Queers, Friends and Countrymen, lend me your ears…

Last week Saturday Night Live lampooned Obama for not doing anything, the International Olympic Committee said ‘We’re not that into you…” and by Friday Oslo awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize…. methinks the aliens living beneath the surface of the Moon may have issues, but that’s a story for another day.

THE CRAZY WEEKEND BEGAN FRIDAY morning with the strange news that NASA bombed the Moon in search of water beneath the surface (is this where the plutocracy plans to relocate once all resources are depleted?) to Oslo bestowing the Nobel Peace Prize on President Obama, to the president’s address to the Human Rights Campaign Saturday evening and a quick jaunt to our nation’s capitol for the National Equality March on Sunday.

I campaigned and fundraised for Obama from 2007-2008. This, as the Hollywood Precinct Captain for the campaign, as well as an organizer for the fundraising apparatus Generation Obama Los Angeles (GOLA) and co-hosting a huge early fundraiser at Universal City Walk in early 2008. I was an enthusiastic supporter, if not quite an Obamaniac.В I had been intrigued by Obama since hearing him speak at the 2004 Democratic Convention that I was covering for spin.com. His rhetoric and later his story (I ran out and bought Dreams From My Father immediately) resonated so much with my own background. That and Barack Obama and my own name are as equally different and un-American as names, can get and yet we both embraced and found ourselves benefiting from the American Dream.

I was hooked.

I recap all of this for two reasons: one has to do with my relationship to many democratic gay men during the election and the presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton. The shrillness and opposition toward Obama that came from many gay men amounted to the kind of diva worship usually reserved for Madonna and Cher. Since the bitch can’t sing or dance I would often argue to highly angry opponents, that on a simply prima facie view, I thought it would look dynastic, corrupt and Third Worldish to have nearly twenty years of U.S. government under two families.

From the night of the election onward, through every month of the transition, up through the inauguration, the enthusiasm and excitement, the thrill of this historic moment has been undermined by the most dire of circumstances: a recession in name only (make no mistake, this is a great depression), an untenable war on two fronts that are impossible to solve with any quick solutions, and a rise in violent rhetoric on the right that portends an air of violence and fear that we last felt in the late 1960s. But this weekend, to my most cynical of souls, something magic happened.

I believed again.

Beginning with his opening statement to the Human Rights Campaign, where the president of the campaign seem to re-emerge with his amusing opening claiming “It is a privilege to be here tonight to open for Lady Gaga,” Obama simultaneously brought down the house and controlled the room for the remainder of the speech. He went on to expound and push the boundaries of the speech in unexpected directions. He asserted: “Gay rights are civil rights.”

To be clear, President Obama did not exactly use those words. But about five minutes into his roughly 20-minute address, Obama echoed the sentiment at the black-tie, star-studded fundraising event hosted by the country’s largest gay advocacy group.

Drawing a line between the long, painful struggle of black Americans to the festering frustration of gay Americans that his administration has not done enough for them, Obama said: “It’s not for me to tell you to be patient, any more than it was for others to counsel patience to African Americans petitioning for equal rights half a century ago.”

The rhetoric was striking. The country’s first minority president — a son and student of the black civil rights movement — making a historical connection, tying together two groups who’ve been denied full citizenship.

The image was striking, too, as he told the crowd that, “While some may wish to define you solely by your sexual orientation or gender identity alone, you know and I know that none of us wants to be defined by just one part of what makes us whole.” In his books and in his speeches, the question of identity — his father black, his mother white, his early life more transient than most — has been at his core.

Now as we know the president has often offered lofty platitudes with little specifics, his reaffirmation of repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t tell” for example, so although entertained I remained skeptical yet cautiously optimistic. Maybe it was the winning of the Nobel Peace Prize the day before which he has been rightly criticized for receiving given his relative lack of any substantial change. But what Oslo intended, I believe, is something they often used the prize for, a platform and tactile endorsement of his rhetoric that could manifest itself as self-fulfilling prophecy.

Remember, that’s part of the point — the award has never been apolitical, nor a-historical. See: Lech Walesa, Yasser Aarafat, Nelson Mandela, et al. And according to Nobel: “The prize should be awarded ‘to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for attempting fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses’.” Obama’s doing that. If there is some inherit hypocrisy then this is something that has been around since the beginning of this award. This is after all, the Peace Prize named for the man who invented dynamite.

I happened to be in Washington the same day a number of my friends the right wing might say constitutes вЂ?the Hollywood elite.’ Among them actor/activist Chad Allen. But what I saw among the crowd Sunday and the speakers and in particular the eloquent speech by the screenwriter (and I think maybe an emerging political dynamo) Dustin Lance Black (most famous for winning the Oscar for the screenplay for MILK) was astounding, aspirational and inclusive all at the same time; I felt for the first time truly at home.

Chad Allen sent a text message and Facebook update with the picture at left moments after Black spoke:  “We march and we change the world. I love you all! Chad.” Even that put a smile on my face. We had come and represented ourselves in all our stripes yet put our best foot forward. I can’t imagine a reasonable person not being moved and at least questioning their prejudices after witnessing the testimonials.

I have never felt a real sense of solidarity with the LGBT community.В  Nor did in my course studies or reading of political theory see much in common with gay rights and other civil rights movements likeВ  that of African Americans or Latinos or women. The analogies offered by both academics and talking heads often fell flat to me but I was unable to articulate why. A conversation with director В Bryan Singer finally articulated the reasonВ  when he began explaining the story he was craftingВ  of the first X-Men movie.

When Bryan was setting up the first X-Men movie, he, taking a page from director Richard Donner’s filming of Superman: The Movie, that of versimiltude, of making the movie seem REAL and take itself seriously manifested itself in having a legend like Mario Puzo write the screenplay and the importance of anchoring the film with the highest paid cameo in movie history in casting Marlon Brando as Superman’s father Jor-El. It was in this vein that Bryan wanted to anchor the film with the gravitas of the actors Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan as Professor X and Magneto respectively. In the 1960s debut of the comic book, the two characters represented �mutant’ versions of the ideology of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. By the 1980s the racial analogy of �mutants’ had been replaced by a queer sensibility if not an outright gay one.

Sir Ian was skeptical about this “funny book” movie, reluctant to sign on until it was nearly too late.  At a dinner one night Bryan articulated to Sir Ian why he, who was an ardent backer of gay causes, should do the movie and why the central theme, why being a mutant was more like being gay, than being black or Latino or Asian, why it was a perfect analog for being gay: because unlike those other marginalized groups, when you are a mutant, like being gay, you are ultimately different than your family and have to seek out a new family or community or ideology. The idea is banal in its simplicity, yet profoundly compelling and it was the first time anyone had put their finger on the uniqueness of our situation. Sir Ian too was convinced and signed on.

I bring this up because for a long time I did not care about Prop 8 or gay marriage in general. This started with my fundamental feelings about the history of and the institution itself. One that I felt that was antiquated, sexist and obsolete in a consumer culture where romantic love is often a commodity to be traded. That and I found the word вЂ?marriage’ inherently problematic, contentious and easily used as a lightning rod for superfluous cultural war material. The term marriage is so closely bound to religion and the church in this age that it presented a double-sided not easily won argument. While openly gay Christians like Andrew Sullivan were at war with the church and marriage and sought to reconcile them, I believed the church to be something preposterous and not worthy of a progressive modern debate. This was abundantly clear when Karl Rove was able to shape much of the 2004 election’s rhetoric with the red herring of the fear of the spread of gay marriage, while the progressives and democrats were unable to wield a powerful argument about the loss of nearly 600,000 manufacturing jobs in Bush’s first four years.

Clearly a graver threat to the republic than that of two dudes getting hitched in Hawaii or New Paltz.

By the time of the Obama campaign in California, Proposition 8 had come into play and I found myself once again often at odds with my “gay” countrymen so to speak. I thought the symbolic importance of Obama far outweighed the issue of gay marriage and even though I knew it was being funded by out of state Mormons and the media was often blaming churchgoing pro-Obama African Americans as one of the leading reasons for the failure to overturn the proposition, I knew the truth and the manipulation that framed this argument. At any rate in the year since much has changed. One was the movie Milk, which perhaps made the first openly gay supervisor of San Francisco more of a messiah than he was, but which managed to work out a them of his life that dovetailed nicely with Obama’s: “You gotta give �em hope.”

The movie also propelled a new young and charismatic outsider onto the scene, a good looking, young easily embraced gay man name Dustin Lance Black who’s stirring Oscar speech and subsequent political campaigns to make Harvey Milk Day a recognized holiday has resonated with our generation unlike any other gay politico in the past, in many respects the same way Obama defied conventional paradigms about black politics and what they could be, Black had done for gays.

Maybe I’m still buzzed from this historic weekend or from the pot smoke that could be inhaled in most quarters of the Mall on Washington, but by the time Dustin spoke I was teary eyed and filled with joy in a way I would have never expected, the early part of the speech echoed his Oscar speech of a year ago, where he referenced his own history and struggle with depression and suicide:

“When IВ was 13 years old, my beautiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas to California, and I heard the story of Harvey Milk. And it gave me hope. It gave me the hope toВ live my life. It gave me the hope one day I could live my life openly as who I am and then maybe even I could even fall in love and one day get married. I wanna thank my mom, who has always loved me for who I am even when there was pressure not to. But most of all, if Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he’d want me to say to all of the gay andВ lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told that they are less than by their churches, by the government or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value and that no matter what anyoneВ tells you, God does love you and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights federally, across this great nation of ours. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you, God, for giving us Harvey Milk”.

But the Dustin Lance Black who took the stage today was less thankful and more forceful powerfully arguing that no major civil rights changes had ever been done without the intervention of the federal government that if left to the states very little would have changed for most marginalized peoples. He delivered a polished and compelling speech on par with Obama’s.

“I am reminded that we must look to our history if we are to change our future. We must remember that it was the decision of the courts to legalize interracial marriage, the decision of a president to abolish slavery and the decision of another president to abolish segregation in the armed forces. If any of these things had been left to individual states: none would have happened…. We did not come here to demand partial equality. We did not come here to leave some of our brothers and sisters behind, because now is the time for the LGBT movement to follow in the footsteps of every other successful movement and claim our dream and our dream sounds like this: we demand that the government gives us the full promise and rights of all its citizens.”

“As we commit ourselves to this freedom, we must first free ourselves, we must free ourselves of generations of hate and shame, we must free ourselves of the lies and myths and distortions that have been thrust upon us our entire lives, we must know in our hearts that we are loved by God, that we are full and equal citizens and that we have every right to be afforded the rights of every other citizen and every other citizens love in The United States of America. We are here today to tell the world that the love in our heart is beautiful, it is true and is strong. And now we must share that love, we must lift it up as a shining example of what is good and we must never let ourselves be ashamed for feeling that love. That day is gone. That darkness has passed…. for if we want our freedom, we must be strong enough to fight for it, we must be strong enough to lay our bodies on the line if necessary and make our voices heard. And standing here today it is clear that we have that will. And for the first time in my life I know longer any have any fear, or any shame and I have no doubt that in our lifetime our dream will be a reality and we will be free.”

Sounds an awful lot like the refrain Obama borrowed from Martin Luther King Junior about seizing  “the fierce urgency of now.” In all my days I finally saw a leader, our leader that could speak to the rest of the country . Perhaps if the Obama administration can seize this moment to fulfill its promise of an aggressive progressive agenda he will be buoyed into a second term and hand off his legacy to another game changing political dynamo and our first openly gay president.

Now that’s some audacious hope. Keep the dream alive.