The Alabama soldier who told his dad he was gay on the morn of the end of DADT has racked up a huge viewership on Youtube. I've now watched it several times. I don't quite know why it compels so much. But one thing that struck me: the way the man's head swivels sharply from time to time from left to right and back again. It's almost as if he cannot stare straight ahead and focus on what he is saying. He needs some relief, some physical action to assuage the tension built up over his entire life, some way of facing this moment and then finding an escape from it at the same time.
This is gay America, ladies and gentlemen: the ordinariness, the humanity, the pain, the promise. And the outreach to his father before his mother makes it all the more powerful. I remember my own dad's amazingly open love for me even as he absorbed the news of my sexual orientation (and later, when he heard of my HIV diagnosis, when his face fell like a detonated building). I remember my first boyfriend who was in the airforce and whose father was a general in the airforce. He told me one night that he would love to tell his own dad who he was – but that he was afraid his own father would be forced to expel him from the service. I saw then in one instant the pain a patriot and a family man feels when having to choose between his inner nature and the things he loves. No more.
I am more than usually depressed about the news these days. Maybe that makes it all the more necessary to stop at moments like these and remember that we can move forward, we can alleviate unnecessary pain, we can overcome bigotry and we can make this place a better, more inclusive, stronger country than ever before. Yes. We can.
The Dish 