The Gayest Year Ever?

I overheard a conversation on New Year's Eve at a little (sober) GLBT get-together to the effect that now is a very good time to be gay.

That was followed up by an op-ed piece yesterday by the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Shalikashl... whomever, that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" should be dropped and that the services are, at long last, ready to accept out gay people.

Well, yeah, I have to admit it's a helluva lot better to be gay today than it was a decade ago. Which is a helluva lot better than it was the decade before that, and so on, and so on.

BUT, I'm still half a citizen in my home state, and a non-entity in many states.

When I tossed myself into the fledgling gay lib movement, back in 1972, Stonewall was only 3 years behind me. Our tiny little Gay Community at the U. of D. had sister and brother groups up and down the east coast, from Boston to D.C. And it behooved us to throw our support behind each other's groups, for survival purposes. We never thought, in a million years, that it would be "okay" to be gay the way it's okay to be gay today. We were ecstatic when the American Psychiatric Society declared that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness. And we were equally delighted when states such as teensy Delaware repealed their anti-sodomy laws. We thought all that was "real progress."

I never occured to us to get married. We were young and horny and happy to be able to just screw around without getting arrested.

But, times have changed and things have certainly taken some odd turns.

The other week, for example, a commercial website (which I'm always loathe to praise, or even mention) carried one of the funniest things I've ever read. The website is VH1's, and the item of the day was "The Ten Gayest Moments of 2006".

Come to think of it, it was a pretty gay year. But my absolute favorite item on the list is Number 4 (DreamGirls is this years Brokeback Mountain) and, in particular, the last sentence:

"We only hope this movie is wearing protection as it thrusts its power ballads up into your musical loving ass."

And if that isn't the queerest thing you've ever read, then you are truly a bunch of jaded show trash.

Luv ya! Mean it!!