Marriage (and Other LGBT) Rights in New York and New Jersey
New Rochelle, New York: wild dogs, a goose, and cops. Not necessarily all in one incident. But that’s a synopsis of last night, which was probably the worst one of our trip. Don’t worry, we’re not writing this from the Westchester County Jail.
I would say more, but it’s not quite funny yet. Let’s have some [...]
A Paradigm Shift for Marriage
You know, I wasn’t always a big gay. For more than half of my life so far, I did not self-identify as queer.
In fact, the number of years I’ve had to think about marriage are about three to one the number of years I’ve had to think about queerness. I’ve encountered marriage as a child, as a teen, as a straight-by-default, as a closeted queer, as an out queer, as a married queer, as a Lutheran, as a Mormon, and as a person with enough Comparative Religion credits to need several paragraphs to express their spiritual perspective.
So I was very surprised to learn something about marriage while volunteering for the “No on 1″ campaign in Maine.
Read moreNo on 1, Part 2–Heads We Win, Tails You Lose
There are 13 days left until Election Day. If you had been in the No on 1 campaign office today, you would have known that. You might have noticed the big sign on the back wall that is changed every day to remind you of the imminence of your job. You might have called a volunteer to ask them to spend some time canvassing or at the office in the coming days.
You might have been worried. Yesterday (14 days out) there was a poll published [pdf of press release] that said that 48% of Mainers were for Question 1 (boo), 48% against, and 4% undecided. I’m sure somebody has a calculation on what it takes to get a percentage point of the population to vote your way. How much money. How many volunteer hours. What kind of weather on Election Day.
Read moreHangin’ with No on 1
I worked at a campaign for an initiative before, so nothing I saw when I arrived surprised me–except for the scale. There were computers and tables and chairs cobbled together into a makeshift set–function over fashion. There was food, sandwiches to Twizzlers. But there were probably twenty people, which is about 15 more than ever were seen at the initiative I worked for. I later found out there was a whole second room of volunteers.
On the wall were handmade and professional signs expressing Maine’s love for equality. The mood was cheerful, determined, and busy.
Read moreTravel New England, The Marriage Equality Promised Land
We should have arrived yesterday in Maine. It would have been much later than we thought, as usual. We took the route through Massachusetts to get there, so I thought we’d stop off in Northampton to sample a little lesbian culture before we headed east again.
That was before we realized we’d left Frances’s stroller at an abandoned gas station in Bennington. Detour to Holyoke to buy another Snap-n-Go, which we assembled in the entryway to Babies R Us.
Back on I-90, the dominant highway of our trip, it began to snow. Hard. It wasn’t sticking, but it was enough to slow traffic to a halt. It was dark; we were tired. We called my aunt in Auburn, Massachusetts, and stopped there for the night.
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