This article by student organizer, Andy Bowen, has been reposted from Campus Pride Blog.
There is going to be an LGBTQ march on Washington on October 10-11, 2009—officially named the National Equality March. The premise is a simple one: “Equal protection in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states.” Arguments have been made by movement figureheads in favor of the March. David Mixner, Sherry Wolf, Cleve Jones, and several others have provided other terrific arguments. I feel no real need to restate them in full.
I’ve got something a little different to say to student leaders.I graduated from college a little over a year ago, but I plan on going back to school before too long—I consider myself something of a student on hiatus. In any case, people still in school are of my generation. And it was in my later years of college that my activist self started peeking out, feeling proud. It was a little bit of college activism that eventually led me to volunteer with the DC Host Committee (and its the Student Outreach Subcommittee) of the National Equality March. And it’s students, people learning about the world and themselves, that I tend to focus my thinking on.
Today’s LGBTQ students have come of age in one of those “best of times, worst of times” periods. Thanks to things activists did before and around the time we were born, greater acceptance of LGBTQ people grew in the United States at the same time we did. However, reactive forces came to a head in the era, too. I was seven when Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was signed into law, ten with the Defense of Marriage Act became part of the US Code. Current students, undergrad and grad, were maybe a little younger or a little older than I was when those things happened, but they happened in our formative years, and they represented the death wail of a long-entrenched homonegativity.
And so we grew up, discovered our sexualities, genders, personalities, and politics as we became targets of national political hysteria—targets because of the things we were realizing were inescapably us. Queer kids were hated, yelled at, beaten, killed, thrown out of their homes, diagnosed with HIV and AIDS, denied healthcare, thrown out of the military, and so much more, as had happened to generations past; and all the while, politicians of both parties codified hatred of us with military exclusion and denial of marriage equality. A President of the United States told a joint session of Congress, on prime time television, in a State of the Union Address (!) that marriage was between one man and one woman, and the Constitution should be amended to make it that way. It was a Hell of a time to grow up queer, and that might be the understatement of my lifetime.
And we had to grow up in this. All of that meanness—baseness and cruelty—on top of learning long division, photosynthesis, and stick-shift. Bigotry and indifference to cruelty and suffering on top of figuring out how to live.
And yet—we’ve made it.
There were some awful banner headlines for LGBTQ people, but like I said, the bad parts were part of a death wail. Energy has been building for our movement(s). It’s probably safe to say, without a lot of citations, that the United States is more accepting of LGBTQ people with every generation. For the ill-named Generation Y—most of the crop of students right now—coming-of-age conditions were hardly ideal, but they were in a broad sense likely an improvement over what previous generations of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender, queer and questioning people had to face. We had Gay-Straight Alliances in high school, Pride groups at college, Safe Spaces—a plethora of institutions where, if one hateful place shut us out, we could find a home. When things have been bad, we’ve made use of these things, and found ways to survive, even thrive with feistiness, in public.
So, yes, good energy has clashed with bad in our time, and the good looks to be on the gain. Thus—the National Equality March.
There are the oft-cited—and really good—reasons to march. Namely, we have a lot of things that need pushing and that can be pushed in an LGBTQ-friendly direction: a US President who at least talked a good game on civil rights on the campaign trail; Democrats (who are imperfect, but who are still basically nicer to us, policy-wise) in both houses of Congress. Next to those, we have momentum on marriage equality, and realistic hopes of getting a trans-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Fine, yes, awesome. Good reasons to march.
But students, there’s a special reason for us to march: we have ourselves as witnesses and evidence that bigots, moralizers, merely opportunistic people who want votes of bigots and moralizers, all the other pain we know—all of that buffeting through our formative years has just made us hungrier and smarter about getting justice. We’ve seen the hurt that can come to LGBTQ people, we’ve lived through it, gotten old enough to make a difference, and now—well, now we just have to make the difference.
And that’s why you have to show up on October 10 and 11. That’s why you need to go to your legislators’ offices, and tell them you want marriage equality, nondiscrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, and in all, full equality. That’s why we need to show up on the West Capitol lawn on October 11, and then march through the streets of DC and every other city we can show up in.
We can be the last generation that had to live without full equality, that had to live with a fear of violence and ostracism. We can get rid of those things—we just have to do so.
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