We Are Not There Yet
or
13 Reasons Why Marriage Equality is the Least of My Concern
or
A Wish List
1. The day when I can look for the latest installment of a certain critically acclaimed gay detective book series at Barnes & Nobles, and find it in the "Mystery" section where it belongs.
2. Children are told Dumbledore is gay within the first book of the Harry Potter series, not at a press conference the day the last book is released.
3. Remember the night when Ellen came out on her sitcom? For me, what was historical about that event was not the actual episode but the commercials which flanked it: All of them featured non-gendered or sexuality-specific roles for both men and women. A toothpaste commercial brought two young women into the same bathroom to brush their teeth and ended with a ridiculously hot kiss. That day, I thought the world had tipped towards me. The next day, it had tipped back. The evidence of those advertisements have been so immaculately erased from television that now I wonder if I imagined the whole thing.
4. Speaking of women kissing: I saw two gorgeous girls kissing on a subway platform the other day. Giggling and caressing like water nymphs in a celtic fable. Then I realized that I always see girls kissing in NYC. Then I realized that the only time I see guys kissing is once year on the last Sunday in June. And when I do I experience the same mania as I did as a child, when being told that the groundhog had, indeed, seen his shadow.
5. The day a famous gay actor can play a straight role on Broadway and have his performancecritiqued NOT his sexuality.
6. The day a famous straight actor doesn't angle to play a gay role in order to win an Oscar, because he's afraid that if he plays a crazy person he may go "full retard".
7. The directors of the movies "Precious", "The Patriot", and "Independence Day" are gay. Didn't know that, did you?
8. If you haven't picked up on it already: I'm an actor, among many other talents. And I was told that the theatre was a kind of dilapidated, yet welcoming halfway house for queers. This makes me all the more murderous when I audition for a Shakespeare play and am unallowed to read for the women's roles because of this insidious, ubiquitous unspoken agreement that while its okay to have an all-male or all-female production of a Shakespeare play because of its sideways glance at theatre history --- that a mixed-gendered or gender-blind production of a Shakespeare play would be a much more difficult disbelief for the audience to suspend. I know a lesbian that can play the shit out of Romeo it would make DiCaprio's dick look like a Planter's Peanut. I, have a Cleopatra, Lady Mac, and Ophelia in my back pocket that would make even Vanessa Redgrave, Judi Dench, and Maggie Smith bend at the knee.
All of this is ironic since Shakespeare himself was bisexual, and probably couldn't give a fiddler's fuck.
9. The day that bottoms stop assuming I'm a top because I'm black. (Yes, gays are racists too!)
10. The day drag queens falling in love with other drag queens don't make gay men go "Ew!"
11. The day when the "B" in LGBTQ is not met with a mental roll of the eyes. --- Here's a good reason why you should just assume bisexuals exist: You wouldn't want to be told that you don't.
12. The day Disney announces its first transgendered Princess.
13. The day when I can look into this audience, see my spirit reflected back in your beautiful incandescent eyes, and know this poem is truly a thing of the past.
- Lamar Legend
