Pride & Prejudice

I'm very pleased and proud of the National Equality March, which about 150,000 LGBTs and allies took part in three days ago, Oct 11th 2009.
That same day, while they marched in Washington DC, hundreds more, including myself, took part in a simultaneous march over San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

I'm pleased by the national press the DC march got~~I was equally happy to
see our local march become that night's lead news story on KRON TV, and KPIX TV here in town.
I'm delighted to see us not taking our lack of equality lying down.
I was happy to see so many transgenders taking part in the local march~~they've been an underclass within an underclass and they deserve better.

But I'm still not proud of how we treat each other.
Sorry to be a buzz kill yet again, but the general lack of care and concern for each other in the LGBT community needs to be addressed.

The day after the march, I got an email from a very dear friend. He's a gay Arab~~we were close friends in New York. He was forced to leave this country in 2001 and
has since lived in Lebanon and Morroco. In Monday's email, he told me that he was moving back to Kuwait, the country of his birth. He's given up on the gay community, he says. He wishes he weren't gay. He hopes to find the love from his family that the gay community has denied him.
Those were his words, not mine.
But these are words I understand all too well.
"Not interested, don't care, get over it", are the words I continue to hear from people who claim to be gay activists regarding my mentally ill former partner who lives with an anti-gay Christian family~~a family which uses his disabilities as a control device.
Yes, I've gotten a bit of support here and there from within the gay community, but by a 90% margin, it's been "no one cares about you."
Not even a kind word from them~~and that includes from people I once thought were close friends.
I can't even begin to describe how this has made me feel, especially since I've gotten nothing but support, by a 100% margin, from people we call "straight allies".

It shouldn't be this way.
The gay community should have gotten behind me. The gay community should be embracing my Kuwaiti friend in his loneliness, not ignoring him.

Yes, we show up to march for all the right causes, but when the chips are down, we're never there for each other, because we don't care about each other as individuals, and we have no problem telling each other so.

Earlier this year, and last year, the San Francisco Weekly published a number of cover stories in which they "reported" that all transgenders are prostitutes.
Here's a link to one of the more repugnant
and pointless of these tall tales:
http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-06-10/news/a-beautiful-risk/

That falsehoods such as these are being written in part gay writers is shameful~~I know a transgender woman who works as an artist and a college professor. Another I know is very sucessful in the high tech field.
The Transgender Law Center here in San Francisco has asked the SF Weekly to please stop denigrating an entire community.
The paper couldn't care less.

This past Spring, Michael Musto, an out gay writer at New York's Village Voice, published an op-ed in which he stated that there was no such thing as a bisexual.
Here's that piece:
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/dailymusto/archives/2009/04/ever_meet_a_rea.php
Musto often appears on MSNBC as a celebrity commentator. His television appearences have given him a huge readership base.
Yet Musto couldn't think of anything better to do with his platform than invalidate an entire group of people.
That kind of behavior has been the LGBT community's social norm for as long as I can remember.

It's all part of the same continuim: the mentality that told people that it's OK to ignore and laugh at me when I needed the community's help is the same one that tells Musto, The Village Voice and the SF Weekly that it's OK to shoot other LGBTs down.

It's time for those of us who want something better to stop putting up with this.

When I marched over the Golden Gate Bridge on Sunday, two people accompanied me.
One was one of my producing partners for our film project, the other was our cameraman~~his camera was rolling.
It was our first shoot.
We filmed the marchers, and I told about a half dozen people that our film intends to challenge the status quo and demand that we stop treating each other so poorly.

I'm pleased to say that not a single person disagreed with us.
Perhaps there's hope after all.


David Alex Nahmod
SF CA
Oct 2009