I am a lucky person. For so many reasons, I am lucky. Before today, I knew some of the general reasons I was lucky: I had well educated and hard working parents who took good care in raising their children, I grew up in a safe town in a major mteropolitan area, and I was able to attend undergrad without a single loan taken out. Add to that the luck of breathing and living every day, I am a truly lucky person. Some people in the world don’t have those things, but I do.
Tonight, though, I discovered another way I have been a very lucky person. I am lucky to have been born and lived in an era where society has found it acceptable to be openly gay. I am lucky to be able to hold my boyfriend’s hand in a theater and not worry that I’ll be thrown out for lewd behavior. I am lucky that I am able to live as who I am, and not hide that from the world around me.
This luck I have was found while watching Gus van Sant’s Milk. Its chronicle of the beginning of the gay rights movement, including the development of the Castro and the desperate fight to preserve the human right to hold a job put into perspective just how lucky I am. People like Harvey Milk fought, protested, and demanded not just visibility for their cause but fought and demanded to retain the inalienable human rights given to them by our Declaration of Independence; and by proxy, they fought for the same rights and freedom of visibility I enjoy this very second. Milk even died simply because he did not compromise himself or his beliefs. To imagine that in 1978, California nearly made it illegal for anyone who was gay or who supported gays a to teach in a California public school, and to know that people then mobilized to protect a simple human right…makes me realize how lucky I am.
Along with that, Milk demonstrated to me just how much we need to fight for now, and how much the next generation should feel lucky. Namely, my generation needs to fight, protest, and stand up protect the rights we do own in California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts (even though Prop 8 passed, I truly believe the California Supreme Court will overturn the proposition for it’s completely unconstitutional basis). Along with that, we need to fight and demand the rights we deserve across the nation, not just in these three states. If I learned anything, it is that when there is something worth fighting for, defeat does not mean giving up. Nor does it mean compromising ourselves our beliefs. We must fight to ensure our human rights, because if we as an electorate can revoke one right, we can now by example and precedent revoke any right we want to. As an electorate.
So I thank all those who before me for standing tall and giving me an example to follow. I thank them for being able to kiss Ben in public. I thank them for ensuring it is illegal for police to harass me for having a drink. And I thank them for allowing me to feel so lucky about being me.
Much Love,
K.E.
