Originally appeared in slightly different form June 10, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.
"THE LOVE THAT DARED NOT Speak Its Name," says Hank Stuever in The Washington Post, "now yawns and checks its watch."
Stuever was griping about the Millennium March and the gay movement in general (and I mean gay male; in 3,000 words there was a quick reference to lesbians and Home Depot, and that's about it).
The movement, he says, is dull. These days, we're all about kids, and serving our country, and Crate and Barrel. Hip young straight things may want to be like us, because they have the mistaken belief that we are edgy; but how on the edge can we be, when the largest March contingent was comprised of parents, when March organizers installed a playground for young ones?
"Being gay is boring," Stuever sighs.
Hallelujah.
I like boring. Boring is comfortable. Boring is the bulwark behind our endless trill that we are just like straight people, only with same-sex loves.
Boring will get us our rights faster than outrageous - at least, it will get us white, middle-class rights. The freedom to marry. The freedom to adopt. The legal ability to keep our jobs and our apartments. And once we get those, perhaps we can focus on other rights vital to our community, like equal pay for women, racial justice, protection against perceived-gender bias and education and job training for the poor.
I, too, was struck by the dullness of the March. This was not like a Pride parade, with its aura of community bonding. We were not celebrating our diversity or our spirit.
Instead, this was a virtuoso performance for straight people. Rally speakers were genial celebrities, politicians and other bland figures. Most came to the podium happily supporting the March, the crowd, the movement. There was little divisiveness. There were no radicals. No one threatened violence or insurrection or even civil disobedience.
As for the actual parade from the Washington Monument to the glitzy stage, I saw few bare-chested men or women, fewer leatherpeople in full dress, and no giant penises or Wizard of Oz costumes.
In fact, very little about this March was playful. People took themselves and the March seriously, wearing their politics on their T-shirts instead of embodied in their persons. It was as if 700,000 members of our community had come together to say, "You see, all of you C-SPAN viewers? You see our strollers and our Abercrombie & Fitch hats? We are not frightening perverts. If we had equal rights, your world would not look so very different. You're safe with us."
The WTO protests in Seattle and Washington wound up on the front pages of newspapers all over the country, because protesters were angry, focused and disruptive. We wound up with a story on page A14 of the New York Times.
Why? Happy gay, lesbian bisexual and transgender people aren't news. And our March was more of a festival than a call to action. The most radical thing we were asked to do was vote in November.
All of which makes sense, because, for the most part, our movement is doing well. We have corporate sponsorship. Presidential support. Large, well-endowed organizations. Recognizable celebrities. Our setbacks are inevitably accompanied by gains. We are making steady if slow progress on a variety of issues all over the country. Our anger has been diffused by affluence, our sedition by success.
Thus, we are boring. We are boring to the public, and a little boring to ourselves. And we are proud of it.
Perhaps because, for the first time in our lives, we are able to be boring, when and where we want to. We are able to be our full, awkward selves, instead of the selves pigeonholed by our sexual identities. Boring is beautiful because boring is rebellion. Even now, it's unexpected by homophobics, many of whom seem to think we hide pointed tails under our Gap jeans.
Who would have expected 25 years ago that our fiercest - and perhaps most successful - fight would be simply to be regarded as ordinary?
The best advice of the March came from Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who encapsulated how it was possible to be radical and boring at the same time.
"If you want to live in a world where you can put a picture of your partner on your desk, then put that picture on your desk, and you will live in such a world," she said, her tones ringing through the crowd as if she had said, "I have a dream."
"Blah is bliss," says Stuever.
What could be more ordinary than having a picture of the wife and kids on the desk? The March was full of such moments. It was a plaintive cry for blah; a plea for boring. The theme came, over and over again: We are just like everyone else. We wear the same clothes (if a bit more fashionably), go to the same schools, attend the same churches, raise our children next to yours. We are tired of going to marches, tired of listening to speakers say what we already know, pleading for rights you already have. We applaud politely, yawn and look at our watches.
We are just like you, more concerned with getting the kids to daycare than with changing the world.
And that is why the world is changing.