... and of my cousin Morris Kight:

wordweaverlynn asks what are you going to do to celebrate Harvey Milk's birthday?

Me, I'm just going to make a few things explicit:

I consider myself queer. But I acknowledge that, as queer goes, I'm just swimming in the privilege of plausible deniability, at least at this point in my life. I am, after all, a woman in a long-term relationship with a man. And I look like somebody's grandma. If people remark at all on my affectional life, it's generally to puzzle over the fact that I'm paired up with someone who's polyamorous, and ask me how that works.

But I've spent my life since adolescence surfing the Kinsey scale; I've been known to describe my basic orientation as "mutable." I seem to be drawn to individuals, not types or genders; I've had loving long-term sexual relationships with women and loving long-term sexual relationships with men. Also hot, sweaty short-term relationships, not to mention more crushes than I can even remember.

I've never tried to hide these facts, not since coming out to my own mom in my 20s and receiving the best imaginable response ("Oh, when are we going to get to meet her?"). At some periods of my life, I've gone out of my way to identify publicly and politically with the queer community. I spent one memorable election season as the public face and voice of the campaign against one of Oregon's infamous anti-gay ballot measures - in the relatively conservative, some would say redneck community where I live.

But it's easy for people, even people who know me failry well, not to know these things about me. It's not that I intentionally conceal it - I'm a notorious blurter, and have no real sense of privacy - it's just that the subject doesn't often come up.

So this is me, bringing it up. When I speak for gay marriage, or against hate crimes, it's not just as a sympathetic ally. THESE ARE MY PEOPLE. They always have been. They always will be.

joedecker reminds us that, as they waited 30 years ago for a verdict in Milk's murder, Californians are now waiting to find out whether their Supreme Court will recognize them next week as full citizens. They were disappointed before; they may be disappointed again.

What they, what *we* won't do is shut up, or go away, or give up. Civil rights movements take generations; this one is rolling along pretty well by those standards. I plan to stick around to watch it succeed.

Tags: "i am large, i contain multitudes", politics, queer_as_folk