Thanks, Harvey!

It's gratifying to see that the movie Milk is so well received. It's a good movie. It reminds me of things I haven't thought about in a long time.

I was going to college in Oakland in the years when Harvey Milk was campaigning to be a city supervisor across the Bay. I remember his admonition to "come out of the closet and fight". It was tough back then to come out. It meant severed ties with family, being fired, ostracized, ridiculed . . . sometimes beat up . . . occasionally killed. It was tougher for the gay men than for us lesbians, but we were still, with good reason, afraid.

We used to have these little business cards -- I think they were pink -- that read, "You have just been talking with a Lesbian." We passed them out after conversations with our wait people at restaurants, with passengers on buses, with shoppers on Telegraph Avenue, with strangers at the park -- where ever and whenever we could. Even though we were usually safely away before the cards were read, we thought it very risky. But the idea was that people didn't really know any lesbians; didn't know what they looked like or sounded like, what they thought about, what they cared for.

In those days a lot of women older than me divided themselves up into the roles of "butch" and "femme". They either dressed as men or they wore frills and makeup. Butches always partnered with femmes, never with other butches, and femmes never partnered with femmes. These women would assume these roles in the evenings, when they went out on the town. During the day they "passed".

We younger women thought we were so progressive with our easy movement between masculine and feminine roles. But we were just as closeted.

I remember when Harvey Milk was elected. I went to the Gay Freedom Day Parade that year and waved and cheered as he rode by. We were all elated. It felt so affirming to have somebody like us in public office. He still had the same message: "come out of the closet and fight."

I remember when he was killed. It was every bit as bad as when MLK was killed and when JFK was killed. We cried our hearts out.

I didn't come all the way out of the closet until 20 years later, when another gay man was killed: Matthew Shepard, age 19. We of the glbt community in Wyoming felt the cold hand of fear squeeze our hearts the day he was beaten and left tied to a fence to die. I finally decided that enough was enough. Terrifying as it was, in the months following that tragedy I kept finding myself witnessing in larger and larger gatherings to being a lesbian.

It is perhaps easier in 2009 to come out of the closet and fight. But it is still no walk in the park. Terrible crimes are perpetrated on the glbt community every day. Young gay men are still the population most at risk for suicide. Women loving women and men loving men still risk losing their families, their jobs, their faith communities and their homes.

I am still afraid every time I have to come out. My heart races; I sweat. I know that, every single time I do it, I risk ridicule, rejection or worse. I have a healthy fear of gay-hating groups, religious people who want to "love the sinner and hate the sin", political organizations who would blame the glbt community for societal ills. But I still have to come out. For the sake of my glbt brothers and sisters, I have to come out. For my own sanity, I have to come out. Scary and lonely as it sometimes is, I have to be out.

Here's to Harvey Milk, trail blazer for gay rights. And here's to each of us who reluctantly or enthusiastically, sooner or later, follow in his footsteps and come out of the closet and fight.