For the first time in my life, I truly feel oppressed. I've felt discrimination, I've felt hate, I've been targeted; had my home egged, shot at and paint balled. I had someone threaten to kill me and my partner John; had them threaten to burn our home down on Easter Sunday, I've had to clean up the glass from broken windows. As disturbing as all of those acts were while we lived on Mineral Springs Rd. here in Durham NC; they don't compare to how this week's vote on Amendment 1 in North Carolina has made me feel.
For the first time in my live I feel pressured by institutional oppression. Interestingly enough, I'm single and unattached with no hint of romantic prospects and not even a glimmer on the horizon. So marriage or civil union for me isn't possible right now. Even after several assaults and bumps and bruises in the past; here in North Carolina and once in Louisiana, I don't recall ever feeling as demoralized and damaged as I feel this week. I am perplexed and disturbed by the fact that, in facing my neighbors, co-workers, family members and friends; that six in ten of them voted to make me a second class citizen with far fewer rights than they enjoy.
I suppose that when there were physical confrontations at the Our House diner on Glenwood Ave. in Raleigh or when a sheriff's deputy with Durham County cornered my date and me at Waffle House on Hillsborough Rd. in Durham because in his words, "Something just didn't look right." I coped rather well because the bigotry was overt. The sheriff's deputy didn't like two buff, late thirties, men in somewhat flamboyant bar wear visiting Waffle House at three am on a Sunday morning. What to him didn't look right was we were who we are and we weren't drunk, so he had NOTHING on us. But he held us for twenty minutes of incessant questioning until one of his comrades said, "Let them go."
This vote on Amendment one was covert. You see so many with whom I work, have stayed silent and by their silence have spoken volumes. They've said hello and asked how I am, but they haven't mentioned Tuesday. Those around me who have voiced compassion and expressed dismay; well that tells me how they voted and where they came down on the issue.
The masses who turned out to vote for this Amendment were mostly coached into their vote by their preachers and lay people in their churches, by the idiot brigade on AM talk radio and by deep seeded bigotry; away from the public eye and in a secret society. A society where there is no debate or rebuttal but rather edict and hierarchy. A secret society in which this is the way that it has always been and yes, shall remain. Those masses who voted yes, at heart view me as less than equal; as if something is wrong with me; as if I made some sort of decision to gladly live at the point of their bigotry, intolerance, ignorance and sometimes violence.
Yes, I feel oppressed, but let me give you oppressors fair warning here and now. The gloves are off. I'm NOT leaving, I'm here for a reason and I will remain here. I will fight too. Not with my fists but with my whit, my pen, my money and my brain. I will when I deem it necessary disrupt you in your secret places. I will when essential call you out in print by your name. I will, when needed punish you financially by directing my money and my business referrals away from you. I will participate in the broader and greater struggles to free any and all peoples who might feel the yoke of oppression.
Finally, I will work to my dying breath to educate my enemies that I did not make a choice to be what and who I am anymore than they made a choice to be what and who they are. I did however and will continue to make a choice to live an open, honest and affirming life; the life that God has called me and all of his beloved to live.
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