Fun week, no?

On the one hand we’ve got Carrie Prejean, whose 15 minutes of fame feel longer than “The English Patient,” throwing a temper tantrum on “Larry King Live” for King’s audacity to ask a legitimate question about her choices in the wake of a sex tape scandal.

And on the other, we’ve got Will Phillips, the 10-year old boy who refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because he believes this country doesn’t treat gays and lesbians with “justice for all.”

Sometimes, I think God is a playwright at heart.

Prejean’s story has played out like a 60’s Bedroom farce with operatic dimensions — a dramatic moment of confrontation on national television (yeah it was a beauty pageant, and yeah Perez Hilton was her adversary, but still), a firestorm of media coverage in the wake, Prejean painting herself in the role of virtuous God-fearing woman trampled by the Big Bad Gays, half-naked pictures of her looking sort of slutty on rocks, a memoir (of course!) about the ordeal marketed to Christian conservatives, then the bombshell revelation that there are sexually explicit videos of her floating around.

Fabulous.

(And does anyone else enjoy that Carrie Prejean, who’s essentially spun celebrity out of her own narcissism, is the only celeb whose sex tape scandal doesn’t involve another person on camera with her? Always hogging the spotlight.)

Then, unexpectedly, along comes Will. Lovely, wise, understated, young Will, who in a simple gesture spoke more eloquently and powerfully than Prejean did in her entire book (called “Still Standing,” incidentally. Is she serious?). You can’t really accuse a 10-year old boy of having a political agenda or plans for a book tour, so our Will was simply doing something he believed was right. And I’m with him on this one: I want our flag to represent a country that really does what it promises.

The Will Phillips story isn’t a game-changer. It’s a lovely reminder of what standing up for your principles looks like (and it doesn’t hurt that it came from a 10-year old boy — way to make us adults look like spineless jellyfish, huh?). It would be wrong of us to make Phillips into anything more than a morale booster for the movement: he’s not a sign that sweeping generational changes have taken place, but if he becomes a lawyer, we have to recruit this kid to be a vocal leader for us!

The playwright in me would love to see this as the next scene in the play: Carrie Prejean and Will Phillips get a chance to meet. The face of a hypocritical, judgmental and narcissistic movement hell-bent on fostering inequality looks into the eyes of a ten-year old boy who stood up for equality without the promise of gain for himself.

“So, what are you famous for?” he’ll ask Prejean.

She’ll sputter and regurgitate some standard line about being persecuted for speaking her beliefs and her faith. But Phillips will see past the B.S and hear the voice in her most secret soul tell the truth.

“I’m famous being a hypocrite, which essentially means I’m famous for nothing.”

Phillips won’t judge her. If she’s even half-serious about her faith in God, she’ll get judged in time.

In the scene I’d write for them, they’re at an event where the Pledge will get spoken. And Prejean will throw her hand up to her heart and ramble the words off, putting up a good show for the cameras, not really listening to what she’s saying. And maybe she’ll glance over at Phillips, who’ll just be standing there, listening intently to the words and saying some little personal prayer-wish that the promise of the words will one day be fulfilled, and maybe she’ll get it. In a flash of understanding, she’ll get it, get what conviction and truth and integrity looks like, and the hand over her heart will feel it beat a little faster. It’s what happens when you’re surging with regret.

Probably not. But one can hope.

I just watched the video you made concerning the victory of anti-marriage equality advocates in Maine.

And though we’ve never met (a product, no doubt, of some great cosmic alignment of the stars in the universe — one that I consider myself grateful for every single day), I feel as though I know you. So I felt compelled to write to you this morning, in the hopes we might better understand each other.

In your video, you say we are stunned and hurt and upset over the loss in Maine. You’re right, Maggie. We are. We’re stunned that the “Yes on 1″ campaign used the same revolting, slanderous messages that have been used against us for years — that we’re child predators, that our marriages would rob people of religious freedom, that all we want is to indoctrinate children into the big scary horror that is Homosexuality. We’re hurt that people still believe all that nonsense, that decent, intelligent Americans still fall prey to such blatant fear-mongering from people who can’t use actual arguments against ours. And we’re very upset, Maggie. We’re upset that for the second time in a very short time, strangers have been given the power to decide how the law treats other people, and strangers have decided for gay men and women whether or not they can keep the right to codify and protect their relationship.

See, Mags (can I call you Mags? Come on, I mean it with affection. I nickname all my friends, and we’re friends, aren’t we?), I watched your video, and I realized you have absolutely no idea what we’re stunned, hurt or upset about. And if we’re going to be pals, I think you should at least take the time to know something real about me. So, lend me your ear, Mags, because I want to let you in on the secret you’re missing, the little piece of the puzzle you haven’t fully figured out yet.

With a little devilish twinkle in your eye (and don’t think I didn’t see it there, because I did! I so did! The mediocre webcam lighting didn’t fool me for a second!), I saw you talk about our loss with a barely repressed glee — we lost and you guys won! — and every time you mentioned us you called us “advocates” or some other impersonal nomenclature, and all of a sudden, I got it. I got you, Mags. Finally. After such a long time of not getting you.

This fight — You think it’s all about ballot boxes and campaigns and videos and votes and which states you win and which ones you lose and what commercials can we run on which stations and what do the polls say and how can we beat them, how can we win?

For us, it’s not about that at all. For us… it’s our lives, Mags.

Fess up, Mags. You can tell me the truth. Because I’m not going to tell anyone (seriously, nobody reads this, don’t worry): It’s a game to you, right? Because that’s easy, right? It’s easier just to create these cartoon versions of actual cultural moments because to actually deal with what’s happening and with real people’s lives would be complicated and harder to spin? It’s just a way to cast people in roles that make them feel good about themselves (you know, you’re the little guy standing up against the big bad monolith and if we all just stick together — and donate some funds to the cause — we’re gonna bring that big bad monolith down! Right? I’m right. Come on, Mags. You can tell me.)

Mags, I have to share this with you, because I feel we’ve become close: you remind me of someone. Well, a bunch of someones actually.

We have these women all across Lafayette (I’m in Lafayette, Louisiana, nice little city in south Louisiana, you should stop by!), these women who have wealthy husbands and really terrific houses (in River Ranch, it’s our planned community, kind of creepy if you ask me) and they have very little to do with their time other than wait in their really terrific houses for their wealthy husbands to come home in the evenings, so their days are filled with the pursuit of Meaning — not little old regular meaning, but Capital M Meaning, the kind that transforms a life from a collection of connected days to a living, breathing agent of change in the world.

They look for Meaning everywhere — in every club, gathering, organization they can think of (because nothing says Meaning like being in a room with other people looking for Meaning as well, right? Meaning by association! Awesome!) — and when they find a message they can wrap their mind around, they grab onto it with a vice grip and wrestle it to the ground, they take that message and tuck it into the deepest part of who they are and they repeat it and shout it until the message takes root there and becomes less of a message and more of an identity, a signpost of worth, a foundation upon which Meaning can be built.

They don’t have to believe the message. It doesn’t matter if it’s true to them or true in any sense of the word. It just has to work with others. Because when your Meaning is wrapped up in a message, the only way to sustain it is for others to agree with you.

You remind me of those women, Mags. All this shrieking and hyperbole and grand religious metaphor — it doesn’t sound to me like a belief. It sounds to me like a grasp at Meaning.

Because there are a lot of people in this country who still get scared of men like me, right? And all it takes is a little grandstanding, a nicely chosen word, a little divisive rhetoric and all of a sudden, those people are looking to you with admiration, looking to you for guidance, and you’re getting on TV and the news and suddenly Maggie Gallagher isn’t just someone’s name — it Means something.

I don’t blame you, Mags. Everyone wants Meaning. But you’re earning on the backs of people like me, people who work hard, contribute positive things to the community, who love with honesty and integrity and who don’t deserve to be slandered and spit on and attacked in the way your organization has attacked us.

That’s not cool, Mags. And there are times when I suspect you know it. Because while others may just dismiss you as a raving lunatic with delusions of grandeur (just saying what I’ve heard), I think there are nights when you turn out the light and lie there in dark and you know, in the secret place we all have inside of us, that what you’re doing is wrong.

Next time you have one of those nights, think about me, Mags. I’ll be in the dark in some other part of the world, and I’ll be sleeping well. Because I haven’t built my sense of self on the backs of anyone. I found Meaning in the right place — within myself.

Be well, Maggie Gallagher. I look forward to your next video.

Tomorrow, Maine voters go to the polls to decide the fate of marriage equality in the state. Advance polling says the vote will be very close, and it will all come down to voter turnout.

Doesn’t it feel like California all over again? The uneasiness, the dread, the hopefulness cut with a pragmatic realism (even now more so, after Prop. 8, because we know what it feels like to lose it, we know the hollowness, the gut-busting pain of it).

I’m not the kind of writer who can offer the kind of analysis that seems to be the typical fodder in moments like this: the positioning, the arguing, the strategizing. it’s not what I’m good at.

Moments like these make me turn inward, think a little closer to home. (We all do what we can in moments like this, no?)

This weekend, I went to New Orleans to see my new beau, Marc. We spent Saturday roaming the city, then headed out to a Halloween party that night. It was a nice day, low key but fun, and it’s always a treat to watch a Big Gay Party in New Orleans from a detached observer’s distance.

Sunday, however, was different. Marc woke up at 8 a.m. feeling wretched. It looked and felt a lot like the flu, and his sickness put a halt on anything we’d planned for the day.

Right before I left that evening to drive back to Lafayette, through a sort of foggy haze of half-sleep and achiness, Marc looked over at me and said, “I’m sorry. I ruined your whole Sunday, didn’t I?”

He didn’t. Not even close.

Granted, we spent the entire day in bed and probably only talked for about five minutes (minus a quick trip for lunch and a mango smoothie for Marc). He slept, and I watched episodes of “Will and Grace” and ‘The Golden Girls” on DVD. And hours sped by like bullet trains, and before I knew it, it was 10 p.m. and I was gathering my stuff to head back home.

But the day was still lovely. Sometimes, he would turn over in his sleep and slide his arm through the crook of mine and sigh. Other times, he’d slide back into me so I could sling an arm over his stomach. And every once in a while, he’d crack open an eye to look at me, and he’d smile, then fall back asleep.

They’re the unexpected, unplanned things that always seem more real to me than the strategizing and the positioning and the debating. They’re the substance of our lives, and they’re the things that make marriage equality worth fighting for.

We don’t just fight for a recognition of our singular worth anymore. We’ve fought that fight, and while there are still pockets of the country that make that fight difficult, if not impossible, for the most part, our singular worth is understood. Being gay isn’t the mark of Cain it was for previous generations of gay men and women. Our value as individuals in our ordinary lives are, in many respects, understood and appreciated by the culture at large (and before you jump to negate that notion, look around. Compare today to thirty years ago and see how far we’ve come).

Now, we’re fighting for something much more important: a recognition of the validity of the lives we build with each other. This fight is about respecting the relationships we build, the love we share, the life we commit to with another person — and not just respecting them but protecting them from those who’d rather they didn’t exist, from those who’d like to see the years we invest in our husbands and wives be inconsequential and legally nonexistent.

For a Sunday, I laid beside my new beau and watched him sleep, got him water when he needed it, bought him a smoothie when he said it would make him feel better and kissed him on the forehead even if he was asleep and didn’t know it, because those are the things that you build a life on. That’s what marriages are made of, and while I’m not trying to marry Marc (I mean, come on, we just started dating, I’m not in the business of scaring the crap out of men I like). this Sunday opened a vista on what a marriage between us might look like, a quick glance into that future of “for better or worse, in sickness or in health” that we all have sitting in the back of our heads, that we yearn for.

The politics are important, yes. But the hundreds of thousands of gay couples who have spent the last 10, 15, 20 years sleeping beside their sick partner and getting them a glass of water are more important. Those lives — those quiet private lives that we don’t see everyday and that don’t make up the public face of our community’s engagement in the discourse over the marriage equality issue — are who we are in cities and towns all over the country. They’re our bedrock, our foundation, and when we argue this issue and fight for it, we need to not only fight for the political win, but we should fight for them, remember them.

If we lose tomorrow in Maine, we haven’t just lost a vote. We’ve lost something much greater. We’ll lose marriage. And that, to me, is an unacceptable loss.

The desktop image on my office computer is a flowchart. At the top, in a bubble, is a simple question: Are you happy?

If you answer yes, the chart points you to a simple directive: Keep doing whatever you’re doing.

If you answer no, the chart poses another question: Do you want to be happy?

if you answer no, the chart directs to keep doing whatever you’re doing. But if you answer yes, the chart sends you a straightforward solution.

Change something.

As a community, we’ve got a long way to go before we’re happy. Yes, things are much better than they used to be, and yes, we’ve come a long way, baby, but the road stretches out in front of us, there are still battles left to fight (and win!), and our happiness today is a bittersweet one — the kind that comes with a mournful underbelly, a gratitude that still dreams forward.

Are we happy? No.

Do we want to be happy? Yes.

Change something.

It begins in us. Change doesn’t come by simply criticizing our leaders. Change comes when we hold them accountable and go out into the world and show them the change we seek. Change comes when we confront homophobia, not just complain about it. Change comes when we acknowledge that our happiness is something we create, something we are responsible for.

Come out at work. Call someone out for making an offensive joke. Correct your mom when she refers to your boyfriend as your “friend.” In small, everyday ways assert the validity of your life as a gay person — without malice and without anger — and live the equality you’re looking for.

Do you want to be happy? Yes.

Change something.

And ultimately, we need to grow into a different view of what change means, what change entails. Radical change, the kind that reshapes a world, doesn’t come without loss. And not just loss for our opponents — loss of our own, loss of ideas and beliefs and behaviors that suited us before but will not suit us now. You can’t grow a new skin until the old one is shed, so we have to embrace the act of losing, get rid of the things that keep us locked in the past and be willing, for the sake of change, to be someone and something new.

We can’t ask for change in the world without being willing to change ourselves. And we have to be the change we seek. Otherwise our shouts and rallying cries are empty words. If we don’t live what we’re asking for — if we willfully live one life in private while protesting for a different life in public — then we don’t deserve to get what we’re asking for.

Do you want to be happy? Change something. Change the view of another person. Change something in you. But make change happen. In every small way, in all small things. Change something.

Words — even these — are cheap. Action is everything.

Change.

I’m a bear.

I’m a 6′2″, broad-shouldered fella over a certain weight (and if you think I’m going to tell you exactly how much I weigh, you are out of your ever-loving mind), bearded and firmly devoted to jeans and t-shirts over anything I could buy at Abercrombie and Fitch.

Not that I could fit into anything at Abercrombie and Fitch, mind you, except the main entryway.

So. I’m a bear.

Woof.

When I first came out 15 years ago, I didn’t know what the hell a bear was in gay terms. I actually stumbled upon the community quite by accident — trolling the internet of course, cruising my way through gay chat sites filled with guys that I wasn’t remotely attracted to, eventually landing on a site filled with guys that looked like me, guys I thought were hot, and I said to myself, “Oh! We exist! And apparently we’re called bears!” And I was really excited, because until that point I didn’t really feel as though I fit into the gay community, because even among this group of Others, I was another Other — a hairy, chubby Other.

Now there was this moniker that I could apply to myself, this “Hello, My Name is…” badge that I could stick on my sweater, that would connect me to other guys like me, that would give me a community.

And belonging to a community mattered. An 18-year old gay kid in a small southern town already feels adequately out of place. He really doesn’t need to feel like the stranger among strangers.

My ex-boyfriend recently moved to Dallas, and he’s getting his feet wet in the bear community there. And from our conversations — and what little he tells me about his new life there — I gather he’s taking the community identity very seriously (he went to something called a “bear dance,” which is all well and good, but I have an cynical imagination, and I can just picture a high school gym decorated in streamers and a disco ball filled with big hulking hairy men slow dancing to “On the Wings of Love”).

In a recent email update, he told me he was having some trouble with his car, and he was glad because he’d found someone to help out.

“I met this bear mechanic who said he’d fix it for a good price.”

Not just a regular mechanic. A bear mechanic.

Apparently in Dallas, being hirsute affords you a set of mechanical skills that launches you above and beyond mere hairless mechanics.

Sarcasm, of course. I’m sure the guy’s a good mechanic. But I thought it was odd that my ex felt the need to tack that “bear” on the front of his occupation, as if that identifying marker were somehow important to the situation at hand, as though his sexual proclivity (or at the very least his sexual self-identification) mattered in communicating his worthiness to fix a car.

I don’t have the same need for that bear “Hello, My Name is…” badge anymore. That’s still the kind of man I’m attracted to, and I’ll use the moniker in conversation as a shorthand to get my point across, but I don’t feel like “a bear,” or any other gay subculture designation.

Hell, there are a lot of times I don’t even feel it necessary to tack the “gay” moniker to myself. It doesn’t feel important sometimes.

And it sometimes feels like a cage.

Being a big gay bear in the world seemed important to me when I was still trying to figure out who the hell I was in relation to everything else. I came out as a gay man not really knowing what that meant, what that entailed (because I didn’t have any points of reference in my south Louisiana town), and I needed that marker, that label, to give me a place to build an identity on.

Now, I don’t. I have a lot of other identities. I’m a writer, a teacher, an artist. I’m so many other things that are ultimately more important to my self-definition, that the bear thing — even the gay thing — takes a backseat.

I’m discovering that’s both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, it has served me well to be an openly gay man who didn’t live through his identification as a gay person. I’ve been able to change a lot of minds on matters like marriage equality, employment nondiscrimination and other gay issues because, in my daily life, I subvert the expectations of what “gay folks” are like. I’m just this guy — not the boogeyman “Gay Guy” that our opponents make us out to be.

But on the other hand, I can forget what it’s like to be judged on my gayness, what it’s like for others to see me through that prism first, and it can make me complacent. It can lull me into thinking everything’s hunky dory for me and gay folks everywhere — and it isn’t.

It’s a struggle. But I think our larger push for equality as a community will move us in the direction of erasing those distinctions, and if not erasing them, making them less important to us, less essential to our sense of self-worth and importance. And we’ll be less inclined to see ourselves through the prism of being gay.

And bear mechanics will just be mechanics.

I’ll “woof” to that.

I get accused sometimes of being a prude.

On the one hand, the moniker fits: I do have conservative notions about sexual appropriateness. I believe monogamy is possible. I think the fact we might biologically be hard-wired to drop anchor at every available harbor doesn’t mean we can’t contain that urge, or at the very least keep it from running unchecked and libidinous. (yeah yeah, I hear the dissent already, and that’s fine, I’m not judging, it just doesn’t work for me.)

And on the other hand, the notion of me as a prude is laughable. Because in the 15 years since I’ve come out, I done my fair share of anchor-dropping (and, truth be told, other people’s fair share of it, too), and I have, like most every gay man I know, been something of a…

Well, a slutbag.

And I’m not defending the behavior, I’m just saying that I did it. And look back on it fondly, as a learning experience, a time in my life when I experienced everything there was to experience, even if some of it is so horribly humiliating that I wouldn’t dare speak of it in public.

Because every gay man has that story. That one tragic tale to tell. Of a sexual moment so low and awful and pathetic that it should only be shared with your closest of friends because they at least love you enough to not hold it against you.

Or tell anyone else.

The STORY.

I once had sex with a deaf trucker in the parking lot of a tourist information center.

(You try blogging that on the Internet, see if you like it.)

I met him online. We “talked.” He invited me to his truck, which he basically lived in. I thought, “Eh, what the hell, right? I’ve never done THIS before. If anything, it’ll make for a funny story.”

Having sex with a deaf nomadic stranger is complicated enough. But the fun doesn’t stop there. Deaf Trucker, as I like to call him (because what does he care, he can’t hear me) was also into role play – he was into dominant and submissive roles and such – and I can tell you, you have not lived until you’ve heard someone say, “Call me Daddy. Call me Daddy!” sounding like Marlee Matlin in “Children of a Lesser God.” (sorry, Ms. Matlin.)

We didn’t really “do” very much. I was so over it from the second he said “Daddy.” And it remains the only sexual experience most notable to me for the number of times I rolled my eyes.

But one detail sticks out. He wanted to hold my hand.

Isn’t that weird? He insisted he hold my hand. In the way you hold the hand of someone you love while you’re on the couch watching a movie.

It was so oddly… intimate. For strangers.

In a truck. At a tourist information center.

I let him. Because as much as he was craving something like love, so was I. And even if it was only an illusion for a few brief minutes in the darkness while cars zoomed by on the highway, even if it was completely fake, I wanted it.

Why? Because at the time, my imagination didn’t include the possibility of love and marriage and fidelity — things I wanted — being compatible with being gay. It took years of struggle (including a six-year relationship that failed because I was a very poor partner) to figure out I could be both gay and a believer in monogamy.

For me, promiscuity had a price. Deaf Trucker is a funny story, sure, but the underbelly of it — the sad approximation of intimacy, the salaciousness of having sex in a public place, the fact that he requires a nickname because I can’t remember his actual name — those things leave marks.

And I think we have, as a community, sometimes confused the essentialness of our difference for the essentialness of who we are. Yes, I am a homosexual because I sleep with men. That’s is how I am different. But sleeping with men doesn’t make me gay.

I’m gay because I fall in love with men. I want to build a life with a man. I want a guy to be across my breakfast table when I’m 60. That’s where my gayness lives. And it’s the point of view I work from every day of my life, it’s the identity that colors my personal fight for equality.

And I hope, as our community moves forward in its fight for marriage and family and other battles that further include us into the mainstream life of this country, we find a place in our midst for the gay identity that includes monogamy and fidelity and all of those things we sometimes rail against. Some of us believe in those things, deeply.

That kid, that hypothetical kid in his suburban bedroom struggling with the dawning realization that he’s gay, needs to know he’s got multiple paths in life. He can be whatever kind of gay man he wants to be.

He doesn’t have to hold the hand of a stranger in the dark if he doesn’t want to.

If you normally read my pieces here and roll your eyes at their effusiveness that borders on the cloying, let me apologize right up front. I’m probably going to piss you off today.

Everyone else, just follow along.

I had a lot on my mind this weekend, so today is mostly about loose ends, a little bit of a lot of things, piecemeal, take it how you will.

The ex-boyfriend finally moved out of the apartment this weekend. We’d been co-habitating for two months while we figured out what came next. More conspicuous to me than the noticeable absence of Nathan is the noticeable absence of Nathan’s stuff — an empty closet, pictures off the walls, a computer desk gone, a clock missing on the bedside table. Those spaces seem more glaring, more sad than the space where he isn’t. It’s easy to forget that our relationships aren’t just between us, but they’re an accumulation of spaces, spaces we fill with things, spaces we mingle together. And when someone goes, they leave all these blank spaces behind, shadow lives.

But life isn’t all shadow. While the ex-boyfriend was packing up, I took a day trip to New Orleans to spend some time with Marc, my new beau (I guess I can call him that, here’s hoping he doesn’t read this and raises an eyebrow at the suggestion). You ever meet someone who, almost immediately, feels as though they’ve been in your life for years? Marc feels like that. It’s a delight, really. Our dates have been epic in length, (you could watch Wagner’s Ring Cycle during each of our three dates with time to get through all three Lord of the Rings movies as a chaser,) but they’ve been wonderfully comfortable and lived-in, in a way that’s not a complaint. Although, our immediate comfortable connection has made more than one person accuse of being just like lesbians. Which made me laugh. (And please don’t barrage me with “gay guys always hate on lesbians” comments. I’m on your side. I think commitment is sexy as hell.) Sometimes, our stereotypes are good, no?

Marc and I listened to Obama’s HRC speech on Sirius radio, and I have to say, it ticked me off. I got very tired of hearing all the thunderous applause at what amounted to this; ‘Hey gays, I know the things you want, and I’m telling you I want them, too. I’m just not going to tell you when, where, or how you’re going to get them.” I’m bored with the dangling carrot, and I’m tired of it being good enough for our community. Yes, on paper, Obama’s a good boyfriend, but doesn’t it feel a little like we’re always snuggling with him on the couch, telling him how much we want to turn this relationship into something serious, and he’s saying, “Oh yeah, baby, I agree, I do too, just not right now, let’s just enjoy hat we have right here.” I deserve a better boyfriend, one who not only tells me loves me, but SHOWS me. Come on Obama. We’re ready for marriage (or haven’t you noticed?) Step up to the plate, okay?

I found a quote this morning that I’m tacking up in my cubicle: “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.” Goethe. It’s easy to get caught up in the talk, the endless and labyrinthine debates and discussions about our key issues, but the talk only gets us so far. Bullhorns and signs and blogs (although I love blogs, mind you, don’t wanna anger my web Mom and Dad) are terrific, but they only go so far. Change doesn’t really happen with Big Symbolic Gestures. It takes place in miniature, in small steps, in putting your boyfriend’s picture up on your desk at work, in being out to your family, in correcting someone who assumes you’re straight, in calling someone out for saying something negative about gay people. Yes, we can feel as though change comes when we all band together and shout for equality, but the bigger change, the lasting change, comes in increments, in small steps, in what happens between you and another person. We should focus more of our energy on that change, on what we can do to make that change happen. Eye on the big prize, hands down in the muck and mire.

Favorite moment of the weekend: Marc and I visiting his friend, Wedon, watching Wanda Sykes’ HBO stand-up special. Marc, cuddled up next to me on the couch, turns his head once it’s over and says, “Baby, you tired? If you want to go we can.” That term of endearment was a surprise and arrived unexpectedly. And while I, of course, found it totally adorable, I was also struck by the ordinariness of the moment, the reminder that this life, this moment, was no different than the lives of millions of other couples, gay and straight, that no matter how different we feel and how much we’re demonized in the public discourse, we’re always occupying beautiful, perfect and ordinary lives. We’re not going to indoctrinate children or bring down Western civilization or destroy Jesus or kill America. We’re just someone’s Baby, someone’s Boo, someone’s Honey.

Not as sexy as annihilating the world, but it’ll do.

This time, I was on a date.

Apparently Edward Albee was thinking of this particular date when he wrote this line in “The Zoo Story”: “Sometimes a person has to go a long way out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.”

Marc, my date, wasn’t a New Yorker. He lives in Louisiana as well, in New Orleans, just two hours down the interstate from me. We were both visiting New York (Funny, no? You travel up the East Coast and end up getting moony over a guy who lives a car ride from you every other week of your life. Go figure.), and a Thursday lunch date and evening hang-out had made a second date something of a necessity, and that second date, which began early with breakfast at a nice little place at Union Square, had drifted by mid-afternoon to Central Park and the Bethesda Fountain.

The fountain was my idea.

For me, it was a Grand Symbolic Gesture – the arrival of something new springing up on the heels of something broken, being marked at a place that commemorates healing and rejuvenation, and as Grand Symbolic Gestures go in my life, this one was cut down to size by the impossible to control: rain.

Lots of rain.

Marc and I were stuck under the Terrace for almost an hour, listening to the rain (and a really great family band with a killer way around vocal harmonies), talking, getting to know each other. It was a nice way to spend an afternoon, minus the soggy shirts and hoodies.

Do I like Marc? Very much. Have I already mapped out an extensive future that includes Marc, a dog or two, maybe an adopted kid and arguments over who should be taking out the trash? Sure, it’s an inevitability with me, I have a tendency to follow a moment through all its possible conclusions, tracing a finger along the line this possibility makes across the map that is my life, seeing what destinations this road could take me to. And Marc smacks of possibility, in the best of all possible ways.

And isn’t that what we’re fighting for? Not marriage so much (although yes, we are fighting for marriage, we’re fighting for the paper and the rights and the name and the institution) but we’re really, when it comes down to it, fighting for possibility, for our lives to include, from the moment we’re born, the possibility of marriage as one of the many possibilities we can dream forward.

And not just marriage. The possibility of a welcoming house of faith. The possibility of a job we won’t lose because we’re gay. The possibility of a family we can create with our partner. Not being the victim of violence. Not being rejected by our parents. Not being bullied in school. An endless list of possibilities that we’ve somehow lived without.

When that is missing, when the hope is missing, the road that branches, the choice that can be made, our lives are lessened. And when possibility springs up in one place – when a interesting guy sitting next to you under the Terrace near the Bethesda Fountain leans over and kisses you on the cheek unexpectedly and laughs this distinctive chuckle that sounds one part mischief, one part contentedness – you suddenly want that possibility everywhere else. It fuels the fight.

Tomorrow, I’m driving to New Orleans to spend the day with Marc. I’m walking this road of possibility and seeing where it takes me. I’ll be thinking about the folks in Washington as the National Equality March, because regardless of what you think of the March, there’s going to be a lot of hopefulness there, people aching to find a little possibility to hang on to, and I hope they find it. And I’ll be thinking about everyone who finally owns who they are on National Coming Out Day (be brave, be steadfast, it’s not easy but it’s worth it!)

And I’ll be thinking about my friends Stan and Bruce, who after being together for 19 and a half years, went to Connecticut this weekend and got married. (God bless your union, may you have 20 more years, 40 more, infinite blessings and joys!)

Maybe I’m at the start of my 19 and a half years. Maybe not. Either way, I am filled with what’s possible, and it’s a wonderful feeling. The Angel Bethesda touched a foot on the Earth and a healing fountain sprang up. Marc kissed me on the cheek while waiting out the rain, and the wounds I’d been nursing were healed a bit as well.

The world is a wide open space. It’s ours. Let’s shape the most beautiful place we can.

Last Monday, David and I went to Musical Mondays at Splash in New York.

(for other non-New Yorkers like me, Musical Mondays is a simple construct. A gay bar, a ton of screens, a nonstop playlist of clips from musicals and guys like me who love musical theatre.)

It was, on his part, a masterstroke of an idea. I’m an old-school show queen (even though I hate that moniker), and the three-hour parade of clips from Tony Award broadcasts, concerts and move musicals hit my musical theatre sweet spot, the place in that little corner of my heart that sprouts feather boas and sequins at the sound of Kander and Ebb vamp.

It was fun. We had a few beers, we laughed, we sang along to the tunes we loved (“And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going.” Jennifer Holliday. Tony Awards telecast. Guilty.) and we particularly enjoyed the enthusiasm of one young guy at a table near us.

He was maybe 22, thin and adorable in a Spider Man t-shirt, and he knew every word of every song from every show they played. Sure, you’d expect the kid to know stuff from Wicked, but when he rocked every word and even aped Streisand’s gestures for “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from the Funny Girl film, we both couldn’t help but laughing in amazement.

“It must be genetic,” David said. “He must have been born with all those songs in him.”

Lucky him. I had to spend hours listening to every cast recording I could get my little hot hands on, renting every movie musical under the sun – even Mame, yep, suffered through that, and I even sat the whole film of A Little Night Music – just to get my fairly commendable grasp on the musical theatre canon.

Not that I’m bitter.

What I loved about that kid was his utter completeness, and that’s really the only way to describe it. He was so complete, unafraid of every song aching to burst from his heart, and he didn’t care if it was a showtune, he didn’t care if that made him a “silly queer” or a “faggot” or whatever epithet you could throw at him, he reveled in the song because the song was something he loved, something he embraced, something that made him… him.

National Coming Out Day is just a few days away, and that kid got me thinking about what it means to own who you are and how important it is for those of us who can, without repercussion, come out, be public, speak our truth in a way that matters.

So often, coming out stories are painted in painful strokes, they’re cautionary tales, they’re rife with rejection, argument, abandonment, isolation. Especially where I’m from, in the South, in less forgiving places than New York City, coming out is a Goliath, an Everest, a source of fear, anxiety.

I didn’t have that story. My coming out was, well, wonderful. At every turn, at every pronouncement, I was greeted with acceptance, support, love. My father only had one question for me when I told him I was gay.

“Does this make you happy? Because if it makes you happy, then we support you. Because your happiness is all that matters.”

I feel that I’ve spent every day since paying forward that gift, being out in the classroom, being out at work, writing and producing shows about the gay experience in my little Louisiana town and now writing here, writing this: paying forward the gift of being loved unconditionally for who I am.

It’s our duty, when we can, to sing that song. To let it flood out of us when we’ve been blessed with the gift of knowing the words.

Because we are the difference between that kid singing showtunes at Splash on Musical Mondays and a kid contemplating suicide in his Mississippi bedroom because he’s afraid of what his family will say when they find out he’s gay. Our public lives are a testament to the joy of coming out, of opening yourself to the truth, of feeling at home in your own skin, of being complete.

So speak your truth. You never know who’s listening.

A wounded heart needs a place to repair, and since this wounded heart had a week of vacation time to take before the year was out, I decided that a week in New York City would be just the recuperative break I needed.

I arrived in new York last Sunday and met up with my friend David, a fellow blogger in the gay blogosphere who’d very generously agreed to let me stay with him for the week. Dinner was on the agenda, but there was time to kill, so David steered us toward Central Park.

I had one request for our park visit: the Bethesda Fountain. (I’m not much of an uber-fan of anything, but I am obsessive about Tony Kushner, and Angels in America was the play that made me want to be a playwright, so there’s a theatre geek gravity that pulls me toward the fountain every time I visit the city.)

We stood in front of the fountain for a few minutes, watching countless people rush up to the fountain, turn towards someone with a camera, pose, smile, then jet away.

“It’s so weird the way people take pictures here,” I said. “Huge smiles on their faces, then when they’re done, nothing.”

I’d been watching this one girl, early twenties at best, shoot this beaming, ebullient smile at the camera, then as soon as the flash hit her face, her shoulders sank, her face dropped, and she looked as if her cat had died. Tragically.

Then, serendipity. A wedding. Handsome guy in a tux, thin beautiful woman in a crisp white gown, hand in hand, laughing, being photographed by a very serious looking photographer ahead of them. They made a round of the fountain, being photographed, joyful, and I wanted so much to see the pictures that were being taken of them, to see that joy filtered through an artist’s eye, to see what that kind of happiness looks like frozen in a frame.

I don’t know what it all means, how it all comes together, but I know it’s important to mark, to write down.

I love the idea of marriage coming upon us suddenly, wandering through the park, this shock of a white dress cutting across the greys and blacks and browns of a hundred coats and jeans and t-shirts. And I think sometimes I am that twentysomething girl taking her picture, flash of a smile then dropped shoulders and miserable, and I don’t want to be. I want to be that laughing couple. And I’m standing at this fountain, a fountain that represents a healing fountain sprung from the touch of angel’s foot on the Earth, and there’s a connection, I know there is, but at the moment it’s a little too tricky to make.

Later that evening, David and I were talking about marriage (not to each other, in general, for the larger community, I don’t want my mom to read this and think I’ve been holding out on her), and we talked about commitment and promiscuity and history and do we really all want marriage? and should that even be what we’re fighting for? We talked about ourselves, our community, what we want for it, what we want for ourselves, what we dream we can become.

And that same sneaking uncertainty crept over me, the same that hovered over the fountain and the picture girl and the married couple. I know it was all important, but I just don’t know how to put it all together.

We fight our fight with a great deal of certainty. Certainty that we’re right. Certainty that we’re going to win. Certainty that we are fighting on the side of what’s just. And we are all those things.

But it is also good, I think, to embrace the idea that we don’t know how it all comes together, that the struggle we’re in is sometimes larger than we can wrap our mind around, that all we can do is sometimes grapple publicly with things we don’t completely understand, things the grappling helps make clearer, things we might find down the road we were completely wrong about. Or not.

Before we left, I made a promise to myself to come back to the fountain. Take a picture of myself, smiling broadly in front of it. Maybe it would all come to me then.

Hope never hurts, does it?