My dear friend Sean, a friend who've I've maintained a relationship for coming on 20 years, has been looking into getting me back to Montana to talk about the start of Lambda Alliance some 20 years ago.
My memory can be swiss cheese at times. So many holes! It is thru this warped perspective that so many memories have been flooding back to me about those years. The struggle seemed endless while the threat palpable and all too real. This was a time 10 years before Matthew Shepard's crucifixion highlighted the violence and hatred stoically faced by LGBT people every day, year after year.
At times, those early struggles seem so far behind me. I have everything I could really want. I have a safe comfortable home in San Francisco, with a husband and a daughter, a circle of family and friends whom I love and who support me. And in the middle of the night these thoughts came to me and woke me up. The struggle is not over. The path to an inclusive yet diverse society, the path for social justice and equality that fulfills the promise of Martin Luther King's 'dream' lies in the basis of Mahatma Gandhi's teaching that "you must be the change you wish to see in the world."
In the midst of the storm, I am proud to have stood OUT and strong. In starting a LGBT student group, I didn't really know what I was doing, I just knew that doing NOTHING was NOT and option. I wrote to national organizations like HRC, GLAAD, Lambda Legal, and anyone else I could think to write. (this was before google and the modern internet)
A few did respond, most asked for money. As a poor starving College Student, that is the one thing I really didn't have. What I had was my feet, and my hands and my voice. And god help me, they will never be silenced. MCC (the queer church) has a closing benediction that I think comes from the book of John. "God has no hands but your hands, no feet but your feet, and no voice but your voice. Rejoice and go out and do the work of the Lord!"
I started Lambda Alliance on the campus of the University of Montana. The first meeting was in my apartment on a cold evening in January 1989. Twenty years later, I'm not only a community pharmacist specializing in HIV care, I'm the Vice President of Out4Immigration, a grassroots non-profit. We get e-mail and calls from around the world. People sharing their stories and desperate for help. We have no real budget to speak of. We all have jobs, lives, and struggles of our own. The work that we do, mostly comes from each person individually. And my heart goes out to those asking for help, but I don't have the answers they are looking for. The help I offer is the answer I came to 20 years ago, and it really lies in an old guilt trip my mother used to use, "fine, I'll do it myself."
The discrimination that we face is still very real. Our lives, our love and relationships are torn apart for no legitimate reason. Still today, LGBT people live in fear and desperation. And the only help I can offer is no help to the immediate situation at hand. The strength of our voices can ring mighty and triumphant, but only when joined in chorus.
Harmony and Melody are "Temporal" variations of the same sets of notes. I've got the melody down. I know the issues. I can speak to one person or a thousand, but my voice alone does nothing. The only help I have to offer is an invitation to join me in chorus with others and together we can hope to harmonize.
Gandhi, Rev. Dr King, and Mr Mandella never changed the world themselves. Their triumph was in bringing harmony to the chorus of the voices of the oppressed.
The friends you seek are the friends you cultivate. The family you're looking for are the people you love. The world you seek is the world you create
Mickey
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