it happens to all of us...

What does it stand for? This flag we're so proud of.

I think I'm just getting old. Because the world makes so little sense anymore. Somehow I am expected to want to get married, have a little cottage with a picket fence and a couple of kids and a dog.

Now here's where this post is gonna get tricky. I'm risking offending a whole segment of society, but what the hell.

I have no notion of what it's like to be transgendered. I don't! I'm as ignorant of it as John McCain is about the unpopularity of the war in Iraq. I don't know what a transgendered person goes through either emotionally or socially, and I doubt that I ever will have a good understanding of it.

I also have no notion of what it's like to be married, to have children, to be assimilated, and I don't want to know. Unfortunately, I find that I am once again on the unpopular side of a cultural shift that's (as usual) going against me.

I want to celebrate the difference. I want to know that I don't have to be like everyone else to be identified as acceptable. I would prefer to fight for rights that match my life, not rights that make my life like someone else's so that THEN I'm not different, and not scary.

I see all this struggle to establish this citizenry that is ALL THE FUCKING SAME, and I wonder why we look at ourselves and think WE have to change.

Of course, Gay "Pride" month doesn't do much for my mood anymore either.

Yes, I've stood up. Yes, I've gone to Washington and marched. Yes I've stood in front of the White House with my voice raised and my fist in the air. Yes I've marched in Pride parades. I've even gone so far as to protest in front of a Wal-Mart in Blue Springs Missouri, no mean feat, that.

But I would not march in a Pride parade today. The purpose it lost.

Long, long, ago in 1987, I went to Washington as a member of ACTUP/KC. We were a small group who believed that grass roots meant you started at the bottom and made noise for change, for what was right. I left there feeling more a part of a community than ever before, or since.

Then came 1993. I went back, and it was a huge party. I stayed one day, marched...perfunctorily, and left the next day for San Francisco where I was to bury yet another lost friend. I didn't feel the community that week, I can tell you that.

Pride has meant less and less to me in the ensuing years. I find no reason to feel pride in being assimilated. In fact I find it yet another moment in history when "they" tell me I'm not ok, and that I need to be more like them to be accepted. More like them, just not equal. Cause marriage is for men and women, not me.

Well, frankly that's ok with me. I think we're struggling for the wrong issue, for the wrong ideal, for a futile goal that will drain resources and occupy lobbyists and never really address the inequality we've all lived with all our lives. It'll mean that some people, who choose to use this newfound "right" might (and I use that term loosely) find some acceptance, and some access to benefits they wouldn't otherwise have had. Talk about serving the few!

I suppose it's human to want to keep up with the Joneses, to think the grass is greener on the "straight" side of our culture, to want to be like every one else. But the fact is that we're not! We're different, very different, and that should be something that makes us stand taller and hold our heads up. Instead it inspires us to celebrate young men in very small bathing suits wearing roller skates. It makes us the joke we've always been to the culture at large. It helps them not to take us seriously.

Insisting on being taken seriously is the only way we're ever going to make them listen. And we're not serious, at least not yet.

Don't assimilate, infiltrate! Move to the suburbs and make some noise. Get their attention and then get something done. A Pride parade in the middle of the city is easy to avoid. A pride parade in the suburbs isn't. And yes sometimes you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet. I didn't say this was going to be easy.

In 2001 I WAS the gay Pride parade in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I went to the area where most people hang out in that college town, and discovered that although there is quite a large population of gay men and women there, Pride celebrations were not had. I proceeded to the local novelty card shop, (where else would one find a gag gift?) and purchased a rainbow flag on a stick.

I then went out in the middle of Dickson Street and marched it's length waving the flag at all passersby. I was different that day, I can tell you that.

But I walked taller for it.