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.

We lost in Maine. And that loss… well, it sucks. No point in trying to describe it otherwise.

So, now what?

For starters, if you’re not — come out. To your family, to your friends, to the people you work with. Show the people around you that there’s a face and a name and a life attached to losses like these. The people who go into voting booths and cast votes against our community more than likely only know us in the abstract — in the horrible ads that ran in California and Maine, in the pathetic, hate-filled diatribes of people like James Dobson and Maggie Gallagher, in the hellfire and brimstone damnations delivered from pulpits — and in the abstract, we are easy to reject.

But when we aren’t just an abstraction, when they know what we’re like, what we do, how we conduct our lives and that we move in the same circles and same world as they do, there’s a much better chance of changing their minds. And we can only do that if we’re out. Yes, it sometimes comes with great risk, but we’re seeing the cost of staying in the closet. Maine is the cost. California is the cost.

Secondly, we need to stop blaming the rest of the world for taking marriage away from us and channel that energy into fighting for it. It’s easy to get angry today and call the voters in Maine bigots and rant and rage and point fingers and stew. But what does that accomplish? Not a single thing. You want change? Then work towards it. If you’re spending five minutes today being angry at Maine voters, I hope you spent five minutes calling voters in Maine, urging them to vote “no,” sent emails, wrote a blog, did something, anything — otherwise, you’re wasting time and energy. Anger is only useful when it’s turned into something. Otherwise, it’s an empty emotion, and we’re no closer to victory than we were before.

Finally, we need to start thinking and acting like a real community. This morning, I saw angry missives and comments online from friends of mine over the results of Maine. But those same people, in the weeks leading up to the vote, weren’t talking about it or thinking about it or caring about it. What happens to gay couples in Maine affects gay couples in Idaho affects single gay men in Mississippi affects gay people, coupled or not, everywhere. We’re a community, and until we really start caring about what happens to each and every one of us, nothing will change for any of us. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in marriage or don’t want to be married — act for those in your community who do. Because we’ll stand up for your freedoms when the time comes.

Let’s look toward the next fight. Let’s educate ourselves. Let’s unify as a community. Let’s act. Abandon everything else.

Learn something from this loss. Otherwise, we lost marriage for nothing.

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.

Celebrity gossip is not the first place I go for news, but sometimes the human experience is necessary to help us understand political reality. And what better group of people to watch than those circling the exciting world of Hollywood?

So when the news hit yesterday that Rosie O’Donnell and wife Kelli Carpenter have split, I couldn’t help but think about how the fight for gay marriage often ignores the very real rights we haven’t got when it comes to gay divorce.

It’s one thing to say that a loving committed relationship needs the institutional and social support marriage provides, but when two people split after years together, the law really becomes central to their survival.

If you are a same-sex couple resident in Montana and you take a vacation to Toronto to get married you have a legal piece of paper (though not recognized in your home state) and the affirmation (though not from your own country) of your love and commitment.

But what if you decide, years later, that – like half of the American population – you are no longer in love with each other?

As a resident of Montana, you cannot get a divorce in Toronto. Toronto, like most states with the exception of Nevada and a few others, has a year-long residency requirement for a divorce. In Montana, your relationship was never legally any different from two roommates. And so, you must complete a divorce, with all its entanglements and difficulties, without the assistance of the law.

Things are very different for straight couples.

Family law protects individuals in a lasting relationship from economic exploitation and destitution after a split. When one half of the relationship has not worked, but contributed to the lifestyle of the other half, the law orders spousal support. When one half of the couple has lived in a house owned by the other half for a long period of time, the property is considered a marital home and both individuals may lay claim to it. There are rules about how to deal with the financial burden of children, the shared financial liabilities of the relationship and the shared assets.

Rosie and Kelli are in the midst of a pretty normal problem. It is so normal, entire legal schemes exist to assist with the process of separation. But these legal protections, like so many others, leave LGBT people out.

So, here’s to the fight for gay marriage. But let us not also forget the fight for gay divorce. It is when we are at our most vulnerable that we require the protection of law.

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.

The newest piece of gay gossip comes from a very unexpected place: the mafia.

A young guy growing up in a neighborhood where John Gotti was king joined Gotti’s organization. Except that young guy turned out to be gay and knew that in many mob organizations, people who come out of the closet are later met with unfortunate fates (a la Sopranos).

So he turned into a government informant, found a boyfriend and resigned from the organization.

He has been living in hiding since. Today, at his sentencing for attempting to murder a bagel shop owner, he told the judge that he was gay and had renounced his involvement in the mob a long time ago.

It’s not really news, and it’s not significant to any struggle for the community. Except that the struggle of this young man in his own social structure is similar to our own structure. Sure, we’re not worried about whether to off our boss’s latest enemy, but many are worried for their lives if their sexual orientation becomes public knowledge.

It just goes to show that the human experience, the gay human experience, even in extreme circumstances, is pretty universal.

The story about a Justice of the Peace refusing a marriage license to an inter-racial couple is offensive for many reasons. First, the blatant racism is shocking. We all thought that decent Americans kept those feelings to themselves…

Second, gay couples get refused for marriage licenses all the time and the outrage across the country makes many of us feel like the story we’ve been selling for the past decade isn’t being heard.

But the point that I take away from it has nothing to do with marriage or gay rights.

Yesterday I posted a comment on the fact that the Civil Rights Department has pledged to start enforcing anti-discrimination legislation when it comes to LGBT Americans. And the key to that pledge is the understanding that, even if the laws are good, the enforcers of those laws might render them ineffective.

Well, here we see that played out in Louisiana.

This public servant is bound by a law that protects against racial discrimination. This law is actually quite old news. it’s not like we are in Iowa and the couple is a same-sex couple. But without the impetus to enforce the old accepted law, the fact that racial discrimination is not on the books doesn’t really matter.

This just reinforces the fact that winning hearts and minds in the struggle for equality is as essential as winning over lawmakers.

The head of the Civil Rights Department of the Justice Department announced today that he is making the pursuit of claims by LGBT Americans a priority for his office. Specifically, Tom Perez said,

“We must fight for fairness and basic equality for our LGBT brothers and sisters who so frequently are being left in the shadows,” and to “ensure that there’s a level playing field in which our LGBT brothers and sisters are judged by the content of their character.”

As a lawyer, too often the fight is not to change the law, but change the application of the law. It’s one thing to have procedural protections when dealing with the police, but it doesn’t mean they won’t call you a dyke when they approach you, take you less seriously as you explain your side of the story, use their discretion to arrest those who are different or threatening.

The same is true with the treatment in the courts. Are openly LGBT complainants taken seriously by juries? Addressed respectfully by judges?

Many of us have experiences in our own lives that reinforce the assumption that the laws protecting the public don’t protect us as much.

One speech by a representative of the Civil Rights Department is not the be all and end all of the LGBT struggle. It is merely a blip on the radar. However, if the actual rate of LGBT related investigations increases, this will be an important mile stone on the road to equality.

Changing the law on the books is important. But it’s much harder to change the hearts and minds of those enforcing the law. Thank goodness we are seeing some progress in that direction.