Reply #8: I'll take up arms [View All]

[sui generis]

and legs and other more entertaining body parts.

;)

Seriously though, stand and fight. If you don't want to be discriminated against for being gay you have to fight for equal rights for everybody, and you have to do it the old fashioned hard way.

Believe me, I would rather wade into a throng of freepfucks and beat the living crap out of them with my hands and feet than have to go sit in meetings with congressmen and write long letters and stand vigils and picket businesses and stand up for what's right in the board room and on the street. It's a LOT of work and it uses up a LOT of my life. The Band of Thebes does indeed exist in one form or another, we just don't swing swords these days.

Isolationism won't work. Economic power is what works. The gay community was crippled by the AIDS epidemic for a decade and a half. We were slaughtered one for every one that it missed in a couple of successive generations. We have seen our neighbors, and siblings and friends, and sometimes life partners, die, horribly, in agony and shame and fear, without hope. We have war stories having had our hearts torn out and handed back bleeding, that most people can't bear to even hear, and most of us have never seen a bullet or experienced physical violence. We have post traumatic stress disorder, and not just from losing 4 or 5 of our platoon buddies in a brief skirmish, but from losing dozens of dozens over the years. We have diamond and steel where our spines and nerves used to be.

And as a community we are finally growing older and more powerful, and more dangerous to our foes, a fact that you can get behind. We have political power. We have economic power. We have the power of human decency, and the strength of survivors, and we have real innate pride that "straight pride" parades offends so profoundly it isn't worthy of further comment.

Stick with us kid - we've got your back.

-sui