What if we gave a big gay party and nobody came? What if gay pride parades around the country were canceled in 2011? What if we – the LGBT people of America and our supporters – took all our boa bluster and motorcycle muster and aimed ourselves toward Washington this summer?

I know the big marches on our nation’s capital never have quite the impact we want them to, so I’m not suggesting we all set about on a mad frenzy to book cheap air fares and develop intricate co-housing schemes for a weekend. What I’m talking about is getting everyone to agree that on the last Sunday of June, we will march toward Washington and demand full federal equal rights. With the sweet taste of victory from the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” still on our collective lips, here’s the chant, “We’re here, we’re queer, we demand equality this year!” Repeal DOMA, pass ENDA and let’s permanently wipe discrimination against LGBT people off the books. Why not?

Now, I know you don’t recognize my name and you don’t see a prominent logo from a big LGBT rights organization next to a gigantic “DONATE” button at the top of this post. But I come completely qualified, I assure you, having lived a lifetime (in 2011, it will be 50 years, in fact) as a second-class citizen. And, honey – I’m tired of it.

You can do the math. When Stonewall happened, I was 8 years old. I was growing up in the suburbs of New York City – in Fairfield County, Connecticut – 45 minutes from Manhattan by train. My total neighborhood domination of backyard whiffle ball games and giving Barbies buzz cuts was interrupted by my Dad to tell me Judy Garland died.

“Do you know who that is?” he asked me. ‘Over the Rainbow,’ no doubt was playing on a nearby transistor radio.

“The girl in the ‘Wizard of Oz?’” I half-asked, pretty sure I was right.

“Yep. Dorothy,” he said, going back to whatever he was doing – newspaper, Rheingold beer, Judy music followed by Peggy Lee on the radio station he listened to. The ‘60s of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin never permitted on the playlist.

The gory details that Dorothy was long past being the pigtailed, Toto-toting, ruby-slippered girl from Oz and had stumbled through 30 years of Hollywood hazed, pill-popping, excruciating career lows, typically followed by tremendous highs on concert stages in London and New York, her floodlights to permanently burn out at 47, would be discovered in time. Within a decade I’d come to realize Judy’s path kind of mirrored that of all of us who would have our wide-eyed innocence exchanged for the realization that we were “in the life”. Hopefully you were going to end up on top, belting out encore after encore at Carnegie Hall. The flipside of this, of course, was that you’d OD on a toilet seat.

The Stonewall riots happened in the early morning hours after Garland’s New York City funeral. The drag queens who refused to be “searched” to reveal what was under their dresses, the stone butch who was clobbered with a billy club and shouted “Why don’t you guys do something!?” as she was shoved into a paddy wagon. And then, those who went, in the words of one witness, “berserk” got it all started.

By the time I, along with a couple of my suburban homies, “followed the crowd” from Metro North to the subway to Times Square and then downtown to Greenwich Village on a June Sunday in 1980, we weren’t out to make a statement. We were going to a party. We were young, single, gorgeous and most probably stoned.  

We caught the tail end of that year’s Gay Liberation March. We arrived in time to see a frazzled haired “feminist” in blue denim work shirt and Mork from Ork rainbow suspenders carrying a boom box down the street. Two Tons of Fun (before they became the more mainstream “Weather Girls”) blasted forth, at the top of their gay game. A group carrying placards of known enemies – Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Anita Bryant – followed. Next came the placards bearing known (and suspected) friends – Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Eleanor Roosevelt. And then came the bullhorn, a fabulous queen chanting, “2-4-6-8, how do you know your husband is straight?”

We were outsiders, then, daring not to think beyond this one day each year when a section of a city’s streets were ours. Tomorrow we would go back to the various stages of the closet we were in. But today, we followed the crowd to Christopher Street, where we bought drinks in plastic coconuts and watched couples holding hands and kissing as they wandered through the street party. Secretly we vowed to ourselves that next year we’d have “a lover.”

Time marched forward. Lovers became “domestic partners” – a legal title, depending on where you lived, that afforded your relationship certain marriage-like rights and responsibilities (even though it sounded like you had wedded your vacuum cleaner). AIDS happened, and the community was nearly brought to its knees, watching so many of our friends die of an unexplained horrific illness. Hearing the stories about the parents, siblings, even cousins sometimes of a man who died of AIDS showing up on his passing and taking everything out of the home he shared with his partner – who had no legal rights. In some cases, they took the home.

The marches and parades of the late ‘80s and the ‘90s were politically charged and celebrity infused - mayors and members of Congress rode in convertibles down Fifth Avenue and Market Street. Samantha and the second Darrin (Dick Sargent, very ill at the time with AIDS) were Grand Marshals in West Hollywood. Straight friends and family joined in. Once you got your rainbow on during “The Year of the Queer” or “United by Pride” each Monday morning after fewer and fewer of us went back in the closet. Some of the new kids never spent any time in one at all – taking same-sex dates to their prom.

In the 21^st century, the Holy Grail – gay marriage – is painstakingly being grasped, one of five states at a time. Temporarily legal long enough in California so that 18,000 gay and lesbian couples have the inalienable right (at the state level) that cannot be taken away. A handful of other states and cities concede “marriage-like” validation in civil unions (a newer, more palatable name that no longer implies you are sleeping with your microwave).

All of this, however, remains blocked at the federal level, where 1,138 rights to gay couples are unattainable. And will continue to be so – along with full federal equal rights - for the foreseeable future. Certainly through the throwback 112th Congress coming in next week, unless we start to push ostensibly from the outside. Which is why – the big what if? What if we took that last Sunday in June in 2011 and canceled the march down Main Street and instead faced toward our nation’s capital? What if we, 50 or 100 million Americans, stood proudly in one direction and demanded that our country stop treating anyone as less than equal? What if?

Why not?