Why Being Out and Proud Matters

In the wake of the historic vote last Friday in New York State, the New York Times ran an editorial by a Frank Bruni, a gay man that discussed the impact that out gays have on the attitudes and acceptance of LGBT citizens by family members and friends. The column spoke both of Bruni's personal story but also how gay family members played a huge role in garnering GOP donor support for marriage equality. I missed the column but a local straight friend saw it, clipped it out of the Sunday Times and mailed it to me. She said reading it, she immediately thought of the boyfriend and me. Nothing confronts and destroys the anti-LGBT stereotypes disseminated by the Christianists and professional Christian set as effectively as a living breathing LGBT family member or friend. The stereotypes quickly become lies in the minds of those who know us and are rejected. In my own experience, clients, fellow parishioners and others have been forced to rethink the prejudice that might otherwise be unthinkingly accepted. Here are highlights from the op-ed column:
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The fact that same-sex marriage was drawing such serious attention at such high levels was public proof of what I could see in my private life — in my own family. Where we are is a long way from where we were.
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Outside New York, five states, along with Washington, D.C., already permit same-sex marriages. Twenty-one states, along with D.C., outlaw anti-gay discrimination. And both numbers will grow. That’s what recent polls telegraph, and that’s what the shape and flavor of the campaign for same-sex marriage in New York irrevocably demonstrated. This issue will increasingly transcend partisan politics and hinge less on party affiliation or archaic religious doctrine than on the intimate, everyday dynamics of family and friendship.
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As The Times’s Michael Barbaro and Nicholas Confessore have reported, the biggest and most influential donors to the New York campaign were Republicans. . . . . . Why such widespread backing, from such surprising quarters? One major reason is that the wish and push to be married cast gay men and lesbians in the most benign, conservative light imaginable, not as enemies of tradition but as aspirants to it.
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But an even bigger reason is how common it now is for Americans to realize that they know and love people who are gay. . . . . Same-sex marriage is personal for Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, whose longtime companion, Sandra Lee, has a gay brother. It’s personal for Paul E. Singer, the most impassioned of the Republican donors. At a fund-raiser for same-sex marriage last year, he recalled leafing through the wedding album of “my son and son-in-law,” married in Massachusetts. “At the moment they are pioneers,” he said, according to a transcript, “although I felt like a loving father and father-in-law, not a pioneer, as we were looking at the pictures.” It’s personal for the New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser, who on Monday wrote, “I give in.” She recounted the recent Massachusetts wedding of her niece and another woman.
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In voicing his support for same-sex marriage, Mayor Bloomberg has mentioned — and appeared with — his niece Rachel, who is lesbian. . . . . To reckon with the gay people right in front of you is to re-examine your qualms. I’ve seen that in my father, a 76-year-old Republican.
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Years ago he would quietly leave the room whenever my sexual orientation came up in a family conversation. But when he urged me to attend a Halloween party he gave for his friends last fall, he insisted I bring [my partner] Tom, whom he has come to know well over the two and a half years we’ve been together. And as he introduced us to his golf partners from the country club, he said, “This is my son, Frank. And this is my other son, Tom. Or at least I think of him that way.”
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Do you support gay marriage?” I asked him. “I don’t know,” he said, explaining that it still seemed strange. He added: “But not if you know the person.” “Meaning me?” I said. “No,” he said. “I mean Tom. He’s a good person. If you and he got married? I guess that would be O.K. Yeah, that would be fine.”
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Yes, there are real risks to being out - I was forced from a law firm because of it - but by being out you are an activist in more ways than you may ever know.