For Gays, the Worst Is Yet to Come

To date, the Trump/Pence regime has been nothing but a hostile enemy to LGBT Americans and, when a fifth right wing ideologue is elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court - sadly, it is not a question of if, but only when - many of the hard fought legal gains that have been made for LGBT individuals in America will begin to wither and steadily be reversed. In an allegedly secular nation, we will see the steady advancement of religious based hatred advanced, most likely under the false banner of "religious liberty."  That religious liberty will only be reserved for the few, the Christofascists.  The rights of everyone else will be eroded or eliminated. As this all unfolds, I feel anger - perhaps simmering rage is a better description - at two groups.  First, there are the supposed "friends" who, blinded by their own racism that made Trump/Pence racist siren song attractive to them, were too lazy to educate themselves on who else was on the target list for hatred and a diminution of their rights. The excuse "I didn't know" simply doesn't cut it.  The second group are the LGBT Americans, many of whom have plenty of money and social connections, who never lift a finger to help the cause of LGBT rights. Like wealthy German Jews of the early 1930's, they refuse to see that ultimately they too will be caught up in the wave of hate and government authorized discrimination - or worse. A column by a long time gay rights activist bemoans this latter group.  Bad things happen when good people fail to act.  Here are column excerpts:

I was recently honored for my birthday with an all-star reading of my play “The Destiny of Me.” It was obviously a very emotional experience for me. I’m supposed to be dead by now. Most of the guys who got infected with H.I.V. in the 1980s are long dead.

The play is about a middle-aged man infected with H.I.V. undergoing an experimental treatment at the National Institutes of Health. In his hospital room he finds himself remembering his life since childhood. He realizes his entire life has been one long battle to be accepted as a homosexual: “Every social structure I’m supposed to be a part of — my family, my religion, my straight friends, my university, my city, my state, my country, my government, my newspaper, my TV, my many shrinks … tells me over and over and over that what I feel and see and think and do is sick.”

We’ve come a certain distance from such a blanket suffocation. . . . [with Trump] it continues to be a plague of hate. There is not one cabinet member who has supportive or welcoming words for us. Every week, it seems, Mr. Trump appoints another judge who is on record as hating us. They will serve for many years. A new Supreme Court will further echo this disdain.

I have never been able to answer one question: Why have relatively few of us — out of so many millions — been willing to fight for their lives? I still can’t answer it and I continue to be very sad because of it. And the biggest fight for our lives is ahead of us.

[W]hat little power we do have, lobbying or otherwise, in Washington or anywhere else, is woefully inadequate. Our billionaires are funding concert halls and public parks and retirement homes for primates, but not gay rights. If it weren’t for such stalwart defenders as Lambda Legal Defense and the A.C.L.U., we’d probably be jailed by our enemies.

We will always have enemies. Is that why we’re so invisible as a powerful fighting force? Because too many of us are still afraid to be seen or heard?

Millions of women and straight people are marching on Washington and in other cities and towns and protesting in the offices of elected officials every week of the year. Where are the millions of gay people being angry and vocal and visibly fighting back?

The worst is yet to come. Again. Yes, it makes me very sad. And still imploringly angry.

I for one, will go down fighting, exhausting as it is so often.  I sincerely hope that more will get involved and fight to reverse the coming nightmare.  At PrideFest in Norfolk last month, there were roughly 30,000 people in attendance, yet the rest of the year, most remain invisible and do nothing significant to fight for their own rights. Like the author, I am saddened and angry. 

The Normal Heart - Thoughts and Reflections

The husband and I watched "The Normal Heart" on HBO and found the movie to be not only well done but emotionally gripping.  The two of us were in very different places in our lives during the time period covered in the film.  He was in a relationship with his first partner while I was married to a woman and living in the suburbs, first in Houston and then in Virginia Beach.   The husband knew individuals who were lost to AIDS whereas, I was isolated and largely detached from the horrors that were happening.  The reaction by many in the straight community - that gays were diseased and to be avoided - likely deepened my subconscious resolve that I could never, ever face the reality of who I was.  The result of the reaction of the straight world was that thousands died with little or no support and research to battle HIV/AIDS was delayed. 

One of the most disturbing aspects of the film was in the closing credits when it acknowledged that Ronald Reagan did not first utter the term AIDS in public until 1985 when he pledged to make research a priority.  The next sentence then states that his 1986 budget instead cut funding by 11%.  To far too many, HIV/AIDS did not matter because it was perceived to be happening only to gays, a group reviled by the "Godly Christian" crowd and deemed "other."  That heterosexuals in Africa were contracting it and dying too did not seem to matter, probably because of white American racism that relegated African blacks to realm of "other" as well.  Its the mindset we still see from the conservatives and angry white conservative Christians: if you don't look just like me and don't hold my beliefs, then you simply do not matter.  Indeed, you're not even human.  Behind much of this is the ever present poison of religious belief.

Much has changed since the early 1980's, but one thing has not: many continue to die and far too many Americans simply do not care.  In the Hampton Roads area, HIV/AIDS is a crisis within the black community, yet many black churches and black pastors continue to refuse to face the crisis much less cease their rampant homophobia which continues to cause black men to be "on the down low" and/or fail to seek testing and treatment.  Elton John has an op-ed at CNN that looks at the ongoing problem and the still deadly disinterest that too many hold toward HIV/AIDS.   Here are highlights:

"The Normal Heart," written by my friend, the brilliant playwright Larry Kramer, and based on his story during the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic, tells a tale that many of us lived through, and many others did not survive. It's as relevant today as an HBO movie as when it premiered on the stage in New York City in 1985.

Back then, The New York Times refused to print the word "gay," and New York Mayor Ed Koch was agonizingly slow to respond to the unfolding epidemic. Fear was everywhere. Around the country, family members shunned infected relatives, doctors were afraid to touch AIDS patients, let alone treat them, and hospital wards filled up with young men covered in lesions, dying excruciating deaths. I've almost lost track of the number of funerals I went to in those years. My friends were dying all around me -- I'm lucky that I somehow survived.

ACT UP, the coalition that Larry founded to address the crisis, coined the phrase "silence equals death" as its rallying cry, and it was no exaggeration. By the end of 1983, AIDS had claimed 2,100 lives, but the government would hardly acknowledge that anything was awry. I can't help but wonder, if those in power had cared more, if they had done more, perhaps we could have ended this epidemic before it began to circle the globe. But they didn't care, they didn't act, and 36 million people have died of AIDS since.

Worldwide, another than 1.6 million people will die of AIDS this year

Today, African-Americans represent 12% of the national population, but they account for 44% of Americans living with HIV, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gay and bisexual men comprise only 2% of the American population, but they represented 30% of the nation's HIV infections in 2010.

The crisis is particularly acute in the American South, where homophobia is rampant.

I hope HBO's production of "The Normal Heart" will compel a new generation to act up. There is so much work still to be done, but there's also so much potential. The characters in "The Normal Heart," living as they did in the 1980s, didn't understand what they or their friends were dying of, and they didn't have treatments to manage the disease. They hardly knew how to protect themselves.

Today, we know how to protect everyone, and we have the ability to treat every single person living with HIV. . . . Today, as ever, silence equals death.

[W]e must speak out against injustice, act with compassion, and fight for equality.  If enough of us raise our voices, we can finally begin to end this epidemic.

Just imagine if the millions and millions of dollars spent by "family values groups," the Mormon Church, the Catholic Church and the Knights of Columbus to keep gays inferior under the law had been spent instead on HIV/AIDS prevention, education and treatment how many more might be saved from HIV?AIDS.  The "godly Christians" continue to be the strongest argument available as to why one would not want to be deemed a Christian. 

 

Readers - especially straight readers - need to watch The Normal Heart.  It should be required viewing for Republicans in particular.