For those who are interested in how gay rights moved from dreaming to action, another piece of California's history is now in print: Tom Coleman's memoirs, The Domino Effect. I'm obviously biased here, but my defense is this: New York had a very active gay community at the same time that California did, yet to this day New York state does not have either domestic partnership or marriage, and California has both. I think the key reason is that we had people like Tom (and others) who knew how to act on their dreams.
Tom's book is about what the world looked like when he got started, and how he worked to change it. New York has many elegant writers and historians, which is why we know so much more about New York's gay community and activists than California's. But unless you have an adequate supply of Tom Colemans, your laws remain static. Politics -- particularly the virulently ant-gay politics of the 1960s and 70s -- is very hard work, and all the visionaries in the world don't help if they don't understand how to make change happen in the scrum of government.
As a nation, we're now at the height of our political action. Tom's book is a good way to see how far we have come, and study what people had to do to make that happen.
One Comment for “California Actin’”
posted by TS on
Who among us is venerable enough to remember that virulent ant-gay axis in the ’60s? The ants said they wanted to help the gays achieve their goals, but what they really wanted was… WORLD DOMINATION!!!! MWAHAHAHAH! Feel free to remove this comment or something when the typo is fixed.