Eeew, That’s So Gay,

While searching for the spot to restart the video after a long string of commercials, I slowed down the tape, and ended up running a bit of the last ad before the show started back up. Will Farrell was on screen, kissing another guy in an old promo for Saturday Night Live. A groan traveled across the classroom.

So, it didn’t really surprise me that the audience groaned during the Simpsons Movie, when the two cops kissed and ducked into the restroom and ignored Homer and Marge on the lam. Nor did it surprise me today, when in my doctor’s waiting room, I heard a portly, mid-40’s guy admonish a tyke who had grabbed a squeeze toy, “No, boys don’t play with pink toys.”

When that is the reaction of the general public, it sometimes causes me to despair. Much has been said and written about the use of the word gay, especially in recent usage, as a pejorative term. And, although I’d like to think the tide has turned in the use of “gay” as a bad label, I know that the feelings that lay behind that usage still remain. Kids didn’t learn that attitude from themselves, they learned it from adults.

When I was young, I was formally taught that black people were called “colored” or negroes. We didn’t see many in my little suburban community, and my father occasionally would use the N-word to describe them and their demands—primarily in regard to real estate and moving into neighborhoods. To be fair, he was more ignorant than malicious, and in those years, he probably was lashing out because he felt our value systems were being challenged as society changed during the 60s.

I recall traveling to Florida in 1961; I was six. I remember seeing the signs for “colored” and “white” at restaurants and gas stations. A few years later I found myself on an El-train in Chicago, sharing a bench with an older black gentleman, with my mother and her friend keeping watch over me from across the aisle. I also remember being in Washington DC, seeing Resurrection City, on the eve of RFK’s funeral in 1968.

What made me change? What was it about those years that made me a different man than my father?

I think it boils down to the simple fact that people took a stand against injustice--a public act or voice against discrimination and separate treatment. Rosa Parks, of course, is the patron saint of the modern Civil Rights movement for a very good reason.

Now that I’m a gay man of 50 (ok, 51), it’s time I do too.