I have a better idea for promoting gay rights and the gay people who fight for those gay rights: Employ gay actors.
Congrats on your Oscars and insane salaries and huge Hollywood clout, Sean and Hilary and Charlize and Tom!
Don’t get me wrong. Larry Kramer is a courageous, brilliant, inspiring writer and activist. But are we to attribute all leaps in the civil rights movement to such figures? Did those state senators vote for marriage equality because they found The Normal Heart particularly moving, or because they have gay cousins and siblings and friends who subtly and slowly informed the senators’ opinions over countless holiday dinners? Yes, parades and protests and Broadways shows are visible and important and noble; I hope we see more of them. And I can’t articulate how much I admire leaders in the LGBT community.
I worry, though, that we’re ignoring the influence other, less grand gestures. Perhaps this is the voice of a gay man who wants merely to claim a part of this historic victory, but I believe that we little people are as essential to the process as publicly revered activists. Rich and Moss agree that Cuomo, a straight politician, was a hero of marriage equality despite his unremarkable rhetoric. “To hell with poetry,” Moss says.
I tend to agree. Yes, Kramer is a treasure. But beautiful language got us only so far. “You know, this marriage thing is not such a bad deal, and should be celebrated by those who are married and by those who may want to be. It’s all about choice and equality - why was this so hard?” My dad wrote this to me on Friday. He’s never seen The Normal Heart. He has very few gay friends. He reads Sports Illustrated and Bill Bryson. But his 17-year-old son came out to him 12 years ago, and that dramatically changed his proximity to gay rights. “Dad and I have been following this for the past few weeks,” my mom later wrote. “Every morning when I get up I turn on my iPad to see if they’ve voted…This is historic. I hope you can appreciate how far we’ve come.” She was talking about how far we humans have come, but my parents’ journey started with just the three of us sitting in our living room, crying over a shocking confession and wondering what kind of life a gay man could lead.
I hope other men and women realize how important they are, how valuable their contributions can be. You don’t have to be a Larry Kramer to change a person’s mind. You don’t have to be a published author or a famous actor or a powerful politician to make an indelible mark on your community. If you trace the roots of the senators’ opinions, you’re likely to discover a group of people who did little more than come out to loved ones and ask for support; most didn’t even have to ask for it.
I had a list of questions, but I think they inadequately address my concerns.
I think The Ghost Writer is a good movie. The reviews are favorable, and the premise is interesting. But I can’t confirm the quality of the film because I’ve been too distracted by the beach house in which most of the action takes place. I tend not to like modern, stark houses, and I am by no means a beach person. But so perfect is this particular house that it manages to upstage everything else, including Ewan McGregor. I’ve never not been completely invested in that man. I am now inured to rewinding most scenes because I ignore important plot points to ogle the grand entryway, the enormous kitchen, the gorgeous patio. Even during McGregor’s shower scene I thought, “Whoa. That is one awesome bathroom.”
To put things in perspective, the house in The Ghost Writer rivals Burt Reynolds’s vest in Deliverance as the most unintentionally entrancing movie accessory. “Creepy kid. Ominous music. Raging river. Hey, what happened to the other guy-VEST! VEST! HAHAHA. THERE IT IS AGAIN!”
This is all to say that I take back everything I said about the soullessness of betraying friends and abandoning principles for the sake of wealth and wealth alone. The house, by any means necessary.
This is a letter from my insurance company. It arrived at my apartment five months ago. Rather than offer information about extended coverage or a new copay policy, the letter sought merely to remind me that DOMA prevents the company from providing equal coverage. I took a picture of the letter at the time to prove to interested parties that discrimination is more proximate than we tend to believe and sufficiently heartbreaking even in the most official of contexts.
I then immediately threw the letter away because I couldn’t stand to look at it, and transferred the picture to my computer lest I be tempted to share it. No matter how justified my anger was, no matter how uniformly the seven people who followed my blog despised DOMA, the shame of being the target of an unfair policy was overwhelming. I was as humiliated as I was hurt, so I said nothing to my friends, my family, or my colleagues, who received the same letter.
I’m sharing this image now in an attempt to express the magnitude of my relief. This piece of paper (and the millions who supported it) haunted me, and I’m grateful to everyone who fights to make it an innocuous relic.
“No one fucks like Gaston” wasn’t a line in the original song, but we were all thinking it.
Parenthetically, pausing a 20-year-old VHS cassette at a specific frame is about as difficult as living with the shame of eroticizing a cartoon villain and taking time out of your busy evening to capture an image of his naked torso on your iPhone.
My name is Jim Sherwin. These are bags of my poop.
