How Many More Elections Before Queer People Stop Being Political Scapegoats?
The steady beat of a swinging pendulum
My life has timed out in such curious symmetry with the evolution of queer civil rights in this country. Each new era of my development has coincided with a pendulum swing… and I keep praying it won’t swing back.
I was born the year after Reagan begrudgingly acknowledged AIDS for the first time. I was 10 when protease inhibitors finally began to turn the tide. The first decade of my life was defined by gay people’s fight to survive.
But of course I didn’t know this at the time. I was blissfully ignorant about politics and government. I never saw any protests on TV or in the streets, and my parents never told me what happened to all their friends.
I only really became aware of my own queerness a few years later, in the late 90's — when Ellen came out, Will and Grace was on TV, and films like The Birdcage and In & Out were the comedy hits of the year.
I thought I was living in a utopian era of inevitable progress.
