I’m so angry and hurt right now that I don’t even know how to begin writing this. My husband and I found out last night that his step-brother donated $500 to Yes on 8. We found out that my husband’s cousin is driving around town with a Yes on 8 bumper sticker on his minivan. That people I know, and have been kind to, are propagating this hatred makes me sick. That they have small children who are learning the family value of hate brings me to tears. Knowing that people I love, who have taught me so much about love and kindness, would not be welcome in the homes of this "family" makes me wonder just how the hell I’m supposed to get through Christmas.
I have been angrily, viscerally opposed to Prop 8 since the moment I found out about it. It took finding out these ugly truths about my own family to really get clear on why. My uncle, my mother’s brother, was gay. In a lot of ways, that made me lucky. I got to grow up knowing that gay was normal. I never had to come to terms with what I believed about it, I never had to figure out where I stand on the "issue." In my world, gay is normal, and it always has been. So it was a surprise to me – a shock – to discover that not everyone saw it that way. That some people thought it was immoral or a sin. Love, a sin? I didn’t get it, and frankly, I still don’t. I don’t understand how someone can feel threatened by who someone else sleeps with. Or loves.
My uncle was a wonderful man. He was the one who stepped into my life when my father became absent. He filled the void. When my mother was struggling to pay the rent because my father didn’t pay child support, my uncle made sure that I had the things that would have simply been out of reach: Christmas presents, a class ring, a yearbook. When I was a teen I had really bad acne. The kind that leaves scars for the rest of your life. My uncle paid for the very expensive medication that insurance wouldn’t cover so that today people can tell me what beautiful skin I have. He made me coffee flavored milkshakes when I had my tonsils out. He looked through my yearbook with me and admired the boys that I thought were cute. He talked with me about what I wanted to be when I grew up and helped to guide me. And he didn’t just do this for me. He did these things for everyone in our family. He hired a maid for my grandmother so that she didn’t have to spend so much time cleaning the house. He bought my aunt antique jewelry and crystal goblets. He took my mother to concerts and bought her clothes so that she could remember that she was still young and beautiful. He was generous to a fault. He would go without so that others could have what they wanted, or needed. What he taught me about generosity and kindness will never be forgotten.
In the late 70’s, when I was in elementary school, my uncle and his partner were attacked by men who went to a gay bar specifically to dupe and then attack gay men. My uncle and his partner spent weeks in ICU, and they bore the scars of those attacks for the rest of their lives. Over a decade later, they would both fall ill to AIDS and die. First they watched their friends die off, one by one. Sometimes they went to two or three funerals in a week. Then my uncle watched his partner die. Then he died. My family has not been the same since. It’s really like the heart has gone out of our family unit. We all miss him, every single day.
I can’t help but think that if our society didn’t demonize homosexuality, and homosexuals, that my uncle would still be alive. He would not have been attacked by hate-filled men who wanted to kill him, murder him, because he was gay. The fight to find a treatment or cure for AIDS might have been far enough along by the time he contracted the disease to give him more of a chance. He might have had information about prevention and never contracted the disease to begin with. We’ll never know.
What I do know is that right now I’m so angry I want to hit someone. I want to cry. The people in my family who support Prop 8 are people that I thought better of. I have held these people while they cried. I have tickled their children. I have cooked meals for them, and talked with them and tried to help them through periods of terrible grief. And now I have to wonder. If my uncle passed away today, would they do the same for me? Would they welcome him into their home at the holidays they way they welcomed my mother, his sister?
My husband is having a very hard time with this, as am I. We are debating how to handle the holidays, knowing what we know about them and their bigotry. As he said yesterday: "What do I have left if not my principles? They can take away my home, my wife, my job, everything I own. But they can never take away my principles." How do you lay aside your principles for someone who is promoting hate? Who is teaching their children to hate? What do you do when you discover that hatred is one of your family’s values?
I am looking forward to November 4th with all of my heart. But I know that if Prop 8 passes, that the celebration will be bittersweet. How can I cheer President Obama and mourn the fact that my state has written hate speech into the constitution?
I don’t know how to get past this, and it’s breaking my heart.