In the Name of Love

I posted the following entry one year ago today as the US Supreme Court announced a ruling that made marriage equality the law of the land. Today, as LGBT communities around the country celebrate Pride Month, and in the wake of 50 lives lost in a terroristic hate crime against the Orlando LGBT community, it felt important to revisit this.  We have come so far, yet, there are still those who will fight to diminish that progress...who will disrespect, discriminate, and even seek to destroy and kill us in the name of the god they have chosen...in the name of hate...in the name of fear.  I don't know the answer, I really don't.  I just have to have faith that, if we just keep showing the world who we are...we are friends, neighbors, families, church members, doctors, lawyers, grocery store clerks...if we just keep living the examples of love and understanding, we can't help but win...in the name of love.  It sounds so hokey and idealistic when I see it on paper, but it's really all I have and what I hang on to...

May all beings everywhere be filled with lovingkindness.  

May all beings everywhere feel safe in the arms of the ones they love

May all beings everywhere know comfort and ease

May all beings be happy

May all beings be free

May we all be free...

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. 

Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today, the supreme court handed down a historical ruling on the side of equality for all people.  When I heard it, I cried without really understanding why.  Most days, I don’t feel like an outsider or like I am the object of discrimination because of my sexuality.  But the feelings that welled up inside of me with the ruling really spoke to how deeply the sense of separation runs and how longstanding it has been.  I have become so far removed from it that, in the day to day life that I lead, I am not even aware of it until something like this comes along and the sense of relief nearly drops me to my knees.  The tears that flow today, flow in the remembering of times in my life when I was not removed from the pain of discrimination and hate.  They flow as I think about a thousand or more LGBT people in Dallas, Texas silently walking on a cool October evening with candles in remembrance of a young man in Wyoming tied to a fencepost and left to die for being just like us.  Tears flow as I remember the hot shame of being asked for my ID by mall security after someone had reported that there was a man in the women's bathroom because they only saw my short hair and boyish clothes and didn’t really look at me. They flow as I remember the self consciousness of holding my partner’s hand in a public place and the hurt of being introduced as my partner's “friend” when we would go to gatherings with her family or work or opting out of these events altogether because we simply weren’t welcome as a couple. They flow as I remember kneeling at an altar in a fundamentalist church while the preacher violently prayed over me that God would forgive and remove the "sinfulness" from me because I wanted to desperately to be accepted and loved by the people that worshipped there and I knew that I would never be as long as these "shameful" and "dirty" feelings were inside of me.  Tears flow as I remember lying down in the street in front of city hall for a chalk outline to be drawn to represent the thousands of gay men that were losing their lives to AIDS before the cocktail and when “Living with HIV” was not even yet a thing.  I remember those men…many, many of them.  Tears flow as I remember volunteering at the AIDS Crisis Center on Reagan street in Dallas - sharing meals and visiting with the folks that came in to eat there…hanging out with my neighbor at the Food Pantry…and ultimately, propping myself up next to him in his bed and watching TV while is IV medications ran in every day because his family had disowned him and wouldn’t even acknowledge his existence.  The tears flow as I think about friends that have lost loved ones in hospitals where, in spite of having loved and lived and laughed together for many years, and having cared for them until their final days, they were not allowed in their hospital room because they were not considered to be truly family and for those same friends that had to, through their grief, fight their partner's families to keep the homes and belongings that they shared together. They flow for friends that built their families and had children together, only to never see those children again when their families were separated by the many human shortcomings that have ways of tearing families apart because there was not legal recourse or protection. And they also flow as I remember the way my heart grew on parade days - hot, humid, sweaty days in September - when our community flooded the streets and the air was alive with activism and the sense that we were not invisible - celebrating love that was demonized in the world outside of our little community as sinful, wrong, and inferior...

While our love has always been equal, today, it is acknowledged by the world…and, while I have spent a good part of my life trying to get to the place where I do not have to be acknowledged to be validated, I have to admit…this one feels really, really special.  And that is why the tears are flowing…

Love wins.  It always does...