why it matters

I have to admit, marriage equality has not been at the top of my list of issues to strive for. I've been much more concerned with issues of economic justice like single payer healthcare, union organizing and tenants rights. I was for marriage rights, but it paled in comparison with keeping people in their homes, fighting for dignity for low wage workers and ending the holocaust that is our profit driven health care system of apartheid based on income.

But when the vote was announced last night that made New York State the latest to allow same sex marriage, I felt something I hadn't expected. A flood of memories, being pushed up against lockers as a kid and attacked at school so many times, all the friends who died, the geniuses in New York who made this all possible and so many of them died 20 or 30 years ago. Tom Duane, on the Senate floor spoke of so many gay men, widowed by their partners death of AIDS in the 80's and then evicted from their apartments shortly after.

There was this unfamiliar sense that we are stronger now. When I walked home from my gig on Friday night and walked passed the tourists, debutant girls and frat boys who invade the East Village on weekends, the usual feeling of despair at what this once amazing neighborhood has become, vanished for a bit and was replaced by the realization that I was standing just a bit taller that night.