Rich Mintz  

I’ll have more to say about Prop 8 (decision here) soon, but in the meantime, take a look at this image, one of a series of photos of Shelly and Ellen shot at the Philip Burton Federal Building in San Francisco yesterday that’s hit the wire services today. (Remember Phil Burton? He’d be celebrating too.)

Ellen (at right) is my cousin, and if you need evidence that marriage matters to gay people, don’t read the blogs or ask a psychologist or a law professor, just ask actual gay people like these. (Click photo to expand.)

(Photo: Same-sex couple Shelly Bailes (L) and Ellen Pontac celebrate the ruling to overturn the ban on gay marriage outside of the Philip Burton Federal building August 4, 2010 in San Francisco, California. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images. Used without permission; taken from The Daily Dish.)

The arc of the universe bent a little truer today, as U.S. District Court Judge Joseph L. Tauro ruled in two cases touching on the constitutionality of the ill-named Defense of Marriage Act. The Gill case concerned plaintiffs in same-sex marriages who were suing for federal benefits on grounds of, among other things, equal protection; in the Massachusetts case, the Commonwealth sued HHS for an abrogation of rights.

In both cases, he found for the plaintiffs, and in what language! The decisions, with Chris Geidner’s commentary, are here.

I just finished reading Gill, and I can’t remember being so buoyed by a federal court decision since Lawrence v. Texas.. The defendants’ arguments were absolutely demolished; they were pulverized, in language about as blunt and absolute as I can ever remember reading in a court decision (perhaps save the Orly Taitz ruling). Judge Tauro went through every asserted justification for the law (and some that were not asserted) and just knocked them down, concluding that the only possible motivation for the law was “animus” (well, duh — as he quoted, the animus was on display right there on the floor of the House), and that in such a case, the law runs directly counter to elementary Constitutional protections.

This is all just common sense to gay people, but to hear it bluntly and matter-of-factly affirmed by a federal judge, in the impersonal language of a court opinion, is thrilling. Read the decision. It’ll make your day!

I didn’t really celebrate NYC Pride this year — I was on a train coming back from Baltimore — but I did have the experience of being on the Newark PATH platform on Sunday afternoon as people massed for the trip into the city. And what a festive, jostling mass it was.

In a train like that, you’re reminded of just how wide the definition of the word “gay” has to stretch in order to encompass all of us. At least once a year, people turn out and claim the label who might not fall into the neat Chelsea (or Astoria) or Park Slope (or Red Hook) categories that come first to mind. Even in our homogenized, corporatized, cupcakes-and-Carrie-Bradshaw New York, there’s some diversity left.

Thank God for diversity — not the politically correct one-child-of-every-hue-on-the-cover variety, but the actual festive, jostling reality of America, gay and ungay and everything in between. We would be less than we are if any of the pieces were missing.

And thank God for the generations that came before mine, who marched angrily and proudly in drag and leather chaps (and swept me along with them at the tail end of things, to stand up to LA police on horseback and to CHP officers in Sacramento on the Capitol steps in 1991 to yell “Shame!” at Pete Wilson) so that my boyfriend and I could spend Gay Pride 2010 walking along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan not really thinking about gay rights at all. It’s not over — it never is — but wow. The social changes I’ve seen in the past thirty years go beyond what I ever would have imagined in 1980.

A visibility and safety initiative, from Mexico, on behalf of gay, transgendered, and other vulnerable people: Aguas Con Tu Ligue, which roughly translated means “watch out for your hookup,” i.e., beware of the man you just picked up. Be careful about whom you let into your house. Or, in extremis, “Tu ligue de hoy puede ser tu asesino,” i.e., “the guy you pick up today might turn out to be your murderer.” Blunt stuff, but routine assaults on gay people — sometimes physical crime, sometimes extortion, sometimes just disruption and harassment — are a bigger social issue in Mexico than here in New York. (Not that we don’t have them here too.) The case examples on the site are blunt.

I admire the courage and forthrightness behind the initiative; the philosophy behind it is that visibility helps increase safety in the short term and lead to social change in the long term, which you can hardly argue with.

As a side note, I just learned the word “aguas,” which (in Mexico only) means “look out.” Literally, it apparently originally meant “look out, I am about to throw toilet water [or, probably more literally, urine] out the window onto your head,” but nowadays it is conventional to follow it with a description of what the hearer is supposed to look out for, e.g., “¡Aguas! ¡Viene un carro!” The things you learn…

See Mike White (the guy behind Chuck and Buck) and Justin Long (the Mac guy) as a gay couple in “Devin & Glenn” — three minutes of the most mundane gay marriage ever committed to video. It’s a “No on 8″ follow-on, although I enjoy it more for the reality than the political value.

Jesse Green’s extended feature about Larry Kramer in New York magazine last month is very much worth taking the time to read — especially if you’re young enough that Kramer (if you know of him at all) feels to you like a historical figure rather than someone from your lived experience.

Larry Kramer is probably more directly responsible than any other person, living or dead, for the (belated) response of the U.S. government, and of American society generally, to the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s. To those who came of age after anti-retroviral medications made it possible to imagine living a somewhat normal life with the HIV virus (albeit a normality distorted and weighed down by complication and risk), it may be hard to imagine how terrifying AIDS was when it first appeared. It inspired a fear-driven cultural backlash against the gay community just as that community was starting to come into its own — and a culturally powerful impulse, in an entire generation, to stand together and fight.

The generation in question was the one immediately preceding my own. I was young enough not to know many people personally who died from AIDS-related infections in the early years, but I did know some — and I knew many, many people just a few years older than myself whose entire social networks had been devastated. (I was about to write “decimated,” but for some of the people I’m thinking of, the implication that only one in ten lost his life is vastly inadequate to the pain and dislocation they lived through.)

It’s important that young people remember that the comforts they know — their confidence in their differentness, the medical treatments available to them, their legal protection against discrimination — did not come without a fight. And in the very first days, fighters like Larry Kramer were the ones setting the example.