Special Commentary: Barack Obama, Rick Warren and our supposed straight allies

When Proposition 8 passed I was initially dismayed beyond belief. If we couldn't keep same-sex marriage in California, then where we going to go from here? Then the LGBT community started to react with marches, candlelight vigils, impassioned speeches and blog posts, and in seeing this renewed political action I realized we were living through a historical moment when gay folks were truly galvanized, fed up and not going to take it anymore. 

Call it our Norma Rae moment of 2008. 

Further evidence of that outrage and activism has been evidenced by the gay community's reaction to President-elect Barack Obama's choice of homophobic Pastor Rick Warren to lead the invocation at Obama's Swearing-in Ceremony next month. Many of us were mad as hell and none-too-shy about saying so.

What I didn't know was how our reaction was going over in the straight community, specifically within our allies on the left. At least I didn't until I stumbled across our own Christie Keith's diary on Daily Kos. When I spotted it yesterday, the post had already drawn over 700 comments and was the top recommended diary on the site. It's still one of the most recommended and has over 1700 comments. 

Christie's diary, titled "It's not Obama I'm mad at; it's way too many of you", is as impassioned and eloquent an explanation for our supposed allies of what the gay community is feeling now as I've ever read. And she takes those "allies" to task for not getting what are our struggle is truly about. 

No, the people I'm mad at are some of YOU. I'm angry at your ignorance of our lives, for your complete lack of understanding of what a claim for equality under the law is, for telling us to shut up or quiet down or stop being angry or stop making trouble for the progressive movement or stop drawing negative attention to our party or Obama.

You go, girl! With Christie's permission, I'm reposting her entire diary as I think it's required reading. It's lengthy and not normally the sort of thing we do here at AfterElton.com, but I think you'll find it well worth your time.

You'll find the post after the jump!

Even I don't want another Warren diary. I must be insane. 

I have not been one of the "OMG Obama is betraying us" crowd. Once he was elected, I pretty much let it all go. Before the election and in the aftermath of the passage of Prop 8 I was over here 24/7, but it died down. I honestly didn't even pay that much attention to his appointments and transition statements. I have a life, a family, dogs, my job, and my friends, all of which needed some attention. 

Christie Keith

But it was nothing — NOTHING — compared to what I felt when I started reading diaries here on Daily Kos, full of smug, ignorant pontification on how we need to not be SO ANGRY or SO HURT, and lumping us in with the "What Obama is doing wrong" crowd, and ignoring that our response to the Warren invitation is a completely separate phenomenon.

Let me explain something very carefully, for those who don't know: none of what's going on in the fight for LGBT rights is part of a strategy, as should be apparent by our lack of a cohesive movement and any viable leaders. It's a true grassroots uprising among people who got a taste of freedom and decided we wanted more. We were no longer willing to settle for a long, slow, state by state battle, for death by a thousand cuts, for an extended period of second class citizenship.

I've lived through a lot of watershed moments in this movement, including the assassination of Harvey Milk and the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and the rise of ACT-UP. I know like I know my name that this is another one.

Whether it's "strategic" or not, whether it's what our "leaders" think we should do or not, it's pretty clear that real actual LGBT people are done with the closet. We're seeing things in a new way. We're no longer willing to settle for simply not getting beaten to death, for being able to live in our constricted safe zones without fear of baseball bats to the head and getting fired.

It's not okay anymore to have to decode when and where we can be out, who can and can't be trusted to really know us. We're done with glancing around the restaurant or the street before taking our partner's hand if we're not in a gay bar or walking down Castro St. Done with paying for living fearlessly with broken bones or even death.

But to people outside of this struggle, I think that sea-change is invisible. Many of you really have no idea what just happened or what it's done to us, both good and bad. It's outside your circle of perception.

So I can understand that our anger must be kind of scary to some of you. It looks like it's way out of proportion to what you think happened. And it's not like us, really, even if our movement was born at a riot.

So in the interest of building bridges, which apparently many of you are really big on, I'll share a secret: my anger is scaring me, too. I haven't summoned it, cultivated it, or even welcomed it. It's just there, like the bricks and bottles thrown at Stonewall. It's real like that.

At first I thought the fact that many of you had no idea what's going on for us was our fault. We must not have been telling you our stories. We must have been burying our fears, trying to look smart and strong and successful and PROUD. Like kids with an alcoholic parent, we denied anything was wrong with how we were being treated by our families, government, churches, and armed forces.

So we wrote diary after diary explaining what it's really like to grow up queer in America — to often find no safe harbor even in our own families, who throw us out, or in our churches, which call us sinners, or in our schools, which fail to keep us safe or even alive, or in the army, which uses Don't Ask, Don't Tell as a license to rape female soldiers and cleanse the ranks.

We told you about how many of us are haunted by things that happened to us -- like when I had my head smashed into a car windshield for being so utterly uppity as to use the ATM while lesbian — or to others — like Jennifer Gale, who last week died of the cold on the streets of Austin because the only shelter in town, run by the Salvation Army, wouldn't let a transgendered woman stay under its roof.

We thought you knew, but in case you didn't, we told you how our youth are being tortured, isolated, and abused in religious centers that claim to be able to change them into straight people — places people like Warren advocate and even run.

But I saw that to far too many of you, knowing our stories made no difference at all. There's just something about the fight of LGBT people for our civil rights that makes a whole lot of you here feel uncomfortable.

You keep saying things like, "Just because someone is against gay marriage doesn't mean they're a homophobe or a bigot," even though there are no non-bigoted, non-homophobic reasons to oppose marriage equality.

You say that equality for LGBT citizens is an "issue" that needs to take its place on the list of progressive causes, and not a fundamental civil right that is the very foundation and bedrock of our entire constitutional system: equality under the law.

You say we're too angry and it's not an effective strategy, completely missing that we're not strategizing; we're really this angry — even me, a 49 year old lesbian who lives in San Francisco and has a good job. I'm so furious I often can't sleep, can't eat, and sometimes I shake with rage.

You keep telling us we need to reach out and build bridges to the religious right. Do you really think there is any point at all in telling us we need to reach out to homophobes and bigots, to the people who run the churches that abuse our youth and shove us out the doors, that have brainwashed our parents into rejecting us, that tell us they "love" us while they knife us in the hearts with their laws?

Why don't you tell them to reach out to us? We're the ones who have been wronged and harmed, disenfranchised, electro-shocked, had our kids taken away in ugly custody battles, lost our homes when our partner died, been thrown out of the hospital rooms of our lovers, had wills overturned and benefits denied. We're the ones who had our equality thrown up for a popular vote, and whose rights are denied us in the constitutions of 29 states. Telling us to reach out to them is like saying battered women need to reach out to their abusers, or children to the priest who molested them.

You lecture us not to hold this against Obama, but newsflash: at least for me, this has nothing to do with Obama. I knew he was regressive on my rights when I supported him; he always was, as was every viable presidential candidate. I also knew he had some weird idea that his religious beliefs were some valid explanation or even justification for his views on my civil rights. I'd like to see a Democrat get elected who can be for marriage equality and doesn't have to be a devout Christian, but I live in the reality based community and none, absolutely none, of this was any kind of surprise to me. I'm not a sulking scorned supporter who thinks Obama owes me something, and my support for him has not changed.

No, the people I'm mad at are some of YOU. I'm angry at your ignorance of our lives, for your complete lack of understanding of what a claim for equality under the law is, for telling us to shut up or quiet down or stop being angry or stop making trouble for the progressive movement or stop drawing negative attention to our party or Obama.

You call yourself a progressive and swear you're not a bigot? Well, if you're not with us, completely in support of our full and unconditional equality with straight citizens including marriage equality, then you're a progressive who's also a bigot -- even if your bigotry is a side-effect of your religion. And when bigots give advice to the people against whom they are bigoted, it is, at best, a form of concern-trolling. Your advice is not about us and our real best interests; it's about you.

So stop. Just stop telling us not to be angry or hurt or so emotional. This happened to us. It damages us. It reminds us of our pain, which many of us put behind us at great personal cost. I have lost dozens of friends to suicide, alcoholism, and depression. I've lost friends to gay bashing, and to a disease that ran unchecked and ignored because it "only" killed fags. I live in San Francisco, and there are huge parts of this city I wouldn't feel safe holding my girlfriend's hand. Do you not understand what it's like to live like that?

If you can't stand with us, at least have the grace to stop giving us advice, advocating our silence, lecturing us about our behavior, or telling us who and what we are.

What we do as a movement now is in our hands, and those of our allies. If you're not one of them, shut up and get out of the way.