In 1994 Mr. Conservative himself, Mr. Republican, Barry Goldwater, said:
“You don’t have to like it, but gay people deserve full constitutional rights including marriage and service in the Military.”
He said it in Phoenix — after he had come to terms with his gay grandson. Just like every family with a gay child has had to deal with the reality of a gay child. Just like my family came to reality about me. I can imagine it cannot be easy. But if there’s one thing Conservatives deal with, it’s reality. And for better or worse, gay folks are real. Of this we are sure, even if you are not. So real that our tiny minority — what? maybe 5% of the population? — has brought about a national debate by first convincing our mothers, or some other sympathetic family member, that we’re just OK, but different. By simply begging, almost literally, for acceptance, understanding and guidance. My father was a Goldwater Republican, and in this regard, his apple did not fall far from the tree. But he sure doens’t think I’m against him. I even wrote a book with him.
Being gay is not a political position. This debate is not an American debate. It’s happening in every country on earth. It’s because regardless of the culture, the religion, the race, or any other factor in our Babel of a world, no more than 5% of the people are insistently gay. There’s not just gay parades here, but in nearly every country on earth. Even in Moscow; though there the police still wade in with batons to beat us. And what determination we must have to try to organize gay parades in such places as Malaysia, Egypt and even Iran! But if we’re 5% of the world’s population, we’re some 350,000,000 people. How is this possible if it’s not natural? How could so many “choose,” so independently of each other, to be gay? And to “choose” means we must have somehow turned off our “natural” heterosexuality. How is this possible? How can we turn off “instinct”?
We have this determination because we simply are gay. We don’t know why; neither do you. You “believe” you know, but there’s too much opinion on why for anyone to “know.” Though we gay folks all know it an an extraordinarily young age. Not a gay guy I know — and I dare say I know considerably more than any reader here — does not have the same story. Somewhere, within the first inklings of puberty, we knew it. Virtually all of us say it was roughly between 8 and 12 years old. We just knew. And no one had to teach us what to do. And there are certainly no fairy tales for, um, fairies. Then the problem became how to deal with it, and anyone around us who found out. An even bigger problem was to figure out if there was anyone else around who felt as we did. For we all come to this conclusion ourselves, with no one to ever talk to about it. And you all get heaps and gobs of support. And you wonder why we have trouble with relationships?
We can’t just have dreamed this up and decided to “fight” society for the rest of our lives. There must be more to it. However, right now, just like I was 10 when I realized it, though didn’t have a word for it, there is another 10 year old boy coming to his realization. There is no “cure” for this reality. We are not recruiting these boys. At most we seek to protect them from bullying and to leave them a better America in which to grow up in. Just like you do for your kids. We’d prefer to call it mentoring. Though we’re pretty clueless about how to do it. We have begged the nation for guidance on this issue, but it’s often still way too dangerous to broach.
Many of you think the gay rights movement — or as I like to call it — “Rights for gays” — started in 1969. Or some time even later. But actually it started in the early 1950s in Chicago. A handful of gay folks formed a group called “The Friends of Dorothy.” They published a few hundred mimeographed fliers and handed them out. The nation was so fearful of us at the time, so against us, that the FBI spent over one year and a million dollars searching for “Dorothy.” How they did not know she was a fictional character in a classic movie we don’t know. We giggle about it to this day. But that was when we began begging for the culture war against us to cease. The one riot we had was 20 years later. It was our “shot heard round the world.” It was our moment of extremism in the defense of our liberty. Then we got back to begging.
But we have not attacked family, church or culture. We have begged for acceptance of our kind. We have begged our families, our churches, and we have begged this culture for a shred of humanity and understanding. We have achieved much. We beg, and many call it attack, which leaves us puzzled, even angry. I’d say more than half the nation has now realized that we are simply a harmless bunch of misfits. The least of God’s creatures, perhaps, but His children too. We are merely the pink sheep in His flock. Perhaps it would help if you imagine on us the autism scale. Something went awry in our brain wiring. There’s no way around the reality, however, that here we are. And we have no where else to go. But we are not fighting you, we are begging for a bit of mollycoddling. Which is something we don’t really get.
We do not expect anyone to come to some love-fest with us overnight. We, especially we, know the difficulties of the issue we present; though it’s not really our issue. It’s the issues you have with us. We’re somewhat self-conflicted with our calls for “Accept us, Include us, Ignore us,” true. We’re as coherent as the TEA Party in a lot of ways. No leader, no organization, just a determination to make a better America. Which includes us. But we’re extraordinarily comfortable with ourselves. We just don’t really think about it at all.
I can liken it to this: when you all are strolling through a park on a sunny afternoon hand in hand and espy a rose, and stop to smell, and have a romantic smooch you are accepted, included and ignored. It’s just a loving couple doing what comes natural. Right? But we dare not do this. Even though we pay taxes at the same rate as you do for the parks we cannot yet stroll through hand in hand, smell a rose and smooch. If the taxation is equal, should not the enjoyment of the parks bought be equal too? And all else too? We pay the same, give us the same.
But I can tell you this: at least half my gay friends are as conservative as you all, except on the gay thing obviously. And in these perilous times our nation faces, to argue incessantly over a tiny portion of the country is pointless. Do you really want to debate this DOMA thing for the next 10 or 15 years? We don’t, but we will if we have to. For it is true, marriage, even by a name special for us, is a Conservative value. We want to settle down, we’re still begging for help in doing it. For we never received guidance on how to have relationships; indeed, some say it’s impossible, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Help us find our prince charming, that’s what we beg of you, too.
And to chase away potential voters, and our parents and friends too, is simply not a way to resurrect the greatness of this nation. We are simply too unimportant to fight over. But we’re all too real. And we vote, mostly for whomever will bear us no malice. The Liberals were good at that, hoodwinking us, but too many of us have woken up to the chicanery of the Left. Most polling data indicate that upwards of 30% of gay folks vote Republican. I know I have, consistently, for decades. What can you do to win the rest of us?
And I can also tell you at least half my friends are rooting for Sarah Palin. It’s a simple reason really, besides the political stuff. She has a son who is different, and we pray to God Almighty that she will have the wisdom to realize we’re just sons who are different too. And then put a stop to this debate about us. Let my people go, and get back to the debt, the deficit, the unions, repealing ObamaCare and the rest.
Perhaps the nation should set up a National Commission on Gay Americans — and move all this debate to it. And figure us out. Just don’t forget to include us in the discussion. A discussion I really just hate having, as I’m sure you’re all tired of having it too. But that’s what happens when 5% of the nation with nothing to lose begs for sixty years. It was beg, or continue with the police raids on our bars. Eventually you started listening. We might be less than rugged individuals — but don’t you just marvel at our fortitude? Do we not get two points for that at least? Our fortitude comes because we are sure God is on our side.
You know, Jesus said: walk a mile in another man’s shoes before you condemn him. Walk but a block in mine and it will open your eyes.
And He said: treat others as you want to be treated. We have done so, mostly by begging.
He also said, “Turn the other cheek.” And that too we have done. That’s our getting up to beg again after we’ve been knocked down again.
We have simply been begging God to change the hard hearts against us. For sixty years. Please don’t make us beg for another sixty. I beg you.