Massachusetts GODDAMN Massachusetts

Well I hope everyone had a good holiday. I spent a good bit of time editing my manuscript while totally ignoring this blog.

And now when I am ready to come back to it, an issue hits me in the face with the urgency of a runaway locomotive.

By now, everyone has heard what has happened in Massachusetts, so there is no need to rehash it. Check out this link if you are not aware of the situation.

What is happening gets me angry on so many levels. The first level, of course, is envisioning the press releases that will surely come from Agape Press and that bunch.

Trust me when I say that there is nothing more annoying than a self-righteous gloater.

On a more important level, I cringe to think about another go-round on the "marriage train fight."

I'm probably in the minority when I say that this fight over marriage equality has revealed a bourgeois element of our community.

This point was driven home to me when I read the article about how difficult it is for gay students to get gay/straight alliances started in high schools, despite the fact that the law is on their side.

Meanwhile us black gay men and lesbian women are still fending for ourselves, invisible to two communities that won't give us any respect or visibility.

I am all for marriage equality but gaining it is not the salve for the ills affecting our community. I know gay men who are out but have a negative view of our community. Some don't even know why we should fight for the rights that should be ours, including the right to take care of our families. Some have drunken the kool-aid of lies and actually believe that being gay condemns them to a life of loneliness and vapid sexual relations. Why? Because while there has been so much work about our legal rights, no one has said a word about our spiritual and psychological well-being.

Legal rights are good things, but having a positive spiritual and psychological foundation is more important. Having pride in ourselves is not something we can get from a clique of friends, going out to a club, our material possessions, or fighting for rights that some of us don't even feel we deserve to have.

We have been forgetting that for too long.