Slow Dancing Out Loud

"This day is about people who can begin to live their lives out loud." Mayor Gavin Newsom was celebrating the California Supreme Court decision legalizing marriage for everyone regardless of sexual orientation.

Mayor Newsom's words resonate with me. I've not been able to forget this concept of living one's life out loud. It is amazing how much power a word or phrase has.

I'm gay, but I'm single and don't plan to get married. Still the court decision impacted me in a personal and substantive way.

The reason that I moved from Kansas City, Missouri to San Francisco, California was so that I could live my life out loud, although I didn't have the concept to match the feelings last year.

I was weary of having to decide if I should remain silent about my sexual orientation in employment. I was weary to the bone of the Bible Belt. I no longer intended to endure that silent oppression that loudly voiced itself in political life there.

The Kansas City metro area was once a free and liberal place. At least it was as compared to the small Kansas town in which I grew up. I once was enamored with its flowered boulevards and many statues and fountains. In the end, the city's facial beauty could no longer distract me from the increasingly intolerant social and political realities there.

As the Religious Right took control of the GOP, the social cancer that it brought took hold and prospered in the Plains along with the wheat.

Being in the heart of the Bible Belt, many people became more judgmental against gays and lesbians and saw no problem enforcing their religious beliefs on us in the government and increasingly, in social settings. It was an often silent, but invidious oppression.

In sharp contrast, I felt much more accepted and able to live freely in conservative Arizona than I ever did in Missouri or Kansas. When I returned to Missouri after grad school in Arizona, I never really felt at home again.

I felt as though I were holding my breath, waiting for something; waiting for I knew not what. I could never fully relax.

Finally, when the opportunity arose, I took a chance and moved from a Red State to a Blue State. I moved to what is considered the most liberal city in the U.S. if not the world.

And after Thursday's court decision establishing sexual orientation as a protected class, along with race, religion and sex, at long last, I could relax. I let go of my long-bated breath. Even with all the protections in place in California, for the first time in my adult life, I began to breath easily and deeply.

I participated in the celebratory party in the Castro Thursday night, where the entire LGBT community collectively exhaled. I couldn't help but compare it to Kansas City, where this spontaneous celebration and family feeling could never have happened. I have many gay friends there who still cannot live their lives fully out loud.

I read reactions from around the country, including one from a man in Texas who dared not to hope. But he was joyous that somewhere there was finally justice. That gave him permission to hope just a little that he would see a change someday in his home state. It was clear that he still could not live out loud.

The state argued that the only difference between domestic partnership and marriage was just a word. It implied that the word had no legal substance, no legal value, no power. Even the dissenters in Thursday's opinion didn't buy that the word had no value. Certainly those who oppose gay marriage don't think that the word has no substantive value.

If it is just a word, what a word it is to carry so much meaning, hope and acceptance for those of us who heard it applied to us for the first time in this state. The value, the power of that word, marriage, represented decades of fighting for this moment by the couples who brought the lawsuit. It had the power to make a crowd shout so loudly that the gleeful din could be heard for blocks around the Castro. It had legal substance in that for the first time known in this nation, we became a protected class where the state could not deny us our rights unless it could meet the strictest level of review by the courts.

That word means so much more than just a marriage license to us. For gays and lesbians everywhere, marriage is a homograph. For us, it means we are a huge step closer to being equal - equal in treatment by our government and equal in society for our love. Maybe a huge step closer to one day being fully accepted and respected in this country. And it means we now have a substantial set of state rights under the same name as everyone else in the state.

This one word has the power to reach across the nation and around the world. Now, other gays and lesbians can come to California and get legally married without residency requirements.

There will be a veritable stampede of gays and lesbians rushing to the alter in the event that victory is snatched from us in November. There is still a ballot initiative to amend the Constitution, which means that the struggle continues.

Yesterday I was given reason to hope even where the ballot initiative was concerned. I have a surrogate family in the Bay Area; it is my late step-father's sister and her husband. They consider me family and I, them.

I never felt that they were narrow-minded nor that my being gay was a problem for them. But I wondered how they felt about the gay marriage decision.

My step-aunt is liberal, so I really didn't figure it phased her at all. But my step-uncle is conservative and they are both Catholic. There was room for a little doubt.

My blood-relation uncle and aunt also live in this area and I don't really interact with them due to their Southern Baptist religion. In fact, my uncle is a retired Southern Baptist minister. They love me and I love them, but I don't care to have their religious prejudice in my life.

I figured my mother could do without the barrage. My uncle's constant braying about my lost soul got on her last nerve. My uncle promised my mother that he would never bring up the subject with me, but my uncle feels compelled to raise the subject when talking with her. She holds her own, but doesn't care to debate the subject when she knows they won't change their fractured view of homosexuals.

My aunt once called me when I was on a business trip to San Francisco to warn me. She was deeply concerned that I'd contract MRSA, which had just started coming to public consciousness.

She had good intentions, but I couldn't help but laugh. Her prejudice was showing like a slip peeking out from under her conservative dress.

Despite living in the Bay Area for over 40 years, she had no better idea of what constituted a gay man or his habits than someone in the Arctic Circle.

Of course, being gay and being saved are mutually exclusive in her religion. From the conversation, I quickly grasped her stereotype. She believed that all gay men danced together shirtless (undoubtedly ass-less leather chaps were her worst fear).

Since I am gay, she reasoned that I could not help myself in my unfettered depravity and go dancing shirtless with other gay men in some dark, crowded gay bar. Since MRSA was contracted by skin-to-skin contact, she feared that one shirtless slow dance might just kill me before I got saved.

I knew that her call was out of love for me. I assured her that I wasn't even visiting a gay bar while in town. In fact, I was quite a few miles from San Francisco in Burlingame, preparing for my meeting the next day. I had neither the time nor the inclination to go dancing.

I mentioned that because of my expanding waistline, I was not inclined to expose my torso, depraved dancing or not. I even reminded her that my mother and I are the only two American Indians without rhythm.

She wasn't at all convinced. "Keep your shirt on," she instructed.

Because of my Southern Baptist relatives, I couldn't help but wonder about my step-uncle's feelings or fears about gay marriage.

I needn't have worried. In talking with my step-uncle, he said, "I don't see where it affects me or my marriage. I don't have a problem with it."

My eyes welled up as I let loose of a different level of bated breath. Unlike my Southern Baptist aunt and uncle, he gets it.

Like the gay man in Texas, I have hope. I can finally live my life out loud, even as a single gay man, all because of one word.

I think that I'll go have a depraved, shirtless slow dance at a gay wedding to celebrate. Surely my auntie would agree that you can't live life out loud more than that.