June 28, 1969.  I was beginning my last summer vacation before heading off to college. I was also enjoying the new driver’s license I’d just received.  Perhaps I was having a pizza with some buddies, talking about social issues that bothered us, like Vietnam and racial injustice.  Probably we were chatting about girls we thought were hot and out of our league.  Certainly we were talking about our big plans for our lives and the wonderful things we hoped to accomplish.  Our futures were bright.

Homosexuality wasn’t even a word in my vocabulary.

June 28, 1969.  Gay men in a West Village bar named the Stonewall riot when police make one of their regular vice raids.  At the time, homosexual acts are legal in only one state, Illinois.  Homosexuals everywhere, even in liberal and tolerant New York, were forced to keep their attraction behind locked doors with the windows covered, out of sight.  Gathering places are frequently raided by the authorities, with people arrested just for fraternizing. Being arrested at a gay gathering place could cost the arrestees their jobs and ruin their lives.  The uprising at the Stonewall, which lasts for three days, is the first time gays have resisted authority, and it is considered the “Rosa Parks moment” of the gay liberation movement.  

Homosexuality wasn’t a word in the media’s vocabulary either.  There are few news photos of the events and mainstream coverage, when not demeaning, is mostly nonexistent.

(Photo from the New York Times)

Mid-1970s.  I meet my first openly gay man at the manufacturing firm where I worked, except that when I first met Ronnie, he was struggling to stay in the closet.  Unhappily married – there was a rumor about his angry wife putting broken glass in his sandwich – Ronnie was difficult to work with. He came to work every day with a lunch box featuring Peter Pan and a logo that read, “I Refuse to Grow Up,” and it was appropriate.  He had a sense of humor not unlike mine, but he was often testy, uncomfortable around co-workers and somewhat unreliable.  Once I found him wedged into a small space between a machine and the wall, hiding from co-workers, and you don’t need to be Freud to analyze that sight.

I don’t remember when Ronnie accepted his homosexuality.  There was no great proclamation.  What I remember is that he suddenly became happy.  He was more reliable and more pleasant to work with, even getting a promotion.  I certainly didn’t understand this same-sex attraction thing, but I was a child of the Sixties and if it made you happy and didn’t hurt anyone, then hey, whatever floats your boat.

Summer 1980.  I spend six weeks bumming around the country.  In San Francisco, I head out to the Castro for an afternoon to check out some indie record stores.  I know it’s the center of gay life in Frisco – I’d followed the murder of Harvey Milk - but I’ve spent a lot of time in Greenwich Village and I’ve seen gay couples before, so I’m cool.  Or so I thought.  Until I discover that nearly every couple walking around the Castro is gay.  I’m curious in a sociological sense but also a little uneasy.  It takes a while before I realize that my unease arises because, for the first time in my life, I’m in a community where I’m the minority.  It gives me a quick slap in the face about what life must be like every day for gay people.

November 24, 1984.  I get married.  Denise and I spend the evening celebrating our heterosexual love with our friends, dancing, drinking, eating and laughing.  I don’t spend one second considering that if Denise and I were of the same sex, we couldn’t have such a celebration sanctioned by the state.

Mid-1980s.  I meet my first HIV-positive man.  He works in my sister-in-law’s video store.  I don’t know him well, but he provides a recognizable face for this “gay disease” that’s been decimating their community. We begin making contributions to groups fighting AIDS.  I’m not completely free of homophobia, though.  I’m alarmed to find myself now appearing on the mailing list for gay-oriented products, and when something of an erotic nature arrives, I call the provided phone number and ask to be removed from the list.

Mid-1990s.  Like a good liberal, I preach tolerance.  I go to see, and talk up, the movie Philadelphia (even though I secretly consider it a little crappy).  I’m outraged when Bill Clinton signs the Defense of Marriage Act (even I though I’m not quite sure about this same-sex marriage thing, I just don’t want to rule it out). 

But I fall in love with the music of the Pet Shop Boys, particularly their album Very.  It seems to follow the singer’s progression from closet to gay pride, and the message goes down easily with irresistible, danceable rhythms and with yearning, intelligent lyrics.  It closes with a cover of the Village People’s “Go West,” produced with an orchestra and choir, that feels anthemic.  Love is beautiful, I realize, no matter who the lovers.  I play the record repeatedly. 

The ‘00s.  I’m proud that both of my daughters get involved with the high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance; Nicole acting as President. They participate in seminars and retreats, and teach me to say “LGBT.”  They begin school campaigns to eliminate epithets and ridiculous statements like “that’s so gay;” I vow to never allow epithets in my presence ever again.   They have close friends, delightful kids, who are gay or bi, and they shrug their shoulders, considering the difference in orientation to be as insignificant as someone my generation would a preference for the Rolling Stones over the Beatles.  I vow to follow their lead.  I strive to remove anything from my conversation that implies that same-sex relationships are any less legitimate than my own.

June 21, 2010.  At the Film Forum in Manhattan, I purchase a ticket for Stonewall Uprising, a documentary about the famous riots, and chuckle that walking into the theater alone to see a gay-oriented film, an act that would have made me self-conscious not that long ago, now feels as normal as apple pie.  The film recounts the events of June 1969, but also stuns me by portraying the hostile atmosphere toward gay people at the time.  It plays clips from anti-homosexual public service announcements from the 1950s and 1960s that seem even more deranged than Reefer Madness.  It plays clips from a 1967 CBS documentary, hosted by Mike Wallace, who declares in one of many travesties, “The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage.” The clips seem so stunningly ignorant in retrospect that it’s as if CBS gave the Ku Klux Klan 60 minutes to explain black people.   

I come home, sit down at my keyboard and type in the things I’ve learned in the nearly 41 years since Stonewall.  I’m anxious to say a few more things:

That “homosexuality” is part of my vocabulary now, as much as “love” and “family” and “marriage” and “equality.”  That the arguments against legalizing same-sex marriage seem as desperate as the Church’s insistence, after Copernicus and Galileo, that the sun still revolved around the earth.  That the legalization of same-sex marriage is inevitable, and that the continuing debate over it reminds me of a movie where the ending is preordained, but the script keeps throwing ridiculous obstacles in the way to drag out the viewer’s misery.  That, while I’m a patient man by nature and even more patient as I age, I am grossly offended that my gay friends have to wait longer to experience the same legal sanction of their love that heterosexuals like myself take for granted.

That I’m tired of this idiotic argument, and that I want this story fast-forwarded to the inevitable happy ending right now, so we can go on to discussing issues that are actually  complicated.