I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight (17 page)

      
Don't pretend like you aren't good friends with lots of gay people. If you are an actor in Hollywood, there is no way to avoid it. All the hours you have clocked in makeup trailers in the last
several years and you still think there is something wrong with homosexuality? Wow, did you have to grit your teeth every time a brush crossed your cheek? You must have TMJ.

      
I don't think that you hate gays. If you did, you would have looked really bad on-screen. What are you trying to appear like now? Is this image upgrade going to help the Planet Hollywood chain from dying out completely? Who came up with that horrible Cap'n Crunch chicken dish? In real life, are you the hero or the bad guy?

      
I actually think the Terminator films are cool. But are you?

      
Best,

      
Margaret "Sarah Connor" Cho

i am getting married

I
am getting married. I had stopped thinking about it as a possibility for a long time. I got very used to the delicious dream of spinsterhood, independence in solitude, gardening and animal rescue, a+ varied and lengthy succession of lovers, rejection of the Cinderella fantasies of my peers, looking at settling down like a kind of slow and not all that painful but more just an annoying death, more like a degenerative disease than a stroke. Most of my friends already had a divorce or two under their belts. My fiancé is on his third trip down the aisle.

Marriage for my generation has been a disappointment, for the most part. There is the heady rush of first love, the backlash of the free lovin' swinging '70s key-party antics of our parents, this desire for stability and the pressure to conform. Getting hitched was the emotional part of the American Dream, the pursuit of happiness clause, the completion and reward for the trials of adolescence. The Reagan era gave most of us our values, as we were most impressionable during the reign of Molly Ringwald and the whitewashed vision of John Hughes. The entire Hughes oeuvre maintained that suburban white culture was the true world, the way things really were, how we all wanted them to be. Its power over my generation cannot be ignored or trivialized. Hughes presented to us a tricky nirvana, one in which if you play by the rules you will win—and win big—forever and ever. There were characters written into the thin and uninteresting plots to serve as warnings of the pitfalls in life: individuality, personality, originality, ethnicity. Like eccentric old maid Annie Potts in
Pretty in Pink
, living in the "ethnic" neighborhood Chinatown in order to telegraph her insanity to the viewing audience. She wears thrift store clothes and works at a record store, well beyond her youth, in a futile attempt to deny the inevitable, the fact that she must be married in order to move on, like the unfortunate ghosts of the unjustly murdered and unavenged angry spirits of the dead that must be shown the light, the portal to the other side, so that they might be guided to the afterworld and be released from their bondage here on earth. She warns Molly Ringwald of the dangers of not going to the prom in a cautionary tale about a woman who denied herself the high school ritual, and spends
the rest of her days compulsively looking for shoes, keys, subway tokens, finding them all or finding nothing, all the while knowing that she is really lacking nothing, has lost nothing, but that she, for not going along with the traditions and rites of the American teenager, she herself is what is missing. She is incomplete.

In the end, Molly goes to the prom, and Annie Potts puts on a business suit, with a crest sewn onto the breast pocket, and goes on a blind date with an accountant, finally giving in to the "reality" of womanhood, the true purpose of us all. Completion, surrender, giving in and giving up.

In
The Breakfast Club
, Goth-before-her-time Ally Sheedy stops making art out of her own dandruff and allows herself to be made over by Molly Ringwald, capturing the attention of jocky cock Emilio Estevez and finding out that she has beauty, which will eventually, God willing, lead to her "completion." The title song of this film, "Don't You (Forget About Me)," was a sickening premonition of the future, in that we remembered. We remembered to get married. We remembered that having a family was the best thing that could happen. We remembered that we needed to be pretty, and not stand out too much, in order to achieve that final goal: Completeness. Wholeness. Whiteness. Matrimony. Suburbia. Babies. Death.

So why am I getting married? Because somebody I love asked me, and I want to. I know I am already complete, because I've had to fight to realize my completeness, to see it when all I was offered was blindness. I had to force myself to see what was not there. So now that I have seen it, I just want to spend a lot of my parents' money and have
an embarrassing semi-Satanic wedding where, instead of wedding vows, we exchange blood. Instead of death, we choose immortality, like vampires. Instead of children, we will have dogs and art.

dear reverend jackson

      
Dear Rev. Jackson,

      
I have been a fan of yours for many years. We once shared the stage in San Francisco at Davies Symphony Hall. Your message of equal rights and peace has always resonated with me. Through all the different political and social upheavals over the past decades, you have been a strident voice in our society. I especially appreciate all the work you did to unite the African American and Korean communities during and after the L.A. riots. Your faith was much needed during that very difficult time. Thank you for your activism and your commitment to making our America a better place.

      
I have spent many years as an activist. I learned from you that people can be encouraged to create change just by listening to someone speaking the truth with love and compassion. Since to me you have always been this kind of truth-teller, I am shocked by your comments at Harvard Law School concerning gay marriage.

      
This is the first time in my life I believe I have ever disagreed with your views. I was not present, so perhaps your words were
taken out of context, but the sentiments were very clear, and as loud as bombs. I don't wish to repeat your sentiments, they frankly are too upsetting for me, and coming from you makes them doubly hard to hear. Your stance against gay marriage is both troubling and startling, and in sharp contrast to everything you have done to raise minority status as well as consciousness in our nation.

      
I ask you to look back at the many gay and lesbian politicians and activists you have known in your long career. I am sure that many of them might be your friends, or, at the very least, have won your respect as men and women devoted to making this country better for all the people who live within its borders and beyond. Would you say that they were less than human? Would you consider them deserving of fewer rights than other Americans? Do you believe that gay and lesbian Americans are not worthy of love?

      
If gay marriage is unacceptable in the culture you were born and raised in, does that make all cultural mandates worthy of law? If so, then my marriage is invalid because the person to whom I am married is not Korean and interracial marriage is not accepted in Korean culture. Should we really receive less than other couples who have married within their race? Aren't I obligated to take a stand against my culture in order to uphold not only justice and equality but what my heart would ask me to do? Is it morally wrong to love one another because we do not look like the other married couples we might see on television?

      
Should we be corrected by society at large and punished by our government by receiving less than fair treatment because we are not white? How is this different if my spouse and I were the same gender? If being gay were a choice, would people actively choose to have less acceptance and more prejudice heaped upon them by society? If race were a choice, wouldn't I choose to be white?

      
I ask you to review your position on same-sex marriage. If we were a truly free nation, this would be above argument or opposition. As a civil rights leader, shouldn't you choose equality for all Americans?

      
Respectfully,

      
Margaret Cho

jobs and economy solution: legalize gay marriage

E
very tabloid and even legit magazines had Britney and her "shocking" Vegas nuptials on the cover. My own opinions about Britney and her first marriage were that she was doing the same thing many a young person might do that is impulsive and wrong, regrettable and, well, young, and that we are not focusing on the real problem, her music.

I'm just kidding. I love me my Britney. I'm a slaaaaaave to you. I
own
that DVD. I do not play, and I am not trying to front. Music is my medicine, and I take my St. Joseph chewable aspirin and wash it down with the crunk.

My feeling is that she and Justin really had something good together, and that they will reunite someday. But that is just my own opinion. I do not like to get in people's business about who they want to get with. But they had a CONNECTION that I believe we have not seen the last of.

What people were getting all upset about is the argument that marriage is sacred and therefore must remain heterosexual, and here we have this little girl and her too-big-to-be-that-age man-child looking out onto the Las Vegas neon desert and wanting to do something "crazy," so they decide to tie the knot. Where is the sanctity there? What is so sacred, then, about these kids wanting to escape the boredom of life and taking immediate and not well thought out action to alleviate the dull torpor? Why doesn't the law allow this option for homosexual couples? If marriage is such a holy rite, then why is it available twenty-four hours a day? The ceremony costs two hundred dollars. Some heterosexuals don't spend that much on their nuptials, because since it's so available to them, and so easy to get into and out of, why bother dispensing the cash?

I am proposing something to the right wing who argue until they are gay pride rainbow flag colors in the face that same-sex marriage is an abomination. What I am plainly stating is that if same-sex marriage
were allowed in this nation, there would be a tremendous spike in consumer spending, which would ultimately benefit everyone, especially the monied Republicans already trying to protect their fortunes in these financially trying times. Imagine, just the catering alone would pay for tax shelters for the wealthy until kingdom come. All those tiger prawns and bottles of Cristal would bring in outrageous sums. Costly custom tailoring would be the norm, and Vera Wang's phone would never stop ringing. Each call would be a double order. Florists wouldn't be able to keep up with the arrangements. There would be a stargazer lily shortage, leaving frustrated florists to look to peonies and special hybrid roses for innovative and seasonal centerpieces. Wedding planners would become the new power brokers, and Liza, Barbra, Bette, Cher and even Britney could perform at private ceremonies for huge, undisclosed honorariums. Architectural heritage would be preserved, as the historical buildings that lay dormant now would be renovated to create beautiful spaces for weddings, and they would be booked years in advance. It just makes sense. Dollars and cents. This is what Republicans really want anyway, isn't it? Why walk away from financial opportunity just because of your religious beliefs? Besides, nobody ever made a dime off of bigotry. Stocks in prejudice are plummeting faster than anyone can say "dot-com," and I would hate to see you all lose that big money that your daddies left you.

rhea county, tennessee

W
e need to keep them out of here."

So said Commissioner Fugate, who was trying to make Rhea County in Tennessee essentially gay-free. Queen, please. Guess you are going to have to take
Will & Grace
off the local affiliates, not to mention
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
. In fact, you probably would have to remove Bravo, HBO, Showtime, PBS, IFC, Sundance, if you want to keep them out of here. Then you have to dismantle all satellite dishes, outlaw all Internet access, television, radio, music, dancing, art, fashion—and you can just forget about Pottery Barn. Abercrombie & Fitch would have to close its doors, as would every theater, nightclub, restaurant, boutique, salon, gift shop, dog groomer, accounting firm, army recruiting office, travel agency, museum, landscaper, hospital, contractor, learning center for the developmentally disabled, school, home for the elderly, church and temple. The entire county would have to relocate, and let only avowed "heterosexual" citizens (assuming this is "us") in after a rigorous and thorough cavity search, and, even then, how could you be sure? There is no real way of knowing, because you cannot keep "them" out of here. You cannot keep them out of anywhere. Because them is you. Them is us.

You have no idea who lives among you, what gayness this way comes. This is like Salem, but this time it's Gaylem. Why are we trying to do a revival of
The Crucible?
Did Goody Proctor witness a man
professing that fuchsia is the color he could absolutely not live without? Did he know that getting manicures
and
pedicures once a month is proof enough? Is he being burned at the stake? The witch hunts perpetrated murderous genocide on innocent women, a disgusting stain on the flag that you weren't ever able to SHOUT out. So why do you think that this isn't going to leave another mark? Also, if you are actually remembering that we live in the United States of America, there is this thing—weird, really, to think about now in this day and age—it is called freedom. Yeah. This country is supposed to be a free one. Isn't that a hoot? I know. It was a long time ago, but it still holds up in court. We are all created equal, and that includes these who you so ridiculously refer to as "them."

A special message to the guy who needs to come out to his homophobic father: Tell him what is happening in Rhea County. Tell him that you are being referred to as "them." Ask him if he would consider the boy he raised, his own child, his creation, part of his body, his life, his everything should be referred to as "them." Ask him if he would think of you as less than human because you choose to love someone. Someone who would also be referred to as "them." Ask him if he understands that you have the ability to love, that was passed down to you through him, and since he was successful in teaching those difficult lessons, if it would mean any less if you were loving a man?