The world as we may have known it 20-30 years ago has changed in many violent and radical ways that are not about to be altered soon. Yet, for all of that change, none of it good, there is one thing I am so happy about but makes me even more concerned: Having married my partner and being out in a society that now talks about killing gays as if we were some kind of pest or weed in the garden.
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My wife and I went to Toronto in 2008 to get married. We both agreed that waiting for the old men in Albany to allow us to do what we wanted to do was a foolish waste of time. Neither of us were young and we wanted to get married and continue with our lives as a married couple.
So we went to Toronto and we got married. We returned home and live as a married couple and it is all that I had hoped for and more. It has made me happier than I ever recall being in my life. And it has shocked me by its very nature.
Never would I have thought, as a terrified 20 year old, for example, that I could walk down the street with my wife. I never at that age could have imagined talking as freely as I do about my wife and our life and being as accepted as we are by so many people.
And yet, there is something wrong, so wrong with this new aspect to being a lesbian in America today. I am more frightened, more anxious about our status here than I ever was when I knew what the better part of courage was in facing down homophobes. Facing expulsion, for example, from my junior college for the suspicion that I was a lesbian was nothing compared to feeling that people talk all too easily about the executions of gays in another country being in part supported by people here in this country who spoke for the inauguration of our new biracial president.
New nightmares arrive from this sense of imminent doom. I do not blame the LGBT community for this newly awakened fear in me. I do not blame those who have been fighting tirelessly for the equal rights and protections of those in my community. I blame those who think they can talk this way about people they do not know.
I blame those in my church who do not stand up for us and who act as if unity were more important than humanity and love.
I know that I love my wife more than I could ever have imagined loving another person. I know that I worked very diligently after we wed to get used to wearing this wedding ring and to adjusting to the thought of forever. These were all new to me and not things that had ever been on my horizon as I tried to see my life at very stages of it.
Now I feel quite vulnerable and exposed by these horrible thoughts people walk around with and that are finding some kind of acceptance. Why is there no outcry from the president that anyone connected to his work has helped in any way to foster the execution of gays in Uganda? Is he and are others so blind that they do not realize that these thoughts become actions and that the actions tried there can be tried here and elsewhere as well?
Do we have no collective conscience? Are we only guided by our identity politics so that if you are straight and married this is not a problem for you to have to worry about so why get involved?
We are on the road to disaster. It is not that long a road anymore. I hope someone stops the bus soon and reminds us all why we are here. It is not to hate and wish death on each other.
In the season of Advent it is to love and watch and wait for what is good and compassionate in us all.
Authors Bio:Deborah Emin is the founder of the publishing company, Sullivan Street Press (www.sullivanstreetpress.com). She is also the impressario of the Itinerant Book Show as well as the program director of the REZ Reading Series in Kew Gardens, NY. Her novel, Scags at 7, is back in print as well as available as an e-book from Sullivan Street Press. In addition to writing for OEN, Deborah has a blog on the Sullivan Street Press website where she writes about her experiences on the road, i.e., writing about anything that has to do with the Itinerant Book Show. She is currently at work on Scags at 18, due out fall 2010. And she travels back and forth to Cedar Rapids, Iowa where she is writing a book about the aftermath of the 2008 flood there. To keep up to date with all she is involved in, please go to her website www.deborahemin.com