By David Webb The Rare Reporter What a difference a few decades and the evolution of new generations can make in society, particularly when it comes to the development of a new community. When I first moved to Dallas in the summer of 1969 — just a few months short of my 21st birthday — I found a community of people that heretofore I had only read about in literature. It was by accident that I landed in Oak Lawn because I just as easily could have rented my first apartment in any other area of the city. As I started navigating the neighborhood, going to the grocery store and going about the other mundane aspects of my life, I began noticing some very interesting people. It wasn’t long before I realized that I had stumbled upon something new and exciting. The LGBT community as we know it today was in its infancy. There were a few gay men’s bars, at least one lesbian hangout, some drag shows, cliques of gay people working at downtown department stores and hippy festivals in Lee Park where LGBT people celebrated openly with young, liberal straight people. In those days, I didn’t see a lot of same-sex couples living together. I occasionally became aware of older same-sex couples who had lived together for long times in homes, but for the most part I only met other single people like myself living in apartments. There were a lot of people living together as roommates, but from what I could tell there were few commitments in these arrangements. It was the days of indiscriminate sexual activity that was being practiced by gay and straight people alike. I did quickly find a place for myself in the community, and I became a part of a family of gay and straight people who socialized together. There were a couple of married straight people in the group, a divorced woman with a child, several gay and straight men and other people who drifted in and out of the network over the years.
This was a time when people realizing they were gay often chose not to reveal it to their birth families. Many people who felt isolated developed relationships with groups of people who gave them the support they needed to recognize and accept who and what they were. Many other groups of people that I encountered seemed to consist primarily of families of gay men or lesbians. It seemed to me that lesbians tended to be more likely to couple than gay men at that time. I was unaware of any same-sex couples raising children in the early 1970s. That early model of friends-as-family was one that served me well, and for some reason I’ve never much wanted to become involved in a committed relationship with a partner. Despite a couple of half-hearted tries over the years, that still holds true for me today. But it has changed drastically for many other people since the launch of the gay rights movement with the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City in 1969.
Legal challenges to state laws restricting marriage to heterosexuals began in the early 1970s and the fight for marriage equality has progressed to the point that same-sex marriage is legal in six states and the District of Columbia in the country now. Information gleaned in part from the 2000 U.S. Census and published by the Williams Institute in “Census Snapshot” in December 2007, reveals that an estimated 8.8 million LGBT lived in the U.S. in 2005. In 2005, there were 776,943 same-sex couples in the U.S., compared to 594,391 in 2000, according to the report. The Census information makes it clear that LGBT people live in every county in the U.S., whereas in the early years openly gay people seemed to be mostly a big-city phenomenon. Of these same-sex couples living in the U.S., 20 percent were raising children under the age of 18, and an estimated 270,313 of the U.S.’s children were living in same-sex-couple households, according to the report. An estimated 65,000 of the U.S.’s adopted children reportedly lived with a lesbian or gay parent. Clearly in the 40-plus years since the start of the gay rights movement, all of the characteristics of LGBT life have changed dramatically. Young people are often quicker to acknowledge and accept their sexual orientation, and there is a whole array of options that were unavailable to previous generations of LGBT people. When young LGBT people think about their lives and relationships today, it’s probably in terms of dating, finding the right person, living together, getting married and even raising children. If anyone had told me 40 years ago that I would see such developments in my lifetime, I would have thought they were crazy. But that’s how it is today, and it makes me wonder what sort of decisions I might have made about my life if so much had been available to me when I was young. David Webb is a veteran journalist who has covered LGBT issues for the mainstream and alternative media for three decades. E-mail him at davidwaynewebb@yahoo.com.]]>

By David Webb – The Rare Reporter The passage of a resolution by the United Nations Human Rights Council last month declaring that LGBT people around the world should be afforded equal protections with all other human beings left me overjoyed, yet still full of consternation. The measure’s passage represented a great victory for human rights advocates who pressed for it, but the very need for such an action underscored how dangerous it is to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender in many parts of the world, including the United States of America. Homosexuality remains illegal in 76 of the globe’s countries, and it is punishable by death in five of them. In the United States, where the nation’s sodomy laws were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003, discrimination and violence against LGBT people continues to run rampant. An analysis of 14 years of FBI hate crime data by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project in late 2010 revealed that LGBT people are more than twice as likely to be violently attacked as Jews and blacks, more than four times as likely as Muslims and 14 times as likely as Latinos. In a press release by the U.S. Department of State, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called the U.N. resolution a “historic moment to highlight the human rights abuses and violations that LGBT people face around the world based solely on whom they are and whom they love.” She noted that torture, rape, criminal proceedings and killings are sanctioned all over the world by religions that condemn anyone who does not adhere to traditional heterosexual norms regarding sexual orientation and gender identity. The controversial resolution, which was proposed by South Africa, passed narrowly on a vote of 23 to 19. Although the measure was supported by the U.S. and other Western countries, it was opposed by African and Arab countries where the prosecution and persecution of LGBT individuals is the most severe. Three countries, including China, abstained from voting. Reaction to the U.N. resolution from opponents of LGBT rights was telling. Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s representative to the Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva, denounced it as a maneuver in an international agenda to restrict the freedom of churches. Tomasi claimed the church opposes violence against homosexual behavior and punishment based on a person’s “feelings and thoughts,” but he condemned the measure as detrimental to society and likened laws against homosexuality to prohibitions against incest, pedophilia and rape. In Ghana, the Rev. Joseph Bosoma of the Sunyani Central Ebenezer Presbyterian Church called on President John Evans Atta Mills to crack down on homosexuality in the country, warning that society was on the verge of a punishment similar to what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah in Biblical times. The president assured the pastor that the government would take action to check homosexual activity. Similarly, Alex McFarland of the American Family Association, the group that is sponsoring Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s The Response Prayer Rally in Houston on Aug. 6, declared recently that the world is now in The Latter Days, in response to the passage of marriage equality in New York. He argued that LGBT rights are not the equivalent of human rights. Soulforce, an LGBT group that monitors conservative religious groups, noted that another host of Perry’s rally, Lou Engle, the leader of The Call, is one of three evangelical leaders in the U.S. who supported the Kill the Gays bill in Uganda. For three decades the greatest impediment to the LGBT rights movement has been Christian Rights groups and its leaders who have seized on the concept of a “homosexual agenda” bent on destroying American culture and society. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, declared the fight against LGBT rights as a “second civil war.” Some of these Christian Rights groups have earned the distinction of being identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center because they have resorted to crude name-calling and spreading false information about LGBT people in an effort to draw support to their cause. Like the Ku Klux Klan that vilified all minorities in its terroristic oppression of people and also operated under the guise of Christianity, today’s militant Christian Rights groups target LGBT people for scapegoating. LGBT people comprise the last minority group left that it is politically correct in some quarters to attack, and Christian Rights groups and politicians like Gov. Perry are making the most of it. The beginning of this summer marked the 16th anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention’s apology to black people for its abominable treatment of that race over the years, and some gay activists, such as Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out, petitioned the church group to issue a similar apology to LGBT people. That, of course, did not happen, but one day perhaps it will. Until groups like the Southern Baptist Convention, which urges followers to “go the extra mile when witnessing to gay people” recognizes LGBT people as equal, freedom will continue to be a worldwide challenge. The U.N. resolution was a milestone in that journey to equality, but the road ahead for LGBT people will continue to be a long and difficult one. The U.S., which admittedly is far behind some countries, will likely see success long before LGBT people in some parts of the world feel free. David Webb is a veteran journalist who has covered LGBT issues for the mainstream and alternative media for three decades. E-mail him at davidwaynewebb@yahoo.com.]]>