It strikes me that even my best straight friends, magnificent men and women all, don't always know of or understand the deep chasms of grief and pain that underlie the modern lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender experience like so many catacombs. What you see from me, from Keith, others like us, the lightheartedness, the ready sardonic wit, the great clothes and the bodies they scarcely contain, skin care sufficient to lift small countries out of poverty, sure that's real.
Every glittering façade is in some measure real, in affect if not substance. The scenery on a stage is real by the same token and often to the same scant degree.
What lies beneath is another story, almost another world. All of us to a man or woman have suffered discrimination, in our families and at home, in our society, in the workplace, in our schools and colleges, at travel or at rest, in public or private, stateside and abroad. I still remember a young man getting crucified in Wyoming, remember two others shot down four miles from my desk in sight of the Stonewall, and yes, I remember the tens of thousands deprived of the right to serve our nation in uniform with honesty and honor.
Gay men are still gripped in the vise of the AIDS epidemic, long forgotten but still deadly and growing like a malevolent cancer preying on the weakest. Half a million dead in America alone, more actually, in an America ostensibly at peace, and we haven't even begun to mourn them. Say their names? How? There are too many.
Gay women meanwhile endure an epidemic of 'curative' rape, of breast cancer, of physical or verbal abuse often shading into rape, of societal invisibility, powerlessness and all the burdens of sexism that afflict their straight sisters differently but as widely.
Gay men and women of color– afflicted by catastrophic HIV infection rates, by the poverty, ghettoization, inadequate healthcare, by the failing schools common to communities of color as is, and all this without the self-built aid denied those outside the norms too often obtaining in communities of color – are by almost any measure at the very bottom of this great nation's concern, if they register at all.
Or would be at the bottom were it not for transfolk crowding them out at the foot of the ladder, magnificent warriors like Emma Violet Todd and Mariah Lopez Ebony notwithstanding. If you seek heroes, look to them and theirs.
And true enough, we may seek to and often do find, far more than society at large, happiness in a bottle, a needle or a line of sharp white powder, to intoxicate away for an hour, a night, a day our grinding cold reality, to anesthetize loneliness and grief with glittering flesh for a few minutes in the cold hour before dawn.
But still we endure, all of us. You may try to kill us; and sometimes you will succeed. You may try to ostracize us, and there again you may succeed, or may not, it doesn't matter.
Because we endure. Love is stronger than any force this universe knows. We still believe against experience and disappointment that the great hope of America, "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" cannot but be made true. It must be made true. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of a promissory note America wrote to all her children without distinction, yesterday, today, now and forever until our very shores drown and mountains crumble into dust. Until they do, or even if they do, gay men and women, bisexual and transgender Americans will dare to love one another. We cannot and will not do otherwise, not today, not tomorrow or next year, not ever.
Liberty, Justice, Freedom and Equality are our birthright as they are yours, we will not rest, we shall not falter or fail, we shall go on to the end until these great words become real, shine like beacons blazing in a night robbed of any fear or injustice, flaming lights bright enough to shame a thousand suns, lights to awaken this nation of ours, this country we too love, love today and soon enough will love in one ceaseless day of hope, of rebirth, of justice no longer denied and hope no longer the cruel jest belonging at best to a distant ephemeral future.
The day will dawn when we no longer mourn the senseless deaths of our precious young, when their beautiful faces minds bodies smile again without a care. Today is not that day. Nor will tomorrow be. That day will nonetheless dawn as surely as the tides roll in on our mighty shores.
Today we are one day closer to it, another day nearer to seeing a fiery sunrise from the old East towards the new lands of the West, our West, our land, built by our people without regard to hue or creed or sex or wealth, a land hammered from steel, glass, rock, blood and sweat to fashion our home of miracles for a people of ceaseless marvel.
All of us; Black, white, gay, straight, new arrival or ancient gentry. We are one flesh bound by blood and law, by our past, by our love for one another, by our future. That is America. We are America, all of us.
This is what we are: a great nation at the apex of its power, bestriding the globe like a colossus, peerless, but great not owing to arms or wealth or colossal size; no, America is great because she is good, because she believes that everything can be made better, more equal, more kind, more satisfying to human need, more evocative of human genius shining like a field of stars. We can exalt valleys, make the crooked line straight, have lambs lie with wolves in tranquility.
The true glory of America, that which endures, lies not in our matchless arms, in half a continent bound by law now for two hundred and forty years, lies not in our vast wealth. It lies in the hearts of our people. In the sheer goodness and kindness of Americans, in our ability to be fair to one another, to open our door in love to old friend and unknown stranger alike. It lies in our ability to embrace every newcomer as potentially one of us, to reach out in love to the stranger, make him or her a stranger no more.
I do not believe, cannot believe, that we will betray what makes us who we are. The murders in Orlando – and so much more – might lead you to believe that ugliness, fear, hate are inevitably our future; this darkness always seems so much more apt to the darker side of our species. This shadow of grief at long last perhaps no light can pierce.
I disagree. I fell in love with America over twenty years ago, with her generosity of spirit, her love of the downtrodden, those magnificent words on a statue down in the harbor overshadowed by the gleaming towers of Manhattan filled with two million souls from every corner of the globe; that is who we are. The American Dream still lives in our hearts and those of millions beyond our shores, for whom America is the last best hope of mankind.
We cannot fall short, not for our children, not for new Americans flocking every day to the Mother of Exiles, not for the weakest among us or the marble tablets of our fathers. And we will not fall short.
This dream will never die. E Pluribus Unum.