I am a gay American.
Last summer, when I heard disgraced New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey use this phrase to deflect the country's attention from his extramarital affair with a man, I laughed.
Huh, I thought. Good spin.
And then I forgot about it - sort of.
Every now and then the phrase "I am a gay American" would cross my mind, and I wondered why it seemed so startling. Perhaps "gay American" seems strange because as gay men and lesbians, we are used to categorizing ourselves as outlaws - and for a long time we were, literally, living outside the law since our relationships were illegal, and of course still aren't legally validated in most states.
We are used to fighting these unfair laws. We are used to fighting the government, particularly this government, this administration. And we have relished our status as outsiders, breaking society's gender rules, creating our own culture, redefining what it means to have a family. Redefining what it means to be in love.
Every year, Gay Pride celebrates this. We find the most outrageous clothes in our closets, and we march and sway and dance to show our cities and ourselves that there is strength in numbers, that there are many, many, many of us here, and we are living the way we choose - which, it seems, it not the way most mainstream Americans want us to live. We are different, we say. And we are happy about this difference and we love this difference and we want this difference to be accepted.
And yet, even in seeking acceptance, we are the same.
I am a gay American.
McGreevey said this for the wrong reasons, but I think he used the right words. As pundit Andrew Sullivan has pointed out:
It was the announcement of a new category, a new identity. . . .After all, 'gay American' is designed to sound like 'African-American.' It insists on the fixed identity of a group of citizens. And it celebrates their public citizenship: These people are as American as they are homosexual, and their homosexual orientation is as unremarkable a feature as the color of someone's skin.
Isn't this what so many of us have been saying, but in different words? We're here. We're queer. Get used to it. We're not going away. Our identity has a culture of its own, rules of its own, joys and trials of its own. But most of us also live easily in the larger American culture. We are assimilated. We have jobs and cousins and roots in hometowns. We ride the bus. We go camping. We buy iPods. We want yards and fireplaces and granite countertops and Jacuzzi tubs. We walk our dogs and treasure our cats. We send our mom flowers on Mother's Day. We are gay Americans.
We are not fighting against our country when we battle for our civil rights. We are fighting for it. We are fighting for a better America, a more democratic America, an America that gives equal opportunity to its citizens whether black or white, male or female, gay or straight.
We don't need to move to Canada to be free to be gay. That is, we shouldn't need to move. Our fight is here. Our war is here. And if, right now, we are ashamed to be Americans - because of our country's rampant xenophobia, because of the narrow-mindedness that threatens gays everywhere - well, there is no better reason to redefine what it means to be American. Redefinition is, after all, our specialty.
I am a gay American.
The phrase makes me wish a little that Pride month was longer, that it stretched into early July, that it included Independence Day. What better time, on that most American of days, to declare that we want what all Americans want: to live our lives the way we choose, to pursue happiness, to have representation in our government, to be free from laws and social restrictions that pressure us into being something less than what we are.
I am a gay American. And I've never been more proud of that.