Today is a great time to be The Gay

So says this thoughtful piece on how every-day dangerous and scary it was to be out not so long ago.

"I had grown up in the fifties and the sixties, when practically the only public homosexuals in America were James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Gore Vidal, and (the bisexual) Paul Goodman. There were no gay images on television (unless you count Paul Lynde and Liberace), no politicians in favor of gay rights (much less any who were out of the closet themselves), and no news coverage that didn’t share the tone of a notorious page-one story in The New York Times that appeared in 1963. It carried this headline: Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern."

Change, thank you Buddha, has come partly due to the AIDS epidemic. During that desperate decade before drugs made it a chronic yet manageable disease, people saw their sons and nephews and brothers die painful, wracking deaths in the closet, as the world whistled by.

That horror woke us up quicker to the fact that we are all God's children.