Lately there have been some things that have been bothering me concerning the Prop 8 movement. I’ve been hearing so many people criticizing everything that everyone is doing and it is really beginning to take a toll on all of us involved in the activism movement. If we constantly have to fight not only our opponents, but our supporters as well, then nothing is going to get done. People won’t show up to events that require a large amount of people to make a difference, people won’t talk to certain members of other gay organizational groups, and people have flat-out stopped caring because they don’t like what the people who are actually out there speaking up are trying to say.
Sure, I don’t agree with some of the methods of the community organizers in the area, and sure, I don’t like the way some people like to try to get the message across. But you know what people? The sad truth is that those kinds of people that we don’t like are ALL that we have right now. Do you want to know why that is? Because the very people who don’t like who we have, or how they do things, are not doing anything themselves.
All of the negativity in the gay community is the one thing that turns me way off. And just to let you all know—especially those of us that are negative and judgmental—it is not your fault. We have grown up in a society where we have had to prove that we are just as good, if not better, then our straight counterparts, and it has seeped into the heads of many homosexuals that we are in fact better. That’s the sad thing; growing up in a world where we have had no one to speak for us and no representation is what has made us the way we all are today.
All I am trying to say is that there is a fight going on out there people! A huge fight for OUR rights. Not just mine, but yours as well. So even if you don’t want to get married, or if you just flat-out don’t care whether or not you have rights, or even if you don’t like the people who are out there trying to make a difference in our favor, at least show your support, and your respect. I’m not talking about the respect that we receive from many of our opponents—that false respect they seem to have for us. I’m talking about the genuine respect that we as a gay community have for each other. We are just as diverse, if not more so, as other minorities. We all have the responsibility to show our support for one another.
If we can’t even join together in something this huge—so huge that it affects all of us in the GLBTQQI community—then why would they even want to give us our rights back? If you are not happy with the way we are trying to get the job done, I’ll have you know it takes little to no effort to start a movement. So the question I’m proposing to you all right now is this: Are you going to sit there and criticize everything I am trying to say right now, or are you going to go out there and do something about how you feel?
