureau poll showed a staggering 83 percent of the public in favor of marriage equality.

But Germany will hold elections in September, and the Social Democratic Party, a key coalition partner with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party in the current coalition government, and the Green Party announced in late June they would make marriage equality legislation a condition for any future coalition governing agreement. Within days Merkel called for a Parliamentary vote where members were free to vote their conscience, and within the week, Parliament passed marriage equality with 75 members of Merkel’s party voting in favor.

Although Merkel voted against marriage equality, she strongly urged unity after the vote, hoping the vote would engender “social peace and togetherness.” With her words, she appeared to be attempting to set a tone of less polarization and divisiveness in the society. On the other side of the world, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who claims to support marriage equality but is blocking a free conscience vote in the Australian Parliament despite clear public support for equality, would do well to follow Merkel’s example.

The LGBT rights movement in Germany did not follow a linear upwards trajectory since its beginning in 1897. One of most enduring images of persecution of LGBT people in the West is the pink triangle that gay male prisoners were forced to wear in the Nazi concentration camps. Beginning in the 1970s, the LGBT rights movement reclaimed the pink triangle as a symbol of bravery and pride (see page 6), and today Germany has marriage equality, a key element in the critical process of integrating protections for LGBT people into the institutions of society. The triumph embodies Magnus Hirschfeld’s vision of the victory of “human love … over human hatred and ignorance,” “science … over error,” and “justice … over injustice”—a vision just as relevant to the world today as it was a century ago.

A Great Leap Forward for Marriage Equality
June 22, 2017

With this year’s theme of San Francisco Pride, “A Celebration of Diversity,” we are thrilled to celebrate a great leap forward in the worldwide marriage equality movement: last month’s legal victory in Taiwan that will make the nation the first in Asia to have marriage equality. “I’m leaping with joy like a bird,” exclaimed Taiwanese LGBTQ activist Chi Chia-wei, one of the parties to the suit, who was has been fighting for the right to marry for over 30 years, according to the Agence France-Presse (AFP). His words reawaken the joy that we and millions of others experienced during Pride two years ago when marriage equality became the law of the land across America.

The victory in Taiwan is particularly exciting for us as a biracial Chinese American family. We remember participating thirteen years ago in the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance’s historic marriage equality float in the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade, the first of its kind in any Chinese New Year parade in the world, beamed to television audiences across Asia. Our float boldly proclaimed that the Chinese symbol of marriage, double happiness 囍, should be available to all. We are delighted to see that vision starting to become a reality in Asia itself.

We and Asian LGBTQ activists hope that the victory in Taiwan will have ripple effects across the continent. “This will have a huge impact on mainland China. Next stop, Hong Kong, then mainland proper,” proclaimed a Chinese social media user, as reported by Radio Free Asia. Although Taiwan and China differ politically, they share deep cultural and familial roots. Ray Chan, Hong Kong’s first openly gay lawmaker, told AFP that he could foresee Hong Kong couples going to Taiwan to try to marry and then returning home and pressing the government for recognition of their relationships.

Japanese activist friends also welcomed the news, noting the importance of marriage equality becoming a reality “not only in western countries but also in Asia.” Vuong Kha Phong, a Vietnamese LGBTQ advocate proclaimed the Taiwan decision “a historic victory for the LGBT groups in Asia,” and looked to the decision to build “momentum to mobilize the community to take action” as Vietnam will reconsider its marriage laws in 2020, according to the AFP.

The language and reasoning of the Taiwan Constitutional Court’s historic decision itself is very strong. In an official press release, the Court proclaimed Taiwan’s exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage “obviously a gross legislative flaw.” The Court highlighted how Chi Chia-wei had been appealing to different branches of the government for the right to marry for “more than three decades.” It concluded that “after more than a decade” of the legislature being “unable to complete its legislative process on those bills regarding same-sex marriage,” the time was up.

The Court found that denying same-sex couples the ability to marry violated lesbian, gay, and bisexual people’s fundamental constitutional freedom “to decide ‘whether to marry’ and ‘whom to marry,’” a choice “vital” to “human dignity.” The Court also made an expansive ruling with respect to sexual orientation discrimination, holding that the Constitution’s equality guarantees required “heightened” judicial scrutiny of differential treatment based on sexual orientation, and that the marriage exclusion could not withstand such scrutiny. By applying “heightened” scrutiny explicitly, the Taiwan court went further than the U.S. Supreme Court has, and it is past time for the American court to take this critical step.

The Taiwan Court gave the legislature and other responsible authorities two years to comply with the ruling and “discretion” as to “the formality … for achieving the equal protection of the freedom of marriage” for same-sex couples. We and Taiwanese LGBTQ activists believe that full marriage equality is the only way to achieve this result. If the legislature fails to act in two years, same-sex couples will be able to marry under current procedures.

According to the AFP, Chi Chia-wei was jailed for five months after filing his first petition for the right to marry, back in 1986.  That was the same year the U.S. Supreme Court held that states could imprison LGBTQ people for the physical expression of their love. Today, both countries’ highest courts have ruled in favor of marriage equality. Chi told the AFP that he has “been able to carry on for so long” because he “wasn’t discouraged by the setbacks.” He said: “My belief is that if you can do one right thing in this life, it’s all worth it.”

As our community continues to pursue full LGBTQ freedom and equality on both sides of the Pacific, we take inspiration this Pride season from Chi’s optimism and perseverance and the collective work of countless other Taiwanese LGBTQ activists.  They remind us all that we are “doing the right thing” and “it’s all worth it.”

Celebrating Pride as We Remember Orlando
June 8, 2017

As we mark the first anniversary of the Orlando massacre in which 49, mostly Latinx, members of the LGBTQ community were murdered and 53 others were wounded at the Pulse Nightclub, we find ourselves reflecting on how sobering the events in the early hours of June 12, 2016, were.

Stuart had gotten up earlier than John had that Sunday morning, and as soon as he heard John rustling awake, he rushed to him to tell him that something horrific had happened the night before. We watched Christine Leinonen, mother of Christopher “Drew” Leinonen who together with his partner Juan Ramon Guerrero were killed that night, desperately seek news of her son’s fate on live television and plea for an end to “the hatred and the violence” and to “do something with the assault weapons.”

A year ago, Janiel Gonzalez described what had happened inside the bar to the Palm Beach Post: “I was ordering a Red Bull at the bar … . As I was signing my tab, out of nowhere … [I heard rapid gunfire] … . [I]t got louder and louder … . He kept on shooting and shooting and shooting … . I could smell the ammo in the air.” And “[w]hen I dropped to the floor … [I] saw people crying and covered in blood.”

Shawn Roysten, who also survived the massacre, explained in the Los Angeles Times: “There were so many bodies, so much blood.”  Eddie Justice lost his life that night when the gunman found him hiding in the bathroom. Shortly before he died he texted his mother: “Mommy I love you … . In club they’re shooting … . He’s coming. I’m gonna die.”

We have been fortunate not to have suffered such brutal and sudden loss in our lives. However, our recent experiences losing close loved ones and consoling others who have lost life partners and dear friends heighten our sense of connection and empathy with all of those who lost loved ones in Orlando. Our hearts are with Orlando and all other victims of gun violence. We hold each other and those we love more tightly.

A year ago, we wrote in this column: “We cannot fully honor the lives of those lost in Orlando on June 12 unless we do everything in our power not just to reduce hatred, but to eliminate access to the firearms that provide the means by which people carry out these types of massacres and other gun violence.”

Today, we ask ourselves: are we doing everything we can? Shortly after the shooting, Lambda Legal’s Deputy Legal Director Hayley Gorenberg wrote that “we must step up and fight to end gun violence.” And we need to do it “now.” And the Human Rights Campaign announced a new “organizational position that the safety of LGBTQ people in the United States requires the adoption of common-sense gun violence prevention measures.” Since then, Donald Trump was elected President with strong support from the National Rifle Association, and today, gun control advocates search for the way forward.

In 1962, Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan pondered in song: “How many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?  How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

Dith Pran, the Cambodian journalist who overcame incalculable odds to survive the Khmer Rouge genocide and whose life was the subject of the movie The Killing Fields, years later opined: “What matters is that we remember and we keep talking and maybe someday we will mean it when we say about a holocaust: ‘never again.’” Shouldn’t that someday be now?

Today, we heed Pran’s words—we remember, we keep talking, and we renew our commitment of a year ago. And this month, we celebrate Pride and all our community has done to reduce hatred, even as we remember all of those we have lost.

Voices of LGBTQ Refugees from Trump’s America
May 17, 2017

Many of us felt the sting of Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States and feared how it would affect our lives.  But as San Francisco Supervisor Jeff Sheehy reminded us at a hearing he convened last week on youth homelessness in the city, Trump’s election has already become a matter of “life and death” for some LGBTQ young people. Such was the case for D. Andrew Porter, a queer youth living in rural western Kentucky when Trump was elected, and who soon thereafter fled to San Francisco with a friend for safety. D. Andrew—who uses the pronoun “they”—shared their story and spoke of the desperate need for better services for homeless youth in powerful testimony they delivered at the hearing.

D. Andrew described how since Trump’s election last November, “threats of violence have drastically increased. A dear friend of mine living in Cookeville, Tennessee, had her car vandalized [and] set on fire … . [S]he was hospitalized after being assaulted.  And the realities set in. And my mother said, ‘If you stay here, you will die. Go.’”

So D. Andrew and a friend went—driving 2,327 miles in two days to San Francisco. D. Andrew, who is 25 years old and has been doing LGBTQ organizing in rural areas since the age of 15, never intended to leave Kentucky for San Francisco. “[B]eing a Southerner and living in Kentucky, all my life people have said: Move to California, move to New York City, move to these big urban spaces. And there you will find open arms and love and affirmation, the things that you are seeking here that we simply cannot provide you.” But D. Andrew “spent many years advocating against that. I’ll be quite frank about it: San Francisco was never where I thought I would end up.” With Trump’s election, D. Andrew felt they no longer had a choice.

Porter is not alone in fleeing to San Francisco, and they warn of potentially greater numbers of LGBTQ youth coming in the future. “The reality is that the refugees of Trump America are going to be younger and younger. Queer youth are coming out sooner and sooner. Trans youth are beginning to transition faster and faster.”

Although D. Andrew found “coming to California … really exciting and liberating,” they didn’t exactly find the “open arms” they had heard about. “Getting to California and … specifically being here in San Francisco, a new set of obstacles were thrown at my feet.” They, like many other homeless youth, found navigating the system to find youth services and housing extremely difficult—“barriers and barriers and barriers … to navigate.” Supervisor Sheehy described how D. Andrew “couch surfed among friends, but eventually ended up living in a cold, unheated industrial garage” before getting a studio apartment they share with two other people.

D. Andrew acknowledged how fortunate they are compared to many other youth because they “had some income saved up” and a network. They didn’t succeed by themselves. “My story is a common one, but my successes are not. And that’s the harsh truth.”  Many homeless youth “feel trapped in a cage of circumstances.”

D. recounted that one day “I was in the Castro and I gave money to a 16-year-old queer youth from Iowa and sat down with her and talked about her story and promised her that the reality is that even in the hardest of times you can do anything for a year … . And … the saddest truth I’ve ever had to say is that if you can’t make it [here] in a year, you probably should move back to less safe spaces, because I’d rather see you move into a more conservative area … than living in California, this space where we talk often about how [many] resources we have and how much we care deeply for these individuals, but … if you are living on the streets, how accessible are those resources to you?”

As Supervisor Sheehy set forth at the hearing, as of 2015, “the city’s point and time count identified 1,569 homeless youth on the street or in shelters,” and that is “probably an undercount.” Nearly half, 48 percent, identify as LGBTQ, and 13 percent are HIV positive. Numerous people who have been working in the field for years spoke at the hearing and identified many steps to take, such as opening navigation centers and drop in centers and providing housing and access to health care to improve the lives of homeless youth. They pointed to the fact that data shows that targeted programs work. Everyone pointed to the lack of financial resources.

As we listened to D. Andrew’s voice as an LGBTQ refugee from Trump’s America, we were above all struck by their strength, compassion, and desire to help others. For years, these qualities have sustained LGBTQ people from all walks of life in the face of myriad challenges. Those of us who have better living conditions than homeless youth are not separate from those of us on the street. We owe it to each other to end the scourge of Trump’s America and to demonstrate as much strength and courage in supporting LGBTQ youth as the youth themselves have shown.

As Supervisor Sheehy concludes, “We talk about refugees from other places in the world, and certainly we have to be a haven for people from other places in the world. But we have an internal refugee problem, specifically for LGBTQ kids, and all across America with what’s happening with Trump America.”

Famous
May 3, 2017

What does it mean to be famous? Such a question seems apt for a college philosophy or ethics class or something that Cher, Madonna, or Lady Gaga might ponder in a quiet moment. However, the query also lies at the heart of an extraordinary concurring opinion to a pro forma, one sentence order in transgender teen Gavin Grimm’s lawsuit to be able to use the bathroom that matches his gender.

In the opinion, Senior Judge Andre Davis of the 4^th Circuit Court of Appeals first praises Grimm’s eloquence, intelligence, and perseverance in pursing justice. In describing Gavin’s courageous testimony before his School Board, Judge Davis notes how Gavin “explained that he is a person worthy of dignity and privacy. He explained why it is humiliating to be segregated from the general population.” Gavin “knew, intuitively, what the law has in recent decades acknowledged: the perpetuation of stereotypes is one of many forms of invidious discrimination.”

But Judge Davis didn’t stop there. He went on to lay out a broader vision of transgender equality and dignity. He wrote that the school board’s treatment of Grimm reveals “the inequities that arise when the government organizes society by outdated constructs like biological sex and gender.” Grimm’s “case is about much more than bathrooms. It’s about a boy asking his school to treat him just like any other boy. It’s about protecting the rights of transgender people in public spaces and not forcing them to exist on the margins. It’s about governmental validation of the existence and experiences of transgender people, as well as the simple recognition of their humanity. His case is part of a larger movement that is redefining and broadening the scope of civil and human rights so that they extend to a vulnerable group that has traditionally been unrecognized, unrepresented, and unprotected.”

Then the 68-year-old senior judge from his seat of enormous power on the federal court of appeals reached out personally to Gavin, the struggling transgender high school senior. He wrote: “by challenging unjust policies rooted in invidious discrimination, [Gavin Grimm] takes his place among other modern-day human rights leaders who strive to ensure that, one day, equality will prevail, and that the core dignity of every one of our brothers and sisters is respected by lawmakers and others who wield power over their lives.” He likened Grimm to such famous names in the law as Korematsu, Brown, Loving, Windsor, and Obergefell—those “who refused to accept quietly the injustices that were perpetuated against them.”

But Judge Davis recognized that the name Gavin Grimm would likely not become a household name like the others. From Judge Davis’s perspective, though, Gavin was already and would continue to be “famous” for a much more important reason. Quoting Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shehab Nye’s poem Famous, Judge Davis stated: “Despite [Gavin’s] youth and the formidable power of those arrayed against him at every stage of these proceedings, ‘[Gavin] never forgot what [he] could do.’”

Nye’s poem Famous reads in part: “The river is famous to the fish. The loud voice is famous to silence, which knew it would inherit the earth before anybody said so … . I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing streets … famous as the one who smiled back. I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.”

Judge Davis is an African American man who grew up in East Baltimore (famous among other things, unfortunately, for its high homicide rate). According to Wikipedia, he was the son of a food services worker and schoolteacher, whose stepfather was a steel worker. Davis attended the prestigious Phillips Academy Andover, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Maryland School of Law. He worked his way up to become a judge of the federal appellate courts, just one tier below the U.S. Supreme Court in the federal judicial system.

Few readers of this column will have heard of Judge Davis before now. We hadn’t before the Gavin Grimm case. When one searches for the name Andre Davis on Google, two different pro football players come up as the top results. However, Judge Andre Davis is, and will always be, famous in our eyes because, in his efforts to fulfill his judicial responsibility to provide justice for Gavin Grimm and other transgender people, Judge Davis himself “never forgot what [he] could do.” He offers all of us the invitation to do the same.

Gay Win-Win: Marriage Equality Saving Lives
March 9, 2017

The U.S. Supreme Court’s two landmark marriage equality decisions contain powerfully eloquent declarations of the dignity and humanity of LGBTQ people. When the decisions were announced, the nation’s newspapers translated the “take home” message of the legal holdings in more down to earth ways.  The New York Daily News front page headline screamed, “U.S. GAY! ‘Equal dignity in the eyes of the law.’” The Montgomery, Alabama, Advertiser proclaimed, “LOVE WINS.” The Lafeyette, Indiana, Journal & Courier declared, “GAY WIN-WIN,” and USA Today’s front page announced, “Rainbow Rulings,” with a huge close-up photograph of a happy gay couple kissing on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court.

For years, we and many others in the marriage equality movement have hoped that our efforts would not only help secure equal marriage rights for LGBTQ couples, but also that our work would help our community achieve equality and dignity in all aspects of our lives. We intended for marriage equality to contribute to decades-long efforts to give LGBTQ youth hope to be able envision their lives in any way they chose and to experience happiness rather than shame in being LGBTQ. But the degree to which all the public education, the legal victories, the sights of LGBTQ people getting married coast to coast, and the bold headlines proclaiming, “U.S. GAY,” were resonating with young people was difficult to assess or quantify—until very recently.

On February 20, 2017, researchers from the Johns Hopkins and Harvard schools of public health announced stunning new findings: the number of adolescent suicide attempts in states that achieved marriage equality from 2004 to the beginning of 2015 dropped dramatically, while states that rejected equality saw no change during the same time period. When the researchers added up all the numbers, they found that over 134,000 fewer adolescents per year attempted suicide in states that adopted marriage equality with no reductions in states that maintained discriminatory laws. In equality states, adolescent suicide rates dropped 7 percent, with a 14 percent drop for lesbian, gay, and bisexual students. And the study found that reductions in suicide attempts were sustained over time, with lower rates remaining two years after legalization.

The study’s lead author, Julia Raifman, observed, “These are high school students so they aren’t getting married any time soon, for the most part;” however, “[t]here may be something about having equal rights—even if they have no immediate plans to take advantage of them—that makes students feel less stigmatized and more hopeful for the future.” Of course, many other concomitant efforts, such as anti-bullying measures and increasing numbers of LGBTQ people coming out in states that adopted marriage equality, could contribute to the improvements, and the study recognized that it could not identify the mechanism by which marriage equality lowered adolescent suicide rates. But interestingly, the study found that the reduction in suicide attempts did not occur until after marriage equality actually passed, and did not take place in the years leading up to the legal victory.

Despite this progress, teen suicide attempts, especially among LGBTQ youth, remain a huge problem. The study reported that in 2015, over 29 percent of LGBQ high school students reported having attempted suicide in the past year, compared to 6 percent of their heterosexual counterparts. In 2015, 34 percent of high school students who reported attempting suicide were LGBQ. Other data suggests that approximately 40 percent of transgender Americans have attempted suicide at some point in their lives.  It appears that the researchers had access only to data that tracked sexual orientation, and consequently were unable to provide information about transgender adolescents.

The “Healthy People 2020” program administered by the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seeks to reduce adolescent suicide rates by ten percent by 2020. The study’s authors note that their “research suggests that the legalization of same-sex marriage has been very effective in making progress toward that goal.” We hope that the new HHS Secretary Tom Price, who has been a staunch opponent of marriage equality, and others in the new administration take note. As Raifman observed, “We can all agree that reducing adolescent suicide attempts is a good thing, regardless of our political views.”

The study provides compelling evidence that legal and public policy pertaining to LGBTQ rights can have profound effects on the mental health and well-being of LGBTQ youth. We look to the U.S. Supreme Court to recognize this fact when they consider the extent to which federal law protects transgender youth later this month.

The Supreme Court in its nationwide marriage equality decision stated: “Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there. It offers the hope of companionship and understanding and assurance that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other.”

Our hope is that the achievement of nationwide marriage equality results in reductions in adolescent suicide attempts nationwide and that fewer LGBTQ youth find themselves calling out in loneliness. We look to the Court, other judges, and lawmakers to recognize the far-reaching impacts of legal protections for LGBTQ people. And when LGBTQ youth call out in loneliness, it’s the responsibility of friends, family, teachers, counselors, and the larger community to be there to provide care and understanding. We must make real the proclamations of the newspaper headlines that “Love Wins” and legal equality is a “Gay Win-Win.”

The complete study, “Difference-in-Differences Analysis of the Association Between State Same-Sex Marriage Policies and Adolescent Suicide Attempts,” can be found at http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2604258

Art Imitates Life in the New TV Show Doubt
March 3, 2017

As we eagerly anticipate the upcoming premiere of the landmark LGBT history miniseries When We Rise, we were excited to see the premiere of another groundbreaking television series that seeks to educate Americans about the lives of LGBT people: Doubt.  Stuart’s high school classmate, television writer Joan Rater, and her husband Tony Phelan are the creators of Doubt, whose all-star cast includes Laverne Cox, who plays a transgender attorney. In an inspiring personal essay published last week in Entertainment Weekly, Joan reveals that her and Tony’s inspiration for Cox’s character was their own teenage transgender son, Tom—and their collective desire to make the world a better place for transgender people to live.

As Joan writes in Entertainment Weekly, she and her husband Tony decided that—after first struggling with and then accepting and embracing their son Tom as transgender—they “want[ed] to be ambassadors” to help educate the public about the real lives of transgender people. They fantasized about “invit[ing] people who think being transgender is scary or weird or wrong over to our house to meet our family that includes our transgender son, and in the end, they see that he’s really sweet and not scary.” But since their house couldn’t fit the millions of people they wanted to reach, Joan recounts, “we wrote a TV show instead,” featuring Laverne Cox as a recurring transgender character.

Joan explains candidly that “when Tommy told us he was transgender, we didn’t know anything about gender identity, so we got really scared. Like panicked and crying.” But Tom provided his parents resources to educate them, and Joan and Tony “let smart people calm us down.” After they calmed down, they realized that Tom “was still the exact same person he was before he told us he was trans, only now he was happier. Once he told us, he felt relieved and was able to be more himself. He became even funnier and nicer. And it was kind of a miracle to our family to see this person that had been sad become happy. We watched this child of ours who had felt so awkward for so long start to feel more comfortable in his own skin.”

“And then we got to create a trans character as a member of the ensemble of Doubt so that people, who didn’t get to witness the miracle of a person being brave enough to be their authentic self in real life, could see it on TV. They could meet Cameron Wirth, as played by Laverne Cox, and fall in love with her because she’s funny and smart as hell and passionate about her clients and gorgeous and needy and lonely and all the things the rest of us are. And once they get to know her, her being trans won’t be scary or alienating. It’ll feel normal. And if we can do that, if we can broaden the idea of normal even a little bit, it’ll be a good thing. And maybe our show can be part of helping people become less afraid.”

We’re proud of Joan and her family, and we’re grateful that Joan and Tony are using their voices as television writers and creators to illuminate the lives and voices of transgender people. As When We Rise dramatizes the lives of LGBT activists, Joan and Tony have become activists themselves by taking their personal story and that of their son and bringing it to the small screen through the transgender character they created.  With the TV show Doubt, art imitates life in the hope that more people can live authentic and happy lives without having to imitate or pretend anymore.

Acting Up and Fighting Back at SFO :
February 9, 2017

As we arrived at SFO two Sundays ago to join thousands of people protesting the Trump administration’s detention of Muslim immigrants at the nation’s airports, our eyes welled up with tears. For weeks, we had tried to maintain a sense of equilibrium, attempting not to follow every internet post about what the new administration might do or indulge our worst fears. As Mark Twain is thought to have said: “Some of the worst things in my life never happened.”  But now, something was happening.  The US government was detaining or refusing entry to hundreds of lawful immigrants and refugees travelling to the US that weekend and denying future entry to thousands of others, based on their religion or national origin.

We wore our old “Immigration Equality” T-shirts that read on the back, “United by Love, Divided by Law.”  We had worn those shirts for years to support LGBT bi-national couples, many of whom until 2013 were denied legal status in America. Suddenly, the shirts had a new and different relevance. We imagined innocent Muslim people being detained in windowless rooms elsewhere in the airport. We took heed of the famous words of Martin Niemöller, the Protestant minister the Nazis imprisoned, that were written on homemade signs at the protest:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Thousands of people were speaking out that day even though they were not necessarily Muslim.  They hoped those in detention at the airport could hear their chants of support; they were present at the airport to welcome any detainees who made it through immigration.

The next day – Monday — we were scrolling through our email when we were stunned to read an ominous alert from a highly credible source:  Later that day Trump might issue another new executive order, this one stripping LGBT federal employees and contractors from protections against discrimination in place for decades and permitting federal discrimination against married same-sex couples and other LGBT people in a wide variety of contexts.  Although LGBT immigrants and refugees would suffer underthe administration’s immigration orders, those orders did not target LGBT people in particular. Now they were coming for us.  We felt sickened, vulnerable, and furious.

But as news of the proposed order started to leak, the White House quickly retreated, issuing a statement that very evening that protections for LGBT employees of government contractors would not be revoked and stating that Trump was “determined to protect the rights of all Americans, including the LGBTQ community” and that he “continue[d] to be respectful and supportive of LGBTQ rights…”  The resistance was having an effect — a small victory.

But we hold no illusion as to the harm that some of Trump’s actions could have on LGBT people and to the anti-LGBT agenda that Mike Pence and others in powerful positions seek to enact.  A different version of the proposed order is being circulated at this very moment.  And the next day, Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch as his pick for the US Supreme Court.  Lambda Legal characterized Gorsuch’s opinions as a federal appellate judge as “open[ing] the door to all manner of assaults on the civil rights of ordinary citizens – including lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people and everybody living with HIV.”

We attend demonstrations to speak out, to be counted, and to remind ourselves of hope.  We gain inspiration and seek to inspire others, especially young people, to further action. We find comfort and community and often see friends and have some fun as well. At the SFO demonstration, we took particular joy hearing thousands of people from all walks of life chanting: “Immigrant rights under attack. What do we do?  Act up! Fight back!” derived from the ACTUP chants that queer HIV/AIDS activists created in the 1980s.

We do our best to mind Martin Niemöller’s words.  Indeed, everyone, including and perhaps especially Trump supporters, should take heed of Niemöller’s cautionary tale. After all, Niemöller was not merely a passive bystander to the rise of Hitler; he was a Nazi and anti-Semite himself until the Nazis came after him and his views about the independence of his church.  Only then did he gain the wisdom for which he is remembered today.

We cannot ultimately control what happens in life, but we have enormous power over our intentions and actions.  Showing up and speaking out has always been fundamental to the success of the LGBT rights movement.  And as a minority, we’ve never been able to win without the help of others.  Thirty years ago, queer ACTUP activists summed up Niemöller’s admonition in two simple words:  Silence = Death.  Those words could not be more meaningful for all people today.  We have pulled our old ACTUP t-shirts out of storage, and we know we will be wearing them again very soon.

Queer Life in the Best Little Neighborhood You’ve Never Heard of: SF’s Portola District
January 26, 2017

We’ve all heard of San Francisco’s famous LGBT neighborhoods such as the Castro and Polk Street, right? But how about the Portola? The “Portowhat?” you might be asking. If so, you’d be like us before we discovered, and then moved to, this wonderfully diverse and down to earth village with a vibrant LGBT presence in the southeast quadrant of the city.

For years, LGBT people in the Bay Area have lived in neighborhoods outside of the Castro and other known enclaves, but generally with less visibility. When we moved to the Portola seven years ago, we were delighted to learn that not only were we the sixth LGBT household on our immediate block, but also that our block sported a radical faerie house and that two of our neighbors hosted an annual Walt Whitman party to celebrate the iconic queer poet’s birthday.

The Portola is also home to a longstanding lesbian community, including our real estate agent, who helped us. Many other LGBT and community-minded residents make a home in the neighborhood. We have tremendous straight ally neighbors too, many of whom have marched with us in the Pride Parade and joined in the Portola Pride Picnic, held in nearby McLaren Park.  A gay couple who moved in a couple years ago took the direct approach to raising queer visibility when they realized that drivers on the nearby 101 Freeway had a perfect view of the back of their house that stood atop one of the neighborhood’s many hills.  They painted the entire rear of the house in the colors of the rainbow flag, earning their home the nickname Chateau Rainbeau.

A Diverse Community

The area, which is now the Portola, was originally inhabited by Native Americans, with the first settlers being Eastern European Jewish immigrants, some of whom termed the community “Little Jerusalem.” Many Italian and Maltese immigrants also came and cultivated numerous rose and other flower nurseries that supplied most of San Francisco’s cut flowers. With last century’s baby boom, the nurseries gave way to housing, and the neighborhood is now home to a diverse spectrum of residents with large numbers of Latinx and Asian Americans. In our immediate area alone, we feel fortunate to have Italian, Maltese, El Salvadoran, Chinese, Filipino, Greek, Irish, African American, European American, Malaysian, Indian, and Iranian American neighbors.

For years, LGBT people have been a vital part of the life of the neighborhood, both taking an active role as community leaders and creating queer-themed events open to everyone. One of the striking things about the Portola is how many neighbors actually know each other and spend time together both to have fun and to make the neighborhood a better place. When we moved in, we were charmed to learn that LGBT and other residents had created a very popular come-one, come-all style holiday party where neighbors can catch up with each other at the nearby Italian American Social Club of San Francisco.

The new queer-friendly microbrewery—Ferment, Drink, Repeat (FDR)—will feature a specially formulated LGBT Pride brew this June and is located on the Portola’s main commercial street, San Bruno Avenue, which boasts a bounty of Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexican, and El Salvadoran restaurants and food stores.

Of course, all is not bliss in the Portola, and creating a community in which diverse people overcome barriers to live in harmony and connection with one another is not always easy.  On the morning of September 7, 2015, the neighborhood was rudely awakened to the sight of graffiti reading “No More Chinese” in multiple locations. The neighborhood reacted swiftly, powerfully, and creatively. Within hours, residents transformed the graffiti to read “[heart sign] more Chinese.” A few days later, a large and diverse group of residents came together for a public rally at one of the spots where the graffiti was painted and together denounced racism and stood up for inclusion and community solidarity. Former Supervisor David Campos, himself a Latino gay man, and Portola Neighborhood Association President Chris Waddling, an immigrant gay man whose husband is Chinese American, were among the community leaders who spearheaded the rally. The man who painted the graffiti turned out to be a long-time resident, and was prosecuted and convicted of multiple counts of vandalism and hate crimes. No such incidents have occurred since.

Drag Queen Bingo, Portolove, and the Goettingen Cascade Project

Nothing embodies the increasing queer visibility in the Portola more than the neighborhood’s semi-annual Drag Queen Bingo fundraisers that support local community projects. They are held at El Toro, San Bruno Avenue’s Latin music and dance club—the former location of Fucile’s Bar, where local legend has it that Frank Sinatra once sang. Anyone LGBT or otherwise interested in experimenting with a bit of gender bending, trying out some flamboyant self-expression, or just plain hanging out and playing bingo with those who do, is welcome to attend. It’s a family friendly event that attracts people of all ages, and last time included both fabulous drag queens dressed to the nines and stylishly handsome drag kings.

The next drag queen bingo—called “Portolove” and hosted by drag queen Van Detta—is coming soon on Thursday, February 9.  It will benefit the Goettingen Cascade Project, an innovative art and greening project that will employ state or the art materials to transform a formerly dilapidated outdoor staircase atop one of the neighborhood’s hills into the appearance of a glowing nighttime waterfall that will also function practically to illuminate the staircase at night for pedestrians. Phillip Hua, an internationally recognized queer artist who lives in the neighborhood with his husband, is the designer of the installation, which is part of the Goettingen Neighbors Group’s years’ long efforts to create beautiful gardens aside the previously neglected passageway. The group is one of many in the neighborhood taking a proactive approach to greening, celebrating gardens, and preserving the area’s historic nurseries. In recognition of these efforts and the neighborhood’s proximity to McLaren Park, the city named the Portola, “San Francisco’s Garden District,” last year.

Last drag queen bingo, we decided that it was time for us to do drag ourselves. But what should marriage equality activist grooms wear? The answer was obvious, and John adorned himself in one of famous marriage equality activist Molly McKay’s historic wedding dresses, while Stuart presented as a dashing butch bride. As John exited El Toro at the end of the evening, a passerby making a bee line to the bus suddenly stopped as she encountered John on the sidewalk. Her mouth agape, she audibly gasped and exclaimed: “How beautiful! Your wedding day!” John smiled and thanked her in the best falsetto he could muster, and she and he both had huge smiles on their faces as she made her way to the bus. Yet another reason we love this diverse, queer thriving, “can do” and “do it yourself” neighborhood we call home: The Portola.

Still Dreaming on MLK Weekend
January 12, 2017

When John attended his 40^th high school reunion in Kansas City last fall, it dawned on him that he and his classmates started kindergarten in early September 1963, less than a week after Martin Luther King delivered his renowned “I Have a Dream Speech” at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In his address, King famously dreamed that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” and that one day, even in Alabama, “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

Despite the many times John had heard the speech, it suddenly hit him that the great civil rights leader had been dreaming about little five-year-old kids like us—our generation. As we approach this weekend’s annual commemoration of King’s birthday, we can only imagine how troubled the visionary might be if he were alive today. King’s words 54 years ago have striking relevance in January 2017, as Americans dedicated to racial, gender, LGBT, immigrant, and economic justice and equality face grave threats and uncertainty.

In 1963 King told it like it was. Reflecting on the fact that Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation a century before, King observed: “[O]ne hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” Over a half century later, the essence of King’s message rings disturbingly true—even though significant improvements have taken place and the particular problems of today differ from those of 1963. And today, economic disparity evidenced by the vast number of Americans living on an “island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity” is reaching a crisis point.

But King did not merely describe problems; he issued a call to action—a charge that still inspires today. King declared: “We have … come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism … . It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.”

Later this month, millions of Americans will travel to the nation’s capital for the Women’s March on Washington. Five decades ago, King warned that “those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual” and proclaimed that “1963 is not an end, but a beginning.” 2017 must be a beginning, too.

King also spoke unapologetically of hope and articulated a long-term vision of how he wanted the world to be. King implored: “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair … . [E]ven though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream … . I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

We in the LGBT community know well the extraordinary value of dreaming, even in the darkest hour. When LGBT Americans routinely faced disapproval and hatred that forced them to live in secret or in denial, we dared to dream of a future in which we could live openly. We came out. When we faced the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, we dreamed of a day when the disease would not ravage our community. We cared for each other and took ownership of our health care in ways never seen before.  Even as the law permitted states to imprison people for being gay, we dreamed of a day when we could marry the person we loved and celebrate all aspects of our love. We achieved nationwide marriage equality. As we face today’s ongoing challenges, we must keep dreaming.

Although King summoned people to stand up fearlessly and nonviolently for their rights and dignity in the face of those who opposed them, his ultimate dream was one of unity—finding shared values and respect and ending divisions, not exacerbating them. He urged, “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” He noted the presence of “many of our white brothers” at the march and reminded everyone gathered, “we cannot walk alone.” In the dynamic climax to his speech, King dreams of the “day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

This King weekend, we wish that King’s vision had already become a reality. But we’ll be sporting our “Don’t Let the Dream Die” buttons—and we won’t take them off until the great visionary’s prophecy comes true.

Deck the Halls of Schools, Workplaces, and Courts with LGBT Equality
December 15, 2016

Whenever we hear the ubiquitous holiday music that pervade the airwaves this time of year, we can’t help but want to sing along — not with the traditional lyrics — but with the new and improved words that Marriage Equality USA wrote and performed for shoppers at this time each year.  For example, to the tune of Jingle Bells, we sang: ”Equal rights, equal rights, equal all the way! Oh what fun it is to sing for equal rights today!”  We followed it up with:  “Deck the Halls with marriage equality! ‘Tis the season for equality! Don we now our gay apparel ….”  And we belted out many others, hoping to bring a smile to people’s faces while spreading a message of the importance of love, dignity, and equality under the law.

This year ‘tis the season for workplace and transgender student equality as LGBT people will don their gay apparel and argue for these essential rights in five key federal cases over this year’s holidays.  These cases could result in rulings of nationwide scope next year or the year following.  It’s time for our entire community, not just the parties and their lawyers, to be engaged in these cases that could shape LGBT rights for decades.

As we have discussed in earlier columns, transgender teen Gavin Grimm’s case to be able to use the school restroom that matches his gender is being briefed before the United States Supreme Court right now for hearing sometime in early 2017.  That case could have a major impact on the rights of transgender people all across the country.  Four other cases asserting that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation as unlawful sex discrimination are now before Federal Courts of Appeals and could easily go to the US Supreme Court later next year.

Two weeks ago, Lambda Legal argued before the 7^th Circuit in Chicago on behalf of Kimberly Hively, a lesbian who asserts that her employer, Ivy Tech Community College, terminated her as a part-time adjunct professor after 14 years of service because of her sexual orientation.  In court papers, Hively explains that she “never had a negative evaluation,” but that she applied for six different full-time positions for which she had all the qualifications and never even got an interview.  Seven months after she filed a discrimination complaint against the college with the EEOC, the school let her go.  After the recent argument before the 7^th Circuit, legal observers believe a favorable outcome is likely.

This week, Lambda Legal argues before the 11^th Circuit in Atlanta on behalf of Jameka Evans, a lesbian hospital worker.  Jameka claims that Georgia Regional Hospital fired her because she publicly identified as a lesbian, did not “carry [her]self in a traditional woman manner,” dressed in traditionally male clothing, e.g., “(male uniform, low male haircut, shoes, etc.),” and did not otherwise “conform” to “gender stereotypes associated with women.”

Just after the New Year, the 2^nd Circuit in New York will hear the case of Donald Zara, a gay skydiving teacher who asserted that he was fired from his job for being openly gay.  Two weeks later, the same court will hear the case of Matthew Christiansen, an openly gay creative director at the international advertising firm, DDB Worldwide Communications Group, whose complaint alleges he suffers from PTSD and severe anxiety and depression because of horrific anti-gay abuse from his boss.  The district judge concluded that the alleged conduct, which included his boss drawing lewd pictures of Matthew on an office whiteboard and circulating to the office and via Facebook a movie poster he altered with Matthew’s “head on the body of a bikini-clad woman ‘in the gay sexual receiving position’” was “by any metric … reprehensible.”

For years, many courts have held that Title VII does not prohibit anti-gay conduct such as that alleged in these cases because Congress made no explicit reference to sexual orientation back in 1964 when it outlawed sex discrimination.  Indeed, the district judge in Matthew’s case stated that prior 2^nd Circuit precedent required her to dismiss his case despite his allegations of his boss’ egregious behavior. The enormous gains in public understanding of the lives of LGBT people, the powerful landmark marriage equality decisions, and a recent EEOC ruling applying Title VII to sexual orientation are causing courts now to openly question the soundness and validity of earlier decisions. The district judge in her opinion explicitly asked the 2^nd Circuit to reconsider its prior decision.

The United States Supreme Court has never addressed the issue of whether employers treating employees unfavorably because of their sexual orientation constitutes sex discrimination under Title VII.  However, the Court has held that Title VII’s plain wording outlaws any form of mistreatment of an employee based on sex, regardless of whether Congress actually considered the particular circumstances back in 1964.  The Court has explained that Title VII‘s prohibition on sex discrimination is broad, encompassing “the entire spectrum of disparate treatment of men and women resulting from sex stereotypes.” Title VII pertains to all employer “treatment of a person in a manner which but for that person’s sex would be different.”

By its plain terms, the crux of sexual orientation discrimination — firing a woman who dates another woman, but not firing a man who dates a woman — is sex discrimination pure and simple.
One recent court described the assumption that a woman will be romantically attracted to a man to be “the quintessential gender stereotype.”  We look to these appellate courts and subsequently the US Supreme Court to come to the same conclusion.

During the marriage equality struggle, we sang “We Wish for Marriage Equality” to the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”  Later in the carol, instead of demanding “figgy pudding” as they did back in 1935 when the song was written, we demanded marriage licenses and vowed “we won’t go until we get them.” This holiday season our community must commit that we won’t go until we get workplace and transgender student equality.  With our community’s enormous talent, resources, and commitment to living our lives freely and openly, we know that together we can.

Inconvenient Truth
December 1, 2016

No aspect of the 2016 election was more unsettling for us than being forced to confront one of life’s most discomforting but universal truths: despite our best efforts to direct a particular result, ultimately we cannot control what happens.

No one knows this truth more deeply than a good friend of ours who, as the final weeks of the election campaign were unfolding, was forced to confront it in the most profound and personal way possible: he learned that the cancer he had been diagnosed with a year earlier had metastasized and was spreading aggressively. He had just a short time left to live. Lying on a hospital bed at home under hospice care, he learned the results of the election. The news troubled him greatly even though he would soon be gone. He no longer had the time or capability to check news sources or follow the particulars of the drama taking place. He knew the essentials of what was going on and had deep concern for the future of all of us left behind.

Our friend, who had spent his entire work life in HIV/AIDS prevention and education, had practiced meditation for many years and invited friends to come sit in meditation with him every morning in his apartment. He grounded us in our breath and guided us in letting go of any tension we were holding in our bodies. He invited us to clear our minds of negative thoughts and emotions that were not helping us.

He offered that while not ignoring harmful things going on, we could view life as an art gallery, seeing beauty and goodness all around us. Our friend had realized that in life “there’s always something else left to do,” but he felt his life was complete. He was radiant. He accepted his impending death and did not fear it. He was grateful for his life, and we were all grateful for him as well. As he was dying, he was clearly very much alive. He said goodbye.

But he didn’t die as he thought he would. Even as he had done the ultimate letting go—accepting, even welcoming his death—life would not let him go just yet. He joked, “I’d really like to be able to have a date I could mark on the calendar for everyone.” Being alive was painful for him both physically and emotionally, and he couldn’t control when he would go. “I’m ready to be gone, but I’m still here.” Most importantly, our friend’s heart remained open. He continued to speak of love and compassion.  His good intentions sustained him, even when he fell short.

Franklin D. Roosevelt in his first inaugural address in 1932 proclaimed: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Roosevelt in the same address declared: “This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.” Our good friend has confronted the fear of death and has been able to choose not to indulge it. He has given us the gift of sharing the truth of the last days of life frankly and boldly. Perhaps his wisdom is part of our way forward.

We’ll Never Give Up
November 24, 2016

Just five months ago we joined thousands of other people at the corner of Castro and Market to come together in the face of the massacre of 49 members of LGBT community at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. We described it in the San Francisco Bay Times as “our worst nightmare as LGBTIQ people.” Two weeks ago we returned to that famous street corner, as did thousands of others, in shock, disbelief, and sadness in response to another nightmare: the results of the November 8, 2016, election.

At the November 9 gathering we read from one of the Dalai Lama’s poems, whose refrain implores: “Never give up. No matter what is going on around you. Never give up.” We had read the same poem nearly eight years ago to the day at yet another Castro rally the night after Prop 8 passed.

In the midst of our anger and dismay at the passage of Prop 8 in 2008, we also began contemplating the way forward, asking ourselves the counterintuitive question: Despite the horrific loss, what was the best thing that happened on Election Day? Our answer: Over 6.4 million Californians had voted on our side in favor of marriage equality, 48 percent of the electorate and the most people who had ever voted in favor of LGBT rights on any state ballot measure. And Barack Obama, who supported LGBT rights (although not full marriage equality) became the first African American President. Prop 8’s passage ended up unleashing a passion for marriage and full LGBT equality that was unanticipated and unlike anything seen before. It raised the visibility of LGBT people and their families to a new level. President Obama became the first President ever to embrace the freedom to marry and did countless things to advance LGBT rights. Just six and a half years after Prop 8 passed, nationwide marriage equality became the law of the land.

We’ve asked ourselves the same question this year: What’s the best thing that happened on Election Day? We confess that we’ve struggled to find an answer. We, like millions of Americans, have many fears about what might lie ahead and well-founded reasons for concern. Yet we truly don’t know what the future will bring. We are struck by how many of our friends and acquaintances from many different walks of life feel threatened personally by the results of election, and by how many of us are going through versions of the grieving process. We also take note that 62 million Americans and counting voted for the presidential candidate who supported full LGBTIQ equality—and she actually won the popular vote. Indeed, for the second time in the last four elections, the candidate who won the most votes will not become President. Who knows what the results of this election and what follows will unleash in these 62 million Americans, especially those most directly affected? Who knows what might emerge?

Our thoughts often turn to Gavin Grimm, the Virginia transgender teen who, of all things, has the task of convincing five members of the United States Supreme Court in the coming months that he should be able to use his school’s bathrooms just as all of his classmates can. No one knows how actions the new administration might take could affect the posture of the case. But one thing we do know is that Gavin is not giving up. Despite the absurdity that the highest court in the land has chosen to decide how Gavin can go to the bathroom, the case gives our community a new opportunity to educate the Court and the nation about the real lives and struggles of transgender people.

If Gavin’s not giving up, we’re not giving up. We’ll never give up on ourselves, our community, our resilience, our power and the future. We’ll never give up on the intention of our community to make the world a better place. We’ll never give up on hope.

Keep Calm and Stay Agitated
November 10, 2016

(Editor’s Note:  This column was written for the San Francisco Bay Times with a submission deadline before election day,  but for publication after the election)

Now that Americans have all cast their votes, we and many others are beginning to assess in real terms the impact of the election—in particular, how it will affect our lives. A few weeks ago, at John’s high school reunion in Kansas City, we were struck by how differently two of his classmates’ perceived the potential impact of the election on their lives.

One classmate, a straight man who is enormously supportive of LGBT rights, and his wife are compassionate physicians. Moreover, for the past 25 years, they have cared day in and day out for their own special needs son who has severe physical challenges. This classmate remarked that “our day-to-day issues make what goes on in Washington just not worth agitating about. Neither Hillary or Donald (or Gary) are going to make a huge difference to what occupies” us.

By contrast, a gay classmate, who has been with his partner for 23 years and someday hopes to marry him, offered a different perspective. He told us: “We may get married sometime soon, but as you know, Missouri is not as progressive as California—and we are waiting to see how this particular election turns out, especially for our local politicians; many of them still want to fight marriage equality.”

As LGBT people and also as people who have always believed that we should try to use the political system and public policy to better people’s lives, the first classmate’s remarks initially took us aback. What do you mean that “what goes on in Washington was just not worth agitating about?” We’ve been agitating about what goes on in Washington for years. Millions of other LGBT people have been doing so as well.

We’ve gone from protesting the Supreme Court 1986 decision permitting states to put LGBT people in jail to advocating for, and then celebrating, the Court’s 2015 nationwide marriage equality decision. The year 2017 will once again witness the Court addressing a vital LGBT issue: transgender kids’ right to use public restrooms fitting their gender identity.

We protested the federal government’s inaction on HIV/AIDS dating back over 30 years ago, and through Stuart’s professional work participated in the development of effective HIV/AIDS policy. We witnessed the passage of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and its eventual repeal, and participate in the ongoing struggle to pass nationwide protections against discrimination in employment, housing, and public services. The identity of the President, members of Congress, and the Supreme Court justices has had, and will continue to have, a profound effect on the lives of LGBT people.

John’s gay classmate’s thoughts also highlight the importance of statewide and local elections to LGBT people. Local elections, even in places like the San Francisco Bay Area, not long ago had significant effects on the rights and protections of LGBT people; they continue to have vital impacts across the country. Ever since the passage of Proposition 8, we have felt a vague foreboding on election day—a lasting imprint of LGBT people’s ongoing vulnerability as not all our basic civil rights are yet protected nationwide.

But the first classmate’s reaction suggested great wisdom as well. The circumstances of his life mean that caring for his son and family (not to mention his patients) is what he devotes most of his life to. It reminds us of the importance of caring for ourselves, those closest to us, and others as well, regardless of the outcome of elections or whether or not our movement for civil rights is enjoying success or facing challenges.

Indeed, caring for ourselves and others is the motivating reason for the movement itself. His reaction also points to the value of finding well being and happiness that sustains regardless of the results of elections or other life circumstances. Homo-bi-transphobia has caused far too many of us to live far too long in pain and isolation, but our community has found extraordinary and often creative ways to find joy, meaning, and human connection in the face of formidable personal and political obstacles. We don’t know what the next four or eight years will bring, but we will benefit by finding wellbeing amidst both the joys and the sorrows that lie ahead. Let’s keep calm and stay agitated.

Reunited and It Feels So Good
October 27, 2016

When I was a first-grader in Kansas City back in 1964, my classmate Katie and I announced some exciting news to our fellow classmates:  we were going to get married! We picked a date for our wedding, to be held on the playground at recess, and soon began making plans.  But one morning as we sat with crayons and paper in hand, writing out invitations for our fellow first graders, our teacher put the kibosh on our impending nuptials.  Leaning over us, she said, “Don’t you think you’ve taken this a little too far?”  Little did she know how prophetic her words would be:  40 years later my husband and I would be one of the first ten couples to marry in San Francisco City Hall on February 12, 2004 — and much of the nation would be asking a question remarkably similar to hers.

Stuart and I just returned last week from my 40^th high school reunion in Kansas City, attended by over 25 of my elementary school classmates and many other high school friends and spouses.  The reunion was fantastic, and as I was telling my first grade story to my friend Rebecca, she interrupted to exclaim that she and I had in fact pulled off the feat in second grade.  She recounted how one day at recess, the two of us held hands, faced each other, and exchanged vows, surrounded by classmates as witnesses.  I was, of course, delighted to learn of our success.  I wondered if in fact it somehow foreshadowed how Stuart and I and many other couples and supporters did not give up after our 2004 marriages were taken away.  Together, we worked to have California’s LGBT marriage ban declared unconstitutional.  In 2008, Stuart and I married legally in San Francisco City Hall – not on a school playground — surrounded by friends and family.

As I thought back on prior high school reunions, I realized how radically different the legal status of our relationship – and thereby the status of LGBT couples more generally — was at the time of each one.  At my 20^th reunion in 1996, we had no legal rights; no state had marriage equality, civil unions, or domestic partnerships; and Congress had just enacted the notorious “Defense of Marriage Act,” denying federal recognition for any LGBT marriages that might take place in the future.  The State of Missouri had laws criminalizing the sexual activity of LGBT people– even in the privacy of their own home.

By my 30^th reunion in 2006, the United States Supreme Court had declared all such laws unconstitutional.  Missouri could no longer imprison us for being gay, but as the same time the state afforded us no legal rights or recognition as a couple.  Stuart and I were by then California domestic partners, but we lost that legal status as soon as we left the state. The marriage equality movement was struggling mightily in the face of great adversity.  Massachusetts was the only state where LGBT couples could marry, but opponents were mounting efforts aimed to take that freedom away.  Many states had just passed anti-marriage equality constitutional amendments, and then President George W. Bush was calling for a federal constitutional amendment barring LGBT couples from marrying.  Stuart and I were one of the plaintiff couples in the lawsuit to have California’s marriage ban declared unconstitutional.

Last week, we attended my 40^th reunion as a legally married couple, whose marriage is recognized in every state in the union and is protected by the United States Constitution.  And it felt great.  My high school is a public school whose graduates come from a wide variety of backgrounds.  Members of our class have done many different things in their lives, from turtle farming to medicine, ministry to landscaping, dance and theater to law.  Those in attendance at the reunions — from 20 years ago to last week — have embraced Stuart as part of the community.   Twenty years ago, a straight evangelical Christian minister offered to perform a sacramental wedding ceremony for us if we wanted one.  Last week, classmates celebrated the success of the LGBT movement with us and wanted to hear what it was like for me to grow up as a gay person in school.

I left the reunion last week with a profound sense of the power of friendship that can be forged when we share something meaningful together – such as growing up and going to school together.  Much still lies ahead for the LGBT equality movement.  But as we continue to work to engender understanding of each other’s common humanity, I can’t wait to see what things will be like at our 50^th reunion.

King Harald and Lyric Scott: Can Love Win Again?
September 29, 2016

When we took a few moments to catch up on the news last week, we came upon two striking online videos that could not have appeared more different: King Harald of Norway’s much lauded speech embracing diversity delivered at a royal garden party, and excerpts of Charlotte, North Carolina, resident Lyric Scott’s Facebook Live feed, recording her immediate reaction to the fatal police shooting of her father, Keith Lamont Scott, near her house.

The depth and honesty of King Harald’s words at first startled then delighted those in attendance, and resonated not just in Norway but around the world. In his speech, the 79-year-old monarch celebrated Norway’s diversity and exhorted its citizens to deepen their sense of their common humanity. In a voice quiet, yet full of conviction, he reminded listeners that Norwegians were not only those who had been born in the county, but that “Norwegians have also immigrated from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Poland, Sweden, Somalia and Syria.” Indeed, he explained that his own grandparents had immigrated from Denmark and England in the beginning of the 20th Century. “It is not always easy to say where we come from, to which nationality we belong. Home is where the heart is. That cannot always be placed within country borders.”

The King offered numerous examples of the country’s diversity, including “Norwegians (who) believe in God, Allah, everything and nothing.” And he embraced the LGBT community, explaining:  “Norwegians are girls who love girls, boys who love boys, and girls and boys who love each other.”

In the beginning minutes of Lyric Scott’s Facebook Live video, Scott exclaims that “the police just shot my daddy four times for being black.” In angry, impassioned, and expletive-laden language, Scott throughout the video records in real time her thoughts as to what is going on. She expounds upon her belief that the police pulled up to her father’s car undercover as he was waiting to pick up his son at the school bus stop, and “shot my daddy because he was black. He was a sitting in the car reading a … book—so they shot him.”

Police say they were searching for someone else with an outstanding arrest warrant when they saw Keith Scott leave his car with a gun. According to police, Scott returned to his car; officers then approached the car; and when he came out of the car again with a gun, they shot him because they claim he “posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers … .”

Lyric Scott questions how the police could have legitimately feared her father because she says he was disabled, and suspects the police were planting a gun in his car even as she spoke. She also complains about the ambulance response time, warns of repercussions if her father ends up dying, and taunts police officers—all the while worried about how her little brother will get home from the bus stop.

And then Lyric’s Facebook feed records her live reaction when she learns from news reports that her father has died. She cries out, “they just killed my daddy,” and “my daddy is dead.” She utters a primal wail of grief and despair—in one sense voicing universal human pain some of us experience only internally, and in another sense vocalizing anguish and desperation unlike anything we have had to experience in our lives.

We do not know the facts of what literally happened that afternoon in Charlotte. But we do know that wealth disparities and racial segregation and discrimination persist in our society. The recently released 2016 Allianz Global Wealth Report found that what it calls the “Unequal States of America” has the highest disparity of wealth of any nation in the world. Protests over police shootings of African Americans bespeak not only problems in American policing and criminal justice, but more generally of intolerable racial disparities. Regardless of whether Lyric Scott’s assessment of her father’s death is literally true—something we do not know—her observation reflects reality figuratively. Continued racial and wealth disparities in this country contribute greatly to the fact that blacks are shot by police in disproportionate numbers to whites.

How then do we hold King Harald’s conclusion to his garden party address: “When we sing ‘Yes we love this country’ (Norway’s national anthem), we have to remember that we also sing about each other … . Therefore, the national anthem is also a declaration of love to the Norwegian people. My biggest hope … [is] that we can know that we—despite our differences—are one people.”

Do the King’s words only apply to Norway? Are they too idealistic even for that country? Do they pertain at all to the America laid bare in Charlotte, Tulsa, Baton Rouge, Chicago, Orlando, Cleveland, Ferguson, the Bay Area, and beyond? As an LGBT community, we proclaimed “Love Wins” when we achieved nationwide marriage equality last year. Lyric Scott’s haunting cry renders King Harald’s words a quiet plea for love to prevail in a world increasingly shown to be polarized. We must answer the sobering question: how do we make love win again?

Chicago Gun Violence Is an LGBT Issue
September 15, 2016

Over 500 people have been murdered and nearly 3,000 people shot in the city of Chicago already this year.  August alone witnessed 92 homicides and over 400 shootings in the city.  Chicago-based rapper Bo Deal explained in a recent BBC interview: “The past few months, I’ve seen more people close to me” that have “been shot and killed than I have ever.  Everybody’s got a gun….  I’ve never seen so many guns.” It’s “like somebody dropped off crates of guns in everybody’s hood.”  It “seems like it’s designed for us to lose… . Somebody is putting all these guns here.”

Gun violence is a nationwide problem that is multifaceted.  But as Deal observed, proliferation of guns in America has been by “design” of the legal and political movement the NRA and its allies have led for decades, resulting in the seemingly unrestricted flow of firearms that is “putting all these guns here.”  As to Deal’s perception that it seemed as if “crates of guns” were being dropped into Chicago neighborhoods, a 2014 City of Chicago Report revealed that nearly 60% of guns involved in Chicago crime come from out-of-state, with 19% coming from Indiana which directly borders Chicago.  In President Obama’s words, “you’ve just got to hop across the border” to Indiana, a state with some of the weakest gun laws in the nation, and you can easily get a gun.

The 2014 report explained that Indiana, along with Mississippi and Wisconsin, the other two states responsible for most out of state guns coming into Chicago, “permit gun owners to sell their guns to other people without any background checks of the new buyer or paperwork recording the sale. This makes it incredibly easy for gun traffickers, violent offenders and other prohibited purchasers to buy guns undetected.  In those states, guns can move from buyer to buyer and land in the hands of a shooter or murderer without any paper trail.”

Veteran Indiana State Representative Dr. Vernon Smith observed:  “If there was ever a state that was owned totally by the NRA, Indiana is one…. Indiana has constantly protected the NRA and carried out the NRA’s agenda.”  And anti-LGBT Indiana Governor Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential running mate, has long been an NRA favorite, having addressed the leadership forum of the NRA’s lobbying arm earlier this year even before becoming Trump’s running mate.

Of course, many guns used in Chicago crimes do not come from out-of-state.  In the early 1980s, Chicago enacted strict gun registration requirements to reduce the number and availability of guns citywide.  However, the United States Supreme Court in 2010 declared Chicago’s law, which it described as “effectively banning handgun possession by almost all” city residents, unconstitutional in violation of the Second Amendment.  The five Justices appointed by Presidents Bush and Reagan, including the late Justice Antonin Scalia, constituted the majority.  Scalia himself authored the landmark 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller decision that created an individual constitutional right to possess a firearm under at least some circumstances.  And in 2014, a federal court invalidated another Chicago law aimed to stem gun violence, the city’s ban on retail and private gun sales.

Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court could have a profound effect on the future of gun violence in America, because Scalia’s vote was the deciding vote in both landmark gun control cases.  President Obama’s nominee to succeed him, Merrick Garland, appears to oppose Scalia’s position.  Hillary Clinton, who strongly supports gun control, and Donald Trump, who strongly opposes it, would likely appoint very different justices to the Court.

Why do we write about these issues in a column that focuses on LGBT issues?

Last week, the Orlando Regional Medical Center announced that the last hospitalized survivor of the June 12 massacre that killed 49 members of the LGBT community was released to go home.  At the time of the shooting, we and many LGBT organizations and leaders stressed that gun control was an LGBT issue.  Just days after the shooting, the Human Rights Campaign announced a new “organizational position that the safety of LGBTQ people in the United States requires the adoption of common-sense gun violence prevention measures.”  Lambda Legal’s Deputy Legal Director Hayley Gorenberg wrote that “we must step up and fight to end gun violence.”  And we need to do it “now.”

The Chicago killings affect LGBT people too, including all LGBT people who live in communities where violence occurs or who have family, friends, and colleagues who live there.  And both the Orlando and Chicago killings disproportionately affect marginalized racial minorities.  The vast majority of the Orlando shooting victims were Latinx members of the LGBT community, and Chicago gun violence disproportionately affects African American and Latinx people, including those who are LGBT.

Ultimately, it comes down to recognizing and embracing our common humanity.  At root, the marriage equality movement was about the freedom to marry the person you love no matter who you are or whom you love.  Likewise, ending gun violence is about our common humanity and the human right to live free from gun violence no matter who you are.

We’re With You All the Way Gavin
September 1, 2016

“It’s been exhausting.”  So explained transgender high school senior Gavin Grimm in a recent Washington Blade interview, describing his now years long fight simply to be able to use his school’s restrooms as all his classmates can.  When Gavin prevailed at the 4^th Circuit Federal Court of Appeal earlier this year, his Virginia school district couldn’t just let things be and allow Gavin to live in relative peace his senior year of high school.  Instead, the district took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which earlier this month issued a stay of the appellate court’s order.  As a result, Gavin is prohibited from using his school’s regular restrooms until the Supreme Court decides whether or not to take the case and if they take it, issues a final decision in the case.  That could be months from now.

Five of the nine Supreme Court Justices had to vote in favor of the stay for the Court to issue it.  Predictably, Justices Roberts, Alito, and Thomas, consistent gay rights opponents at the Court, voted in favor.  In a move that raised eyebrows, Justice Kennedy, who has written all of the Court’s landmark gay rights cases, voted in favor, too.  However, his stay vote may not be predictive of his ultimate view of the case, and he may be concerned about other legal issues in the case unrelated to the underlying issue of transgender equality.  Justices Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor, consistent LGBT rights supporters at the Court, opposed the stay.  However, Justice Breyer, who has also always voted in favor of LGBT rights, curiously voted for the stay, although he appears personally to have opposed it.  In explaining his vote, he said he was doing it “as a courtesy” to the other four justices who had voted in favor of the stay, and because the Court was on summer recess.

Justice Breyer’s words broke our hearts.  What about “courtesy,” moreover dignity and respect for Gavin, a vulnerable 17 year old transgender student?  While the Court waits months to receive legal briefs and decide what to do with the case, Justice Breyer and his fellow Justices will take for granted their own use of public facilities.  Meanwhile, Gavin’s school district will continue to deny him this basic human right, thereby isolating and stigmatizing him daily.  As Gavin has articulated, this delay and denial carries a very real human cost. In Gavin’s Blade interview, he urged people to imagine how they would feel “if they were the only person forced to use the facility separate of that of their peers, especially when [the] decision was made in a public way that opened them up to the abuse ….”

A Texas federal trial court judge, already notorious for an anti-marriage equality ruling, dealt another blow to transgender kids last week when he issued a preliminary injunction striking down the U.S. Department of Education’s guidelines protecting transgender students from discrimination that the 4^th Circuit had embraced in Gavin’s case.  Judge Reed O’Connor’s order forbids the federal government from proceeding with any ongoing or future investigation of states or school districts for failing to comply with the guidelines and from otherwise enforcing the regulations through new lawsuits.  Just days after the decision, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who brought the suit and also has a long record of hostility to LGBT people, filed a new lawsuit before Judge O’Connor, this time challenging new federal government regulations expanding transgender people’s access to medical treatment.

The root issue to which these and other federal lawsuits involving transgender rights pertain is whether federal statutes prohibiting sex discrimination apply to discrimination on the basis of gender identity.  We take heart that four of the eleven federal circuit courts have already held that gender identity discrimination is unlawful sex discrimination under federal law.  The Texas decision is just a single lower court judge’s ruling, not an appellate ruling, and serious questions exist as to whether the judge exceeded his authority in issuing such a broad order.  Further, the Texas judge could not and did not prohibit the federal government from defending its guidelines and supporting transgender students in ongoing cases, such as Gavin’s case and litigation over North Carolina’s discriminatory legislation, known as HB2. Of course, the problem could be solved once and for all if voters elect Democratic majorities that are pro-equality in both the House and Senate and Hillary Clinton as President. Then, Congress could simply amend federal discrimination statutes to include gender identity and sexual orientation explicitly.

Meantime, the legal roller coaster for Gavin and other transgender people continues, and conservative anti-LGBT interests use transgender people as political targets for fundraising and gaining political power.  These interests have repeatedly targeted our community, most recently in the decade plus struggle for nationwide marriage equality.  Our community is facing the current challenges with the same commitment and determination that we have in the past, and we must support each other as the struggle continues.  We’re with you all the way Gavin.  We’re all in this together.

“Gay Olympics” or Gay Olympics?
August 18, 2016

When the Olympic Games come around every two years, it always feels a bit bittersweet to us.  We love the dazzling performances of extraordinary athletes like Simone Biles and Michael Phelps. However, the Olympics also bring back the sting of the United States Olympic Committee going to court back in 1982 to stop Dr. Tom Waddell and other organizers of the first ever competition for LGBT athletes from calling those games the “Gay Olympics.”  The USOC sued Waddell and other LGBT organizers just weeks before the first games were to commence, fighting all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it won.  As a result, the LGBT athletic event would have to be known as the “Gay Games,” and organizers were forbidden from calling it the “Gay Olympics.”  The USOC went so far as putting a lien (later withdrawn) on the home of Waddell — who was very ill with HIV/AIDS at the time — to recoup $96,000 in attorneys’ fees.  And adding salt to the wound, Vaughn Walker, a then closeted gay man, who later became a federal judge and wrote the lower court decision striking down Proposition 8, represented the USOC in the litigation.

Waddell and the other organizers, represented by the legendary LGBT rights attorney Mary Dunlap, argued that the USOC’s not contesting the existence of the Special Olympics, Junior Olympics, Police Olympics, Eskimo Olympics, Rat Olympics, Frog Olympics, Cockroach Olympics, Tank Olympics, Beer Olympics … meant that the USOC’s purpose in trying to prevent the Gay Olympics from existing was clear:  discrimination.  Organizers explained that the Gay Olympics was intended not only to provide a venue for athletes from around the world to participate freely regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, but to dismantle harmful stereotypes about LGBT people.  The Gay Olympics would show the world that LGBT people could be athletes — indeed champion athletes.

The USOC prevailed at the district, appellate, and Supreme Court levels, with the court majorities never squarely addressing the issue of discrimination.  But appellate judge Alex Kozinski in dissent at the Ninth Circuit largely agreed with the LGBT organizers, observing that “handicapped, juniors, police, Explorers, even dogs are allowed to carry the Olympic torch, but homosexuals are not.”  Kozinski noted that the USOC appeared to be trying to preserve “the very image of homosexuals that the [Waddell and other organizers] seek[] to combat” based on its view of the lack of “wholesomeness” of LGBT people.  Justices Brennan and Marshall in dissent at the Supreme Court concurred, observing that the LGBT organizers intended to use “the word ‘Olympic,’ to promote a realistic image of homosexual men and women that would help them move into the mainstream of their communities.” The title “The Best and Most Accomplished Amateur Gay Athletes Competition,” just doesn’t have the same ring and doesn’t send the same message as “Gay Olympics.”

Even though the USOC got its way, LGBT athletes were not deterred, and have come out and excelled around the world.  The Gay Games and other LGBT athletic events have been held for over 30 years.  Indeed, the 1994 Gay Games, held in New York in conjunction with the 25^th anniversary of Stonewall, drew nearly 11,000 athletes, greater than the number of competitors in the 1992 Olympic Games themselves.

Former Olympic champions — the pride of the United States – who were closeted when they competed years ago, have subsequently come out proudly.  Olympic hero Greg Louganis, the only male diver to win both diving Gold Medals in consecutive Olympics, came out as gay in 1995.  We’ll never forget his extraordinary performance at the 1988 Seoul Olympics that earned him the title of ABC’s Wide World of Sports 1988 “Athlete of the Year.”  And when Louganis came out, he revealed he accomplished this exceptional feat as a person living with HIV.

We also have strong memories of Caitlyn (then Bruce) Jenner leaving her competition literally in the dust, when she broke the world record winning the Gold Medal in the men’s decathlon in 1976 Olympics.  Jenner, who famously came out as transgender and transitioned in 2015, grabbed a fan’s American flag and waved it during his victory lap back in 1976, creating a new Olympic tradition that many now follow.

And although tennis great Billie Jean King was not out throughout much of the time she reigned atop the women’s tennis world, she coached the 1996 women’s Olympic tennis team as an out lesbian.  King, whom Sports Illustrated magazine honored in 1972 as “Sportsman of the Year,” received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her lifetime of accomplishments, and President Obama appointed her (along with openly gay ice hockey player Caitlin Cahow) to the official American delegation to the 2014 Sochi Olympics to demonstrate the very visibility of LGBT athletes that Waddell and his fellow organizers had envisioned three decades before.

The process of dismantling anti-LGBT prejudice that pervades sports and anti-LGBT attitudes in many of the 207 countries that compete in the Olympics has been slow.  However, as the San Francisco Bay Times reported in last edition’s cover story, a record number of openly LGBT athletes (at least 43), including the Bay Area’s own Kelly Griffin, are competing in the Rio Olympics, with some estimates of the actual number of LGBT competitors to be 500 or more.

We may not be able to have a “Gay Olympics,” but they can’t stop us making the Olympics gay – and slowly but surely we are.

Love Embodied: Kryptonite to Hate
July 7, 2016

At this year’s San Francisco Pride Parade, we had the privilege of marching with a special contingent memorializing all those killed at Pulse nightclub in the early hours of June 12. Organized with lightning speed by Richard Sizemore and many others, 49 of us held individual memorials, featuring the name and a life-size photograph of each of the victims. Hundreds of others wore shirts, stating simply “We Are Orlando.” For the previous dozen years, we had made the trip down Market Street, cheering and chanting wildly for marriage equality. This year we marched in silence, dedicating each step to the memory of the person whose portrait we held. We were a means for them to have a presence in the parade. And instead of raucous cheering, the crowds greeted us predominantly with reverent silence or noble applause for each of those lost. Many fought back tears.

The vast majority of victims were Latinx members of the LGBT community. We wanted to hold the memorials of Christopher “Drew” Leinonen and Juan Ramon Guerrero. They were the couple that lived together and that news outlets reported hoped to marry someday. But instead, their families contemplated a joint funeral for them. Juan’s sister Aryam described the couple to Time magazine: “They were honestly so in love. They were soul mates. You can tell by how they looked at each other.”

We were struck by how much Juan’s family and Drew’s mother, Christine Leinonen, not only accepted but also celebrated Juan and Drew. Aryam described Juan’s family as “really loving and accepting” of Juan when he came out and that Juan “was so much love and light.” Catherine McCarthy, a lifelong friend of Drew, wrote in the Washington Post that Christine’s “not just ‘tolerating’ [Drew’s] sexuality, but truly loving him, all of him, allowed him to exist unfettered and undiluted.” In a live interview on ABC television the morning of June 12, Christine, desperate to learn any news of Drew, told the world how “proud of him” she was for starting the gay-straight alliance at high school over fifteen years before, an accomplishment that won him the Florida Holocaust Museum’s Anne Frank Humanitarian Award “to bring gays and straights together.”As demonstrated by Drew’s founding his high school’s gay-straight alliance, Drew and Juan’s love was not passive; it was powerful. Catherine McCarthy described Drew as “love, embodied” and explained that “[h]e had all the time for love because he left little time for anything else.” According to the Orlando Sentinel, Drew and Juan’s mutual friend Brandon Wolf, who himself survived the Pulse massacre, memorialized them: “[Drew] and Juan were the love we wish to see in the world, the kind that pulls people together, breaks down walls, the kryptonite to hate.”

Nothing spoke more of the power of their love than Christine’s urgent entreaties to the nation that Sunday morning as she searched for her son: “We’re on this earth for such a short time. Let’s try to get rid of the hatred and the violence, please.” And she spoke of a different “club” from the Pulse nightclub, a “club” that “nobody wants to be in,” that of loved ones of gun violence victims. She appealed to all Americans: “[P]lease could we do something with the assault weapons so that we could stop this club from ever getting any new members. I beg all of you, please.”

When we married at San Francisco City Hall in February 2004 and found our lives transformed by the sense of dignity we experienced for the first time as LGBT people, we vowed to do everything in our power to make the dignity that comes with marriage equality something that all Americans could experience. We feel a similar urgency now. We cannot fully honor the lives of those lost in Orlando on June 12 unless we do everything in our power not just to reduce hatred but to eliminate access to the firearms that provide the means by which people carry out these types of massacres and other gun violence.

Drew’s close friend Catherine wrote: “There will be a time to change our laws. A time when this sharp grief will shift into a hot and forceful anger. We will not let their deaths go unremembered, nor leave any questions unanswered.” The American freedom to marry movement achieved something that often seemed unimaginable: nationwide marriage equality. It took millions and millions of us, our friends, families, and strangers doing everything we could and employing every skill we possess for our love, dignity, and common humanity. We never, ever gave up. It’s time to do the same to silence the gunfire. It’s time to embody love to become the kryptonite to hate.

Authors’ Note:  The activists who came together to make the We Are Orlando contingent a reality are too numerous to name here individually. However, we want to acknowledge the inspired leadership and dedication of Richard Sizemore, Mason Smith, Richel Desamparado, Tristan Moaveniyan, PSPrint, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and San Francisco Pride.

The Pulse of Pride
June 23, 2016

Joining the iconic march down Market Street in San Francisco on the last Sunday in June—or down any main street anywhere in the world at a Pride celebration—to us is the essence of Pride. Millions of us together show the world outwardly our inner beauty and strength as LGBTIQ people and supporters. As we march, we hear cheers from the crowd that drown out voices external or internal that have told us there is something wrong with us. We celebrate the gifts of being born LGBTIQ.

This year’s parade takes on special significance because of the catastrophic massacre of LGBTIQ people and allies on Latin night at Pulse nightclub in Orlando—a place where people thought it was safe to come, dance, and be themselves. When we heard the news two Sundays ago, we were filled with utter horror, shock, and sadness. Even though we did not personally know anyone at Pulse nightclub that night, we identified immediately with all those who were there. They were kin.

Orlando embodied our worst nightmare as LGBTIQ people—the fear that someone might attack or kill us simply because of who we are. Many of us have faced such threats, cared for victims of such violence, or mourned the loss of friends or family. For those of us lucky enough to face less risk, Orlando reminds us that millions of people around the world—LGBTIQ and otherwise—live with the daily threat of violence.

Orlando also caused us to reflect on how hatred of LGBTIQ people and the belief that there is something wrong with being LGBTIQ is learned and not innate. When the perpetrator Omar Mateen was a toddler crawling on the floor, he was not thinking anti-LGBTIQ thoughts and hating LGBTIQ people. He learned these attitudes. The day after the killings, Mateen’s father stated on Facebook that: “God will punish those involved in homosexuality,” apparently trying to articulate that people like his son should not punish gay people because God will. His words suggest one potential source of Mateen’s learning such horrific ideas.

And the fact that Mateen himself appears to be a person who was attracted to people of the same sex exposes another hideous element of homophobia: self-hatred. Sadly, many of us have felt self-hatred to some degree, and it is deeply disturbing to experience it. Orlando represents self-hatred at its worst, as Mateen killed and injured so many other people as he destroyed himself.

Never has it been more urgent for people who spread messages of condemnation or rejection to understand the devastating harm they cause, not just in Orlando, but also around the world, to millions of LGBTIQ people and their loved ones on an ongoing basis. In further remarks, Mateen’s father stated that “nobody has the right to harm anything, anybody.” We agree, and it does not stop with the harm that an assault rifle can inflict on others. Although we embrace the Constitution’s guarantees of freedom of thought, expression and religion, messages that there is something wrong with being LGBTIQ inflict inner and outer harm on LGBTIQ people even when the speaker or writer has no conscious intention to hurt someone else. It matters not whether the message comes in a religious context, like that of Mateen’s father, or otherwise.

Leelah Alcorn was a 16-year-old transgender youth from Ohio who concluded that the way she was treated at home, in the church, and at school because she was transgender made life so unbearable that she committed suicide last year. To make her life meaningful, she posted a plea on Facebook, timed to appear shortly after her death. After explaining that one of her parents had told her that she was wrong about her being transgender and that “God doesn’t make mistakes,” she pleaded: “If you are reading this, parents, please don’t tell this to your kids. Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate them self. That’s exactly what it did to me.”

Shortly after the shootings, Stuart’s 92-year-old dad wrote us an email that began: “More than ever, you have my love and support, and total empathy for what you and your whole community are enduring.” On Sunday, millions of us will set aside our fears to march and cheer to love and support each other as part of the LGBTIQ community. By doing so, we will be inviting the rest of the world to do the same.

Pride and Presidents
June 9, 2016

“Building a Society of Rights means there is no room for first- and second-class citizens. It means choosing inclusion over discrimination. It means creating unity from diversity.” These words sound as if they could have easily come from President Barack Obama’s eighth and final Pride Proclamation, marking June 2016 as LGBT Pride month. However, these words came from a different president: President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico in his June 2, 2016, Huffington Post essay explaining why he introduced legislation in the Mexican Congress to amend Mexico’s Constitution to make marriage equality the law of the nation.  Currently, marriage equality is the law in 9 of Mexico’s 31 states and the federal district of Mexico City.

The marriage equality movement in Mexico has been building quickly and steadily in the last several years. In late 2009, Mexico City passed legislation allowing LGBT couples to wed, and in 2010 the Mexican Supreme Court upheld the law and ruled that such marriages were valid throughout the nation. Progress continued in subsequent years.

Then last June, just days before the U.S. Supreme Court decided Obergefell, the Mexican Supreme Court issued its own marriage equality opinion. Unlike the U.S., the Mexican Supreme Court lacks the authority to issue one decision that directly and immediately invalidates all state marriage bans throughout the country. However, the Court held that any same-sex couple refused a marriage license anywhere in the country could seek a federal court injunction ordering that the couple be married and that granting the injunction was mandatory. The Court stated, “there is no justified reason that the matrimonial union be heterosexual, nor that it be stated as between only a man and only a woman… . Such a statement turns out to be discriminatory in its mere expression.”

In early 2016, the Mexican Supreme Court unanimously struck down the state of Jalisco’s marriage ban in its entirety, stating that it “undermined” people’s “self-determination” and violated “the principle of equality.” Guadalajara, Mexico’s second most populous city after Mexico City, is located in Jalisco. However, to have true nationwide marriage equality–where LGBT couples can simply marry without having to undertake the expensive and degrading process of obtaining a federal injunction–each Mexican state that currently lacks equality would need to enact its own legislation or the Supreme Court would need to invalidate each state’s law in separate challenges. In an interview, Supreme Court Justice Olga Sanchez Cordero urged states to adjust their rules to avoid the Court declaring their laws unconstitutional.

President Peña Nieto, though, wants to cut through this cumbersome process and “guarantee every person’s full marriage rights” once and for all through a constitutional amendment. The process of amending the Mexican Constitution is difficult, requiring 2/3 votes of both houses of Congress and ratification by a simple majority of the states. The President, however, noted that May 2016 polling showed that “66 percent of people fully or partially agree that same-sex marriage should be allowed under our Constitution.” While acknowledging some resistance, he stated that “as President, it is my duty to ensure that the personal beliefs and customs of some do not limit the human rights of others.”

Neither did President Peña Nieto limit his actions to marriage equality. He launched “an initiative to revise [the country’s] entire legal framework” and “identify any and all laws that go against equality and propose the necessary changes to improve them.”  He also announced in May that Mexico will join the United Nation’s LGBTI Core Group formed to promote LGBTI rights internationally.

We applaud President Peña Neito’s initiatives and the Mexican Supreme Court’s unanimous support for marriage equality. We look for nationwide marriage equality to come to Mexico soon. And we are reminded that when we go to the polls in November, we will have a stark choice as to whether the U.S. continues to have a President that embraces LGBT pride and acts on it, and a Supreme Court that protects the constitutional rights of LGBT Americans.

We Can’t Believe We’re Alive
May 19, 2016

We were in the car recently and turned on the radio to catch the headlines on the five o’clock news. We turned the volume up extra loud when we heard the lead story: the United States Department of Justice was suing the state of North Carolina for violating the civil rights of transgender Americans by denying them the right to use the bathroom that fit their gender identity.

We heard United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch name North Carolina’s notorious House Bill 2 (HB2) for what it is: unlawful discrimination against transgender people. Lynch did not mince words. She explained how North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory and the state legislature “created state-sponsored discrimination against transgender individuals, who simply seek to engage in the most private of functions in a place of safety and security—a right taken for granted by most of us.” Lynch exposed the duplicity of HB2’s proponents, explaining that they had “invent[ed] a problem that doesn’t exist as a pretext for discrimination and harassment.” She explained that HB2 “inflict[s] further indignity on a population that has already suffered far more than its fair share. This law provides no benefit to society—all it does is harm innocent Americans … This action is about a great deal more than just bathrooms. This is about the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens… .”

We were moved when Lynch, the first African American woman to head the Justice Department and herself a North Carolinian, went on to relate HB2 and the struggle for LGBT freedom to civil rights struggles of the past. Lynch explained: “This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation. We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. We saw it in fierce and widespread resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. And we saw it in the proliferation of state bans on same-sex unions intended to stifle any hope that gay and lesbian Americans might one day be afforded the right to marry. That right, of course, is now recognized as a guarantee embedded in our Constitution, and in the wake of that historic triumph, we have seen bill after bill in state after state taking aim at the LGBT community … [N]one of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something they are not… .” She reminded the nation that “[i]t was not so very long ago that states, including North Carolina, had signs above restrooms, water fountains and on public accommodations keeping people out based upon a distinction without a difference.”

Lynch impressed us further by speaking directly to the transgender community. She said: “Some of you have lived freely for decades. Others of you are still wondering how you can possibly live the lives you were born to lead. But no matter how isolated or scared you may feel today, the Department of Justice and the entire Obama Administration wants you to know that we see you; we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.”

We thought to ourselves: “We can’t believe we are alive.” The Attorney General of the United States is engaging the full force of the Executive Branch of the United States government to fight for the rights of transgender people. We’ve experienced similar feelings a few times over the last dozen years–when we married in San Francisco City Hall in February 2004, when Congress repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell by a supermajority, when the President came out for full marriage equality, and when the Supreme Court made it a reality. Standing up boldly for civil rights is exactly what our government should be doing, and millions of LGBT Americans over decades have lived their lives openly and proudly and worked to make this day a reality.

As the marriage equality struggle made abundantly clear, great harm can occur when Americans’ civil rights are put up to a popular vote. It’s déjà vu as legislatures and electorates are now putting transgender people’s dignity up to a vote. The Obama administration is doing exactly the right thing by trying to stop these laws dead in their tracks.

As with many other LGBT struggles, crisis presents opportunity. Over and over, when we have faced our greatest adversities, we have educated the nation about lives and ultimately about our common humanity and the universal human desire for safety and happiness. Attorney General Lynch in her remarks recognized how our nation’s advances in civil rights have not been “easy” and have come with “pain and suffering.” The current struggle sadly is no different. But we are very hopeful that what transgender Americans are doing in response to HB2 and other attacks—telling the truth of their lives—is educating Americans day by day.  As this process unfolds, we are very glad that the United States Department of Justice is by our side.

Exciting Developments for Marriage Equality in China
April 21, 2016

My grandparents grew up in a small village in southern China, and raised my mother and her siblings in Hawaii. My grandparents may have thought of themselves as very open-minded about marriage when they told my mother she did not have to have an arranged marriage – all they asked was that she marry a man who spoke their same village dialect of Cantonese.  But my mother had ideas of her own, and she looked far beyond the family village when she married my father, who is of English and Irish descent.

Our family has a history of working for marriage equality, and it wasn’t until 1967 that interracial marriages like my parents’ were legal in all 50 states. Although John and I have been together over 29 years now, our marriage has been legal in all 50 states for less than a year – yet we are already looking forward to a day when our marriage will be legal in China as well.

Marriage equality activists across the U.S. used to ask for marriage licenses every year as a way to demonstrate the unfairness of marriage discrimination, and to put a human face on the issue as a way to open hearts and change minds. Ultimately, when our marriage license was taken away, we joined others and sued the government – after many ups and downs, we prevailed.

We are heartened to see how couples in China and elsewhere in Asia have adopted this strategy of asking for marriage licenses. One brave couple in Changsha, China, asked for a marriage license – and when they were turned down, they sued the government.

Sun Wenlin and Hu Mingliang filed the first lawsuit in China for equal marriage rights.  When they arrived at their hearing before Changsha Furong People’s Court, they were greeted by cheers from hundreds of supporters waving rainbow flags. Although they lost the first legal round this past week, their case has generated tremendous public interest and support, demonstrating how quickly times are changing. As they plan their appeal, China is engaging in a national conversation about LGBT rights and marriage equality like never before. The New York Times noted that when the People’s Daily wrote and tweeted about the case, they even included a photograph of the plaintiff couple holding hands – a big step for the official newspaper of the Communist Party.

LGBT life is becoming increasingly visible in China, where homosexuality became legal in 1997 – several years before the last sodomy laws were overturned here in the United States. Shanghai has vibrant annual Pride celebrations, PFLAG chapters are active from Guangzhou to Beijing, and rising support in opinion polls show an unmistakable trend towards equality. In his majority Obergefell opinion for marriage equality, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “Confucius taught that marriage lies at the foundation of government.” This led to a nationwide social media conversation in China last year, and prompted one Chinese scholar to say that he thinks “the ruling will have a big impact on China and may promote the legalization of same-sex marriage in China.” Although my grandparents did not live to see this day, I hope they would have been proud.

Faggot
April 7, 2016

Last Sunday, our family had a wonderful dinner in the East Bay to celebrate Stuart’s mom’s 92^nd birthday.  On the way home from dinner, the three of us went to a small, quiet shopping center where I bought Stuart’s mom a new pill box at a drug store, while the two of them shopped at the grocery store.  Buying the pill box was fairly uneventful, although a somewhat mental challenged man, who may also have been on drugs, harassed some of the other customers, telling them they were rich and they should give him money.

As I left the drug store I passed the man, who told me I, too, was rich and should give him money.  I walked on by, choosing not to engage with him.  Seconds later, I heard him yell out at me, “faggot.”

I just kept on walking and joined Stuart and his mom at the grocery store. The man didn’t follow me and said nothing else to me.  His remark had little immediate impact on me.  I wondered if the man used the term “faggot” to some degree as a generic insult. I was neither dressed nor acting particularly “gay” or “not gay” that evening (just as I appeared neither rich nor not rich). The man was clearly disturbed and in need.

Nevertheless, I told Stuart on our way home from his mom’s place that if felt bizarre being called a “faggot” out of the blue while doing the eminently mundane act of walking in a quiet shopping center with a pill box in hand – indeed especially while I was doing such an ordinary thing.

I’ve been fortunate that I have relatively infrequently been called “faggot” or otherwise harassed or faced verbal insults as an LGBT person, although on occasion I have experienced significant threats.  Several years ago, I was leafleting and talking to students about marriage equality on the quad of a college campus when a large and intimidating student became enraged and called me a “fucking faggot” more times than I could count.  He stalked the two of us who were leafleting to the point that we called the police as he was screaming “fucking faggot” at me with his tightly clenched fist inches away from my chin.  We also feared he had a gun.  The police arrested him, and I pressed criminal charges against him in court.  That incident upset me greatly.

Nothing resembling that happened in last week’s incident, but the experience of being called a “faggot” out of the blue stayed with me.  I must admit I have wondered whether I was giving off a “gay vibe” even doing such an innocuous thing as carrying a pill box.  But the fact that being called a “faggot” was the last thing I expected or was thinking about that night struck me most. It reminded me that LGBT people still today, even in the Bay Area, never know when they could face insults, either subtle or not so subtle.  Some people feel a generalized license to make anti-gay insults as they wish.

Although I could brush off the incident as an adult today, hearing people verbally abuse others who appeared LGBT when I was growing up was really damaging to me then. It greatly contributed to my denying who I was to myself in an effort to ensure that no one would say that about me, although sometimes they still did.  It made coming out seem very risky and unattractive.  And, of course, it silenced my ability to speak up for myself and others.  Such insults, threats, and name calling continue to seriously harm many LGBT youth today.  And even casual name calling can be triggering or traumatizing for LGBT adults who have previously experienced substantial physical, verbal or emotional abuse.

As a white cisgender appearing male, the mundaneness of the circumstances of my being verbally gay bashed last Sunday night is an important reminder of how some LGBT people, women, people of color, and others experience this type of insult or scrutiny in myriad forms on a daily basis, simply living their lives as who they are.

We are all in this together, and we must continue to tell our stories of what it feels like to be who we are.  There’s nothing like getting a glimpse of what it feels like to walk in another’s shoes.

Bearing Witness
March 24, 2016

Ryan Kendall was a star witness for marriage equality and against so-called “conversion therapy” when he took the stand in the Proposition 8 trial in San Francisco federal court six years ago. Ryan bravely recounted some of the most vulnerable moments of his life as he told the story of his parents’ horrendous reaction to learning he was gay and of his surviving forced conversion therapy as a youth.  Ryan’s testimony marked a key moment in the trial because the immutability of sexual orientation is an important legal issue pertaining to constitutional rights of LGBT people. Ryan was in exactly the right place at the right time. Judge Vaughan Walker, who presided over the case and is gay, described Ryan’s testimony as “the most touching testimony of the trial,” – so powerful that it led Walker himself to reveal that he had undergone conversion therapy as well.  Since the Prop. 8 trial, Ryan has gone on to testify before numerous state legislatures about the harms of conversion therapy.

But Ryan knows firsthand that at any point in life one may be called upon to testify as a witness to love… or hate. A few years after his Prop. 8 testimony, Ryan found himself on the other side of the country and in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time.  In the end, though, he may have been just the right person to be there.

After the Prop. 8 trial, Ryan, a former Republican, dedicated his life to becoming a civil rights lawyer. His pursuit of excellence led him to Columbia University in New York but also happened to put him on a tragic collision course to witnessing a horrible hate crime. He recently recounted the experience in The Advocate:

It was on a warm spring night in late May 2013. I was out celebrating the end of the semester and wanted to continue the festivities in the gayborhood after a Columbia University-sponsored event at the Delancey ended. I got something to eat, hopped in a cab, and headed to Greenwich Village.

 Once there, I walked up the street, turning right on West Eighth Avenue, just in time to see Elliot Morales exchanging words with Mark Carson and his best friend, Danny Robinson.

 As I approached, I heard Morales repeatedly call Carson and Robinson “faggots.” I thought a fight might break out. So I passed them by on the left. As soon as I had gotten in front of them, though, I was frozen in place — paralyzed by the unmistakable crack of a gunshot behind me.

While Ryan was able to choose to be a witness in the Prop. 8 trial, he had no choice in witnessing a hate crime and a murder. Mark Carson was dead, shot by Elliot Morales – and as fate would have it, Ryan was present for the whole thing:

In the moment after a gunshot, you don’t think, you just do. I didn’t even have time to be afraid. Once I could move again, I turned around to see what had happened.

 As I did, Morales walked by, brandishing his weapon and saying, “Don’t you look at me.”

 But I did look, and I flagged down the responding police officers to tell them what I had seen. The images from that night remain with me. I will never forget the sight of Mark Carson dying at my feet — yet another young black man killed with a gun in the street.

Over three years later, Ryan, now a law student at the UCLA, recently returned to New York to testify at Morales’s murder trial.  He told the courtroom exactly what he had witnessed, and the jury convicted Morales of hate crime murder.

Ryan has never been a passive witness; he is perceptive, engaged, and circumspect. Ryan observed, “As Morales cross-examined me on the stand, I saw a broken man who could have been helped at so many turns.”

Ryan had used the months and years since the murder took place to reflect more widely on what he had witnessed:

In the first few months after the shooting, I was angry at Morales for stealing Carson’s life simply because he was gay. In the months and years that I’ve waited to testify against Morales, my anger at him receded.

Ryan found himself confronted with the question of whether “Carson’s death could have been prevented.”

Along with countless other LGBT people, their friends, and their families, Ryan, has used his voice tirelessly to convey the humanity of LGBT people to the world so that crimes such as the one Morales committed might someday no longer occur.  He has also worked to raise the self-esteem of LGBT people; indeed Morales at trial claimed to be bisexual.

Ryan examined what little he knew of Morales as a person.  He noted that Morales, 33 years old at the time of committing the murder, “had already had been incarcerated for 11 years after committing an armed robbery during which two women were bound and beaten. When Morales was released from prison, he doubtlessly found himself cast out into a society with little support or chance at a decent life…. Then it is no wonder that, as he testified in court, Morales was out of prison by May 2013 but staying on a friend’s couch, with little more than his clothes and a gun.”

Ryan, who describes himself as perceiving “the world through a lens of policy and law,” observes how our prison system seeks “to punish, not to rehabilitate,” how our society lacks sufficient “mental health and social services,” and how easy it is to obtain firearms.  He notes how difficult it is for a person convicted of such a felony to find a job.  He urges us to consider candidates’ positions on these issues as we make “crucial decision[s]” in the 2016 elections.  In Ryan’s words:

I can imagine a world where we choose to break the vicious cycle of imprisonment and recidivism and replace it with a virtuous cycle of education, job training, and hope.

In the end, maybe this murder couldn’t have been prevented. Maybe Morales would have been impervious to help. Maybe he would have found one way or another to kill someone.

But to honor Mark Carson’s life, we should at least try to make tragic outcomes like this less common. We should try to build a world with more love and less violence, with more opportunity and less suffering, with more hope and less hate.

Ryan’s essay regarding his experience, What Happens After You Witness a Hate Crime, is published here: http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2016/3/16/what-happens-after-you-witness-hate-crime

LGBT Rights and Abortion Rights Are Inseparable
March 10, 2016

Last week, the US Supreme Court heard one of the most important abortion rights cases in decades, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. At first blush, some LGBT folks might think that abortion rights have little to do with them. After all, gay men and lesbians don’t get “accidentally pregnant” — to quote a term used in some anti-marriage equality lower court decision of the past decade. However, LGBT rights and reproductive freedom have long been closely intertwined. At stake in both movements are individuals’ fundamental freedoms to control their own bodies and to decide for themselves the paths their lives will take.  LGBT people should care about women’s right to safe and legal abortion not only because it’s the right thing to do but because our two movements depend on each other.

Our first experience of the connection between the two movements came nearly 30 years ago when we participated in an LGBT direct action group, called “Queer and Present Danger,” that was part of the first and only shut down of the US Supreme Court.  The action was organized to protest the Court’s notorious Bowers v. Hardwick decision that upheld the constitutionality of so-called “sodomy” laws that criminalized intimate sexual activity between persons of the same sex.  Our group got along so well that we decided to keep working together on other pressing issues, such as HIV/AIDS and abortion rights.  At the time, during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, LGBT activists were pressing the Reagan administration and the federal government to end their neglect of people with HIV/AIDS.  “Operation Rescue,” a well funded right wing anti-choice group that blockaded Planned Parenthood and other clinics serving women, was also in high gear.  In 1988-1989, Operation Rescue held hundreds of blockades with thousands of arrests of their members. We took part in numerous actions regarding HIV/AIDS and in “clinic defense,” where we worked to ensure access to women’s clinics despite the presence of Operation Rescue.  We saw no separation between these two human rights struggles.

The US Supreme Court recognizes the connection as well.  Until the Supreme Court held in 1973 that women have a fundamental constitutional right to make reproductive choices for themselves, 46 states had laws interfering with a woman’s right to have a safe and legal abortion.  Until the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas decision finally overturned Bowers v. Hardwick in 2003, states could imprison LGBT people for sexual intimacy.  Some states even put people in jail for simply touching another person of the same sex in a sexual way.  Without these decisions, the government today would still be able to exert extraordinary control over the bodies of LGBT people and women.

Recent Supreme Court decisions in favor of constitutional freedoms for LGBT people rest on prior legal victories for reproductive freedom.  The Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision relied heavily on language from a key abortion rights precedent, when it stated:

“[M]atters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the [Constitution]…. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State….It is a promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter.”

That language comes verbatim from Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, which among other things invalidated a law that required a married woman to notify her husband before having an abortion. In Casey, the Court stated that what a woman experiences by having a child “is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman’s role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture. The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society.”

The fiercest opposition to both the LGBT and reproductive freedom movements comes from conservative Christian political forces.  These groups seek not only to raise money and gain political power off these issues, but to impose their personal religious and moral views on everyone through law.  LGBT and reproductive choice supporters have fought side by side in efforts to defeat right wing ballot initiatives. Moreover, with respect to both matters, the Supreme Court has held, quoting the Casey decision:  “The issue is whether the majority may use the power of the State to enforce … [their moral and religious] views on the whole society through operation of the criminal law. ‘Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.’”  As the Court stated in its 2015 marriage equality decision, “the idea of the Constitution ‘was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts.’ This is why ‘fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.’”

In this year’s abortion rights case before the Supreme Court, the reproductive freedom movement is drawing upon one of the key elements responsible for the recent successes of the LGBT movement:  coming out.  In 2014, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg attributed the “remarkable change” in lesbian and gay rights over recent years to the willingness of gay and lesbian Americans to “say who they are.”  The power of LGBT people coming out and telling their personal stories has been and continues to be integral to achieving and maintaining LGBT and marriage equality.

In Whole Woman’s Health, over a hundred women lawyers who have had abortions filed their own “coming out” brief, telling the Justices their stories as to how the freedom to decide for themselves what happens to their bodies was vital to their lives and well being.  Among those women are prominent women in the LGBT rights movement, such as Susan Sommer, Director of Constitutional Litigation for Lambda Legal, and Judy Appel, Executive Director of Our Family Coalition.  One woman who filed the brief explained:  “I am the daughter of a teenage mother who is the daughter of a teenage mother. I had an abortion when I was 16 years old and living in rural Oregon. I believe that access to a safe, legal abortion broke the familial cycle of teenage parenthood and allowed me to not only escape a very unhealthy, emotional[ly] abusive teenage relationship but to … work for one of the nation’s most storied civil rights organizations” and become a lawyer. “I often tell people … that access to a safe, legal abortion saved my life.”

The Supreme Court will likely issue its decision in Whole Woman’s Health the last week of June, on or near the first year anniversary of last year’s landmark marriage equality decision.  The success of the two movements will remain vital to the lives of all women and LGBT people.

Justice for Gavin Grimm
February 11, 2016

Gavin Grimm, a 16-year old high school junior from Gloucester, Virginia, simply wants to be able to use his school’s restrooms as all his classmates can.  But like LGBT couples who had to go to court just to be able to marry, Gavin has had to sue his school district for the right to use the boys’ room.  A panel of the Fourth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals just held argument on key parts of his case and could issue a decision soon.

The ACLU represents Gavin in court and through court filings we quote here, Gavin reveals his story.  Although Gavin was born biologically female, he was aware from early on “that he did not feel like a girl.”  By middle school age, Gavin had “acknowledged … to himself and to close friends” that he was male, and in the spring of freshman year he came out as transgender to his parents because the stress of hiding his gender identity was so overwhelming.  Gavin’s distress was so severe he couldn’t attend school.  With his parents’ assistance, Gavin started getting the professional treatment he needed from a psychologist experienced with gender dysphoria. The psychologist advised that Gavin should be able to live as a male and “should be treated as a boy in all respects, including with respect to his use of the restroom.”  Gavin began hormone therapy and legally changed his name.  The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles approved Gavin’s being identified as male on state identification cards and driver licenses.

At the beginning of sophomore year, Gavin and his mom let the school know what was going on and met with the principal and guidance counselor to explain that Gavin was a transgender boy and that, “consistent with his medically supervised treatment, he would be attending school as a male student.”  Although Gavin initially consented to using a separate restroom located in the nurse’s office because he didn’t know how his classmates would react, Gavin “was pleased to discover that his teachers and the vast majority of his peers respected the fact that he is a boy and treated him accordingly.”  He asked the principal to let him use the boys’ room, and the principal agreed.  For the next seven weeks or so, things went fine, and he was using the boys’ room “without incident.”

Then, parents and other adults got involved and made life miserable again for Gavin.  After two horrific public meetings, the county school board adopted a policy resulting in Gavin’s being banned from “using the same restrooms as other boys” and exiling “him to single-stall, unisex restrooms that no other student is required to use.”  Gavin and his parents attended the meetings to speak against the policy, but doing so meant that Gavin at age 15 had to come out as transgender to the entire community and the press and to reveal publicly that he was the student at the center of the controversy.  Among many accusations, speakers at the meetings “claimed that permitting transgender students to use the same restrooms as others would lead to teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections” and “cited the Bible and complained about ‘morality creep.’” One speaker called Gavin “a ‘freak’ and compared him to a person who thinks he is a dog and wants to urinate on fire hydrants.”  Gavin was left feeling humiliated, as if he had “been turned into ‘a public spectacle’ in front of the entire community ‘like a walking freak show.’”

At school, Gavin is now forced to use a bathroom separate from all the other students, branding him daily as separate and “other” from his fellow students.  Gender dysphoria expert Dr. Randi Ettner described in court papers how each time Gavin is forced to use a bathroom separate from his peers – especially at age 15-16, where fitting in is immensely important to most teenagers — it deals him a “devastating blow … and places him at extreme risk for immediate and long-term psychological harm.”  Indeed, Gavin reports that he “limits the amount of liquids he drinks and tries to ‘hold it’” when he needs to go to the bathroom at school. Consequently, he has “repeatedly developed painful urinary tract infections and has felt distracted and uncomfortable in class.”

The Fourth Circuit Appeals court decision will likely have a profound impact on Gavin’s life, and it could greatly affect the lives of transgender people nationwide.  Although Gavin’s case comes to the court at a relatively preliminary stage in the proceedings, the court’s decision could address the degree to which the U.S. Constitution and federal law protect against gender identity discrimination, and the case could eventually make its way to the US Supreme Court.

We offer our support, respect, and admiration to Gavin and his parents.  Gavin’s legal papers recount that at the school board meeting Gavin testified:  “All I want to do is be a normal child and use the restroom in peace.”  After the January 27^th court hearing, Buzzfeed News reported that Gavin acknowledged that “[a]t first I was terrified, then I realized I have a platform, and I am going to use that platform to help people.”  Like so many LGBT leaders before him, Gavin appears to be finding his voice through his struggle and using his talents not just to make his own life better but to improve the lives of others.  Buzzfeed reports that after the hearing, his mother said that “we have learned through this process [Gavin]… is his best advocate, and we are proud to be his parents.”  We are proud of Gavin, too.

Gavin’s case is G. G. v. Gloucester County School Board (No. 15-2056).

Exciting Developments for LGBT Rights and Marriage Equality in Taiwan
January 28, 2016

On January 16, 2016, Tsai Ing-wen made history when she was elected Taiwan’s first female president.  Tsai’s election not only broke a glass ceiling for women in Taiwan, but it could herald a long-awaited breakthrough for LGBT rights in Taiwan and the rest of Asia.  President-elect Tsai is an unabashed supporter of LGBT rights and marriage equality. During the presidential campaign, Tsai posted a pro-marriage equality video on her Facebook page to coincide with Taiwan’s 13^th annual Pride Parade.  Taiwan Pride, which attracted nearly 80,000 participants, is the largest such event in Asia.  In the video, Tsai proclaimed “I am Tsai Ing-wen, and I support marriage equality.” She explained that “we are all equal” in love and that everyone should be “free to love” and pursue happiness — as pink and red hearts and rainbow rings floated across the screen.  It was a first for Taiwanese politics.

No county in Asia has marriage equality yet.  Tsai’s election, along with her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) winning an absolute majority in the national legislature, could mean that Taiwan will become the first.  Tsai and the DPP defeated the ruling Kuomintang Party (KMT), which failed to advance LGBT equality while in power.  In 2013, over 20 DPP legislators introduced a marriage equality bill, but the KMT has prevented the bill from moving forward.  We do not yet know whether the new government will have sufficient votes and political will to pass marriage equality and other LGBT bills.  Tsai and her party have not committed to making marriage equality a legislative priority.  As a candidate, Tsai stated that marriage equality is “something that society needs to tackle together as a whole, in which some are supportive while others are more reserved.” Indeed, Tsai has explained that her political “style” is to be “patient” and to work “steadily, practically, and accurately to achieve the ideal.” But the political landscape for LGBT rights in Taiwan has changed significantly.

In addition to legislative efforts, Taiwan’s vocal and assertive LGBT activists appear ready to seize the moment to pressure the new government to make legal equality a reality.  Taiwanese LGBT activists have been pressing for equality for years.  As we did in America, LGBT couples in Taiwan have presented themselves to local officials to ask for marriage licenses, putting a human face on discrimination.  In 2012, a couple filed a marriage equality lawsuit, which was subsequently withdrawn for strategic purposes when it appeared that a positive ruling would not be forthcoming.  The cities of Taipei, Kaohsiung, and Taichung recognize partnerships for same-sex couples.  Last year, hundreds of supporters marched on the Kuomintang Party Headquarters to protest the party’s inaction and threw rainbow water balloons at the building in an act of symbolic defiance.  When the government’s Justice Ministry conducted an online marriage equality poll, approximately 60 percent of respondents voted in favor.  A 2013 poll showed 53 percent public support for marriage equality, with a whopping 78 percent of people in their twenties in favor.  Another 2013 poll showed that marriage equality did not then have majority support, but a 2014 poll showed support at 54 percent.

In 2013, the China Post opined that “[l]egalizing same-sex marriage will be a huge step forward in the fight for universal equality akin to ending apartheid.”  It’s hard to overestimate the importance of winning marriage equality in Asia, home to billions of the world’s population.  Activists are fighting for equality in many Asian countries, and a victory in Taiwan would not only bring marriage equality there but could ignite a spark across the entire continent.

6/26 and Beyond
January 14, 2016

As the new year commences, we initiated a new name for our column in the San Francisco Bay Times:  6/26 and Beyond.  You might ask:  What’s 6/26?  It’s June 26 – not only the date of the founding of the United Nations (1945) — and for that matter the invention of the toothbrush (1498) — but the date the United States Supreme Court has issued its three most important landmark LGBT rights decisions.  Indeed, Congresswoman Suzan DelBene, along with 93 cosponsors, has introduced legislation that would designate June 26 as national “LGBT Equality Day.”

Twelve years ago — on June 26, 2003 — the US Supreme Court issued its breakthrough decision, Lawrence v. Texas, finally holding that laws that criminalize the physical expression of love and affection between people of the same gender violate the Constitution.  In the Court’s own eloquent words:  “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The government “cannot demean” the “existence” of LGBT people or “control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”  For the first time in American history, the Court recognized LGBT love, describing how “intimate conduct” between people of the same sex “can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring.”

Ten years after Lawrence – June 26, 2013 — the Court expressed a deeper understanding of LGBT love and dignity in its landmark United States v. Windsor decision, overturning key elements of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”) that prohibited the federal government from recognizing same-sex couples’ marriages.  In Windsor, the Court recognized that marriage equality states like New York had enabled LGBT couples to “live with pride in themselves and their union and in a status of equality with all other married persons” but that DOMA served to “injure” and “disparage” these couples and to make them “unequal” to everyone else.  Reflecting a profound understanding of the daily human cost of such discrimination, the Court noted that “DOMA instruct[ed] all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage [was] less worthy than the marriages of others.”

And last summer – June 26, 2015 – the Court held in Obergefell v. Hodges that the liberty and equality guarantees of the Constitution mandate nationwide marriage equality.  The Court’s opinion evinced great understanding of the struggles, hopes and dreams of LGBTQ Americans.  The decision recounted how throughout much of our nation’s history “[g]ays and lesbians were prohibited from most government employment, barred from military service, excluded under immigration laws, targeted by police, and burdened in their rights to associate.”  The Court recognized our struggle from protest to political involvement to legal action.  And it acknowledged the inadequacies of partial victories:  “Outlaw to outcast may be a step forward, but it does not achieve the full promise of liberty.”  The Court named marriage discrimination for what it was:  “injustice.”  And it concluded that by seeking marriage equality, LGBTQ people “ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

That’s what 6/26 has meant so far for LGBT equality.  But the new title of our column is “6/26 and Beyond.”  What does “beyond” mean?  One thing it means is that the marriage equality victories represent extraordinarily important advances toward a broader goal:  full LGBTQ equality in all aspects of our lives.  LGBTQ people need more landmark Supreme Court decisions on future 6/26’s.  Last summer’s opinion laid the groundwork for a broad decision regarding all types of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, but the Court stopped short of issuing such a ruling.  We need that ruling in a future case.  As we have emphasized before and will continue to do throughout the year, electing a President who will appoint Supreme Court justices who understand that the Constitution prohibits governmental discrimination against LGBTQ people in any form is imperative to the future of our movement.  Our choice in November will be clear.

And we embrace the Cambridge English Dictionary’s definition of beyond, namely “outside a limit.”  We believe the heart of the LGBTQ rights movement has always been the “beyond” and breaking down limits of identity, gender, love, expression, freedom and human experience.  Over the holidays, we had a dinner with our 21 year old niece and her new boyfriend.  As our niece’s boyfriend spoke about how he recognized his privilege as a European American cisgender heterosexual male and told us about a close friend who was genderqueer, we felt as if we were living in the beyond.  In upcoming issues, we will write both about marriage equality and other matters pertaining to LGBTQ lives.  We believe the future for LGBTQ people is bright, and we look forward to the next 6/26 and beyond.