Another glorious Saturday in June. This is one of those Saturdays that you used to see in glossy magazines like Country Home and Southern Living. Happy people are out hiking and picnicking and their kids laughing and playing tag. Friends and neighbors and family and loved ones who are accepted for who they are and what they believe and their general good intentions. Live and let live is the motto of the day and hate and prejudice and misogyny be damned.

I look at so many photos of illustrations that were in my school books and media of the day and once again you see nirvana portrayed…but there are no black children around the Christmas Tree…only white kids dressed in their Christmas finest while Dad smokes his Christmas Pipe and Mom brings him a martini and little Susie fetches his slippers. Of course, African American families were enjoying Christmas just like Caucasian families but somehow they were invisible from the White Christmas portrayal.

Gay people have always been among us. Often they were just out of sight or they were the biggest secret in the room. Everyone that knew them knew that they were Gay…but they pretended to be Straight and those who understood the ruse went along with it in a debilitating lie that slowly devastated the Gay person as their hiding became both psychologically and physically painful.

As Rod Serling said at the beginning of the weekly Twilight Zone Episodes…’ Consider if you will,’ simply asking to be accepted for who you are…not a facsimile of who others think that you are…but for who you are and who you wake up as each morning and who you are sick as and who you are well as and who you grieve as when your loved one dies. In come the Sadducees and the Pharisees with their terrible burden of informing you that God did not create you as you are. As they look down their noses at you and explain to you that you could not possibly love a person of the same gender…and you know that your love them more than your own life…and indeed you have had to suffer for that demonstrated love countless times more than your Straight friends and family.

Do you know that you have done your religious service? As you lay your head on your Tempur-Pedic Pillow tonight will the scripture be floating on pure white fluffy clouds in your mind; ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal…’