Ah, How much can be covered by this nice little American flag!
Tom Paine called Patriotism "the last refuge of the
scoundrel." The truth of this is demonstrated every day of the Bush administration
and by the Christian Right and their strange public commingling (talk about
politics making strange bedfellows: Carl Rove and Pat Robertson—wow! Two
uglier little men you could hardly imagine). But it is something we need
to remind ourselves this Gay Pride Month. It is terribly sad, a tragedy really,
that this little American flag, something that so many of our fathers and
even so many of us have died for, is now covering up so many lies.
We have the continuous lie of the war in Iraq; the lie that gay marriage
can ever threaten marriage itself (when, as John Tierney in The New York
Times said, what really threatens marriage is divorce—especially divorce
brought on by the economic insecurity brought on by George Bush's White House);
the lie that cutting taxes for the rich can bring prosperity to the poor;
the lie that you can protect the environment by destroying it; the lie that
can we can find some kind of magic Band-aide to get us out of the energy
crisis and the crisis of global warming—
Just too many lies.
Camp has been called "the lie that tells the truth,"
but the truth is you don't need a whole lot of elaborate lies to look at
the truth. Most of us see it everyday, if we care to look hard enough. We
see hard-working men and women who don't have a clue how they're going to
stay well without medical insurance; we see wonderful gay men and lesbians
who are not TV glamorous--who are something more than just "consumers" of
Grey Goose, Absolut, and Toyotas. We see people who genuinely care about
young people and old people and the AIDS crisis that is still with us and
decent housing for all of us, not just condos and upscale McMansions for
the rich.
That is the truth about us.
So this year, this Gay Pride Sunday, and the next few
months that come with it, I want us to think about the truth. That place
in our own hearts that sometimes scares us but makes us feel good to be alive.
And remember that the only thing that changes human life is love—and the
truth that goes with it. We queer men and women have been knowing this for
centuries. Sometimes we've felt alone knowing it, but we have. And no matter
how much noise is going on around us, no matter how left out of it we may
feel when the Parade does pass us by, I hope all of us will feel good about
this.
So, let's don't let any little flags cover up the truth.
But let the rainbow flags and the real flags inside us, the ones that say,
"I can sure tell a lie when I see it!" reveal what we are. Proudly.
