CommuniKate

It is two weeks since the election of Barack Obama. It is still true. It makes me smile every morning. Then I read the paper about the Armageddon that is our financial system and it harshes my mellow. But after CA, AZ, FL Prop Hates, it has been a shallow mellow.

Nothing like a little road trip to get the spirits up. The night before I left, I joined 16,000 of my closest, maddest friends at a protest at the Mormon Church near Lincoln Center in Manhattan. The Morons had spent 25 million in support of Prop Hate. Teamed with the Catholic Church, they are like the Hate Fed, bailing out immoral ballot initiatives. My sign said, “Tax This Church.” Another witty sign said, “Et tu Donnie and Marie?” My favorite was, “Joseph Smith had 20 wives and I can’t have one.” It felt good to scream. I saw old friends, but the crowd was mostly young. And they were ripping mad.

I flew on a tiny plane in our unregulated airline industry, to Pittsburgh, the football craziest town I’ve ever been in, and did a show at the University sponsored by the Rainbow Alliance. The students were still high from election night. They told stories of the spontaneous partying in the streets on election night and they too were ripping mad about the anti-gay wins.

The next night I performed in Alexandria, in the newly blue state of Virginia. The Group of 20 was in DC and traffic was at a standstill for people trying to get to the show. The summit had been hastily assembled by our Lame Fuck who welcomed the participating countries with a feeble speech about free trade. The principles of our economy are sound. Could he leave now? I had hoped that Carla Bruni, the breathy gorgeous new wife of France’s President Sarkozy would steal away and come to the show. Mais non.

Tant pis. The Birchmere is a big sprawling roadhouse of a club and it was wild. For the last eight years DC residents have been under house arrest. That night they were free and raucous and ready to party. The show was a pure joy. They are past ready for a new administration and are planning to party with millions on Inauguration Day.

They too experienced the kick in the gut that was Prop Hate, but seemed cautiously optimistic about not having an avowed homophobe in chief. Like many other cities they were planning big gay protests for the next day.

Like General MacArthur, but much cuter, I promised them I would return. I reminded them, as I remind you now, that the night before the Inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama we are going to meet at the Ellipse at 6pm to sage the bad spirits out of the White House. Be there or be square.

While the American family and our extended international family were whooping it up for the historic Obama victory, I banged pans and wept for joy with the best of them. But I also had that dissociated, not-quite-part-of-feeling I had at family gatherings when I was young. Actually, I have never felt gayer.

Make no mistake. Election night 2008 was an amazing reparative night, a triumphant trifecta signaling the end of Nixon’s southern strategy, the Reagan Revolution and the Bush Regime. If Bush could have considered his first presidential selection and his second slim election as mandates, then we can certainly call the Obama victory a landslide.

It was a landside and it crushed us, as California, Arizona, Florida and Arkansas passed anti-gay ballot initiatives. It was a bittersweet night.

We learned three lessons.

First, progressive straight people do not, will not, see the moral equality of gay people. Except for the efforts of the ACLU, the rights of gay people are rarely championed by progressives. The moral sanctity of their marriage is inexplicably undermined by gay marriage. In the forty years since Stonewall we have achieved only a hollow, virtual equality. Like Sarah Palin, we too can be thrown under the bus.

Second, religion is the opposite of the people. While Black Churches certainly helped pass Prop Hate, the White Churches can not get off Dred Scott free. In an image-burnishing move, multi-wived Mormons poured millions into Prop Hate. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, with its zero experience of marriage, contributed thousands. Democracy and religion are a bad mix.

Third, gay people cannot win if our own people do not care. If gay people remain partially or fully closeted, and do not openly support gay organizations which train those much maligned but highly effective “community organizers”, we will never win full equality. It has been forty years since the Stonewall Riots and we still do not think, yes, we can.

So excuse me, if I seem an ungracious party-pooper, quickly becoming more bitter than sweet. If gay people are not full American citizens, let’s stop paying taxes and re-invest in ourselves. It is past time for pro-active strategies, for our own ballot initiative to make divorce illegal and all divorced people disenfranchised felons. It is time for a general strike or a rainbow flu. Until further notice, all gay people should go rogue.