Quee-r-eminiscence! -or- California Goddamn

I'm melting

Merriam-Webster's dictionary tells us that a reminiscence is many things. Among them "a remembered experience" and "the process or practice of thinking or telling about the past." Southern white ladies in the 1920s and 1930s used to write Romantic reminisces of their lives pre-antebellum, and now there's even a magazine, Reminisce, dedicated to the practice.

Reminiscing may have been a fun exercise in fantasy for Southern white ladies in the 1920s and 1930s, or a trip down memory lane for those nostalgic readers of Reminisce Magazine, but for queers, today, reminiscing is a traumatic and frought practice.

Since the election I haven't come out of my hidey-hole. I haven't blogged, I haven't returned emails or calls, and I haven't dared write down my thoughts. Until now. What follows after the jump is about the night of November 4th, about the progress we made and still have yet to make… it is about being stuck in Mendocino, California in the Summer of 2003, on the eve of Schwarzenegger's election, and it's also about you, I hope.

The night Barack Obama became our President-Elect I was having chicken and steak at Charlie's with some friends. As always, the ever-pleasent Charlie's staff were tolerant of our loud asses and, after consistent pestering, agreed to turn down the Beyonce so that we could hear the new President-Elect speak. I felt lifted when Obama spoke. I was incredulous and, yeah, hopeful. See, I told you. I'm the one in the gray hoodie, slack-jawed. Thirty minutes later we were watching amateur strippers vie for cash. Some things change, and some remain the same.

But this reminisce isn't really about Obama.

We were watching the results and the speeches in said gay bar with a friend from San Francisco, California, who commutes weekly into Austin (which was a little too much for us to fathom - "People do that?").

She was in tears.

For at the same moment that Obama became president, Californians said "Yes" on Proposition 8 and effectively rescinded newly minted marriage rights for gays and lesbians. Arkansas told gay parents they couldn't adopt or foster. The queers - in California, in Arkansas, in a little gay bar in Austin, Texas - got mixed messages on the 4th. Many were surprised that California passed Prop 8. I was not.

In the summer of 2003, I was living in Mendocino, California and working as an ice cream scooper with my then-boyfriend. We were housesitting for a friend of his family's and spending every hour of the day together. It was during that summer, in California, that our relationship began to break-down and crumble. Within two weeks of moving back to Oberlin, Ohio (I needed to finish my last year of school) we had called it off and wanted little to do with each other. Looking back on that summer it's hard for me to separate my feelings about California from my feelings about my then-boyfriend. They were, in some ways, one and the same. But I remember another event that rocked my world, and those around me in California, that Summer: the impending recall of then-Governor Gray Davis and election of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

While those inside and outside of California were critical of the campaign to recall Davis, and the conservative politicians who funded the effort, in the end Californians recalled Democrat Davis and elected Republican Schwarzenegger. I was truly surprised when the results rolled in October 7th, as I was glued to my computer screen. Somehow the recall was connected to my story, even though I wasn't a Californian, and the election of Schwarzenegger, in a highly contentious election, was a signal that the liberal California I knew (Mendocino & San Francisco)was just a series of enclaves and niches, bubbles and hovels.

Queers, we should have seen this coming from a mile away. Those wanting to rescind marriage rights in California were smart in appealing to the young, upwardly mobile, religious Californian:

By spreading the slanderous word in a variety of languages, most notably in Mandarin:

Leave it to the ladies on The View to fact-check the claims made by the Yes on Prop 8 folks (discussion of Prop 8 starts at 6:58 in the first vid. and continues into the second)

You know how your boy loves The View.

Even Judge Judy has weighed in to refute the passage of Prop 8 and the adoption ban in Arkansas.

Yet all of these television events came after Proposition 8 passed.

Cut to today, the marches and demonstrations are taking place in L.A. and S.F.

The response is right on: people are angry, defeated, upset, incredulous. But the message could be honed. Instead of protesting in West Hollywood (the gayborhood in L.A.), why not protest in the small towns and counties outside of the city? Why not start a door to door campaign - "Meet a homo!" Additionally, protestors are calling for the boycott of anything related to or coming from the state of Utah, due to the fact that a large amount of funds and personnel support for the Yes on 8 campaign came from the Mormon church. Call me crazy, but boycotting ski slopes and the Sundance Film Festival isn't going to do any damage to anyone but snow bunnies and filmmakers. And really, aren't they already our allies in this?

The passage of Prop 8 was a long time coming, and if LGBT folks in California and elsewhere haven't already awoken from their reveries and reminisces of a blue California, perhaps they'll stay asleep forever. Unfortunately, I'm as guilty as those dreamers.

These histories, recent and years old, personal and political are, I think, indicative of queer relationships to history and geography. We are unwelcome in our country and so we pay attention to geographic minutia where we might be afforded equal rights. Pained and frought, we hope for the next small step forward - a vindication of our rights to marry - but there's a bigger monster in the closet - and it's not the Mormon church. It's our own ability to organize and effect change. The days of hot, sweaty, angry gay libbers are gone, most likely never to return. Until they do, LGBT folks will have to be comfortable with change, that as Nina Simone once intoned, is "too slow."