Happy Gay Pride Weekend!

You want to know one of the things I miss most about my old life in the U.S.? I'll tell you, I miss out-there gay people. I do. And I miss this weekend in San Francisco when the gays and lesbians of my U.S. home are out in full force. For a straight guy with three kids, gay people in the U.S. have shaped my lives in powerful ways.

There is Christopher G. McKenzie, a teacher at my high school in Whittier three decades ago who showed me that being yourself in public, no matter what reaction that provokes, is a courage worth having. He would have been 60 this August, had AIDS not taken him from us. At my straight boy wedding he stood up in front of my relatives, my in-laws, and my friends and asked them to demand that I run for President of the U.S. That's how he was. In 2002 I dedicated a book to him.

There is the young woman whose name I never knew with whom I stood on a BART platform in November 1978, coming home from the memorial for Harvey Milk, a pioneering gay San Francisco politician assassinated at City Hall. He left behind a recording in which he said that if he were ever killed it should be used as an occasion for gays across the U.S. to come out to their friends and relatives. As we waited for a train back to Berkeley she told me that she had called her parents the night before to tell them they had a lesbian daughter.

There is Daniel Brewer and Martin O'Malley, a loving gay couple who died of AIDS in that order. Every time I hear the rantings of homophobic bigotry against gay marriage I think of Martin tending to his beloved partner as Daniel spent his last days in a merciful morphine drowse at home, thanks to Martin's 24-hour care. And the whole time Martin knew he was watching a gruesome preview of his own near future, minus the partner to care for him. Daniel's cousin in the U.S. wrote me recently, after having read his name in an article I wrote and thanked me. No one in her family told her he'd died of AIDS, or about Martin caring for him.

I loved raising my oldest children in San Francisco. Elly hadn't been in the U.S. from Bolivia two months when we stumbled by accident on the last lap of the transvestite parade on Halloween. She was 6, spoke only Spanish, and had not a clue that the line of 'princesses' sitting atop the convertibles were really guys, as they waved to her, "Hello little girl!" "Que linda! Que bonitas sus vestidos!" she kept telling me. I loved that in our Noe Valley neighborhood neither Miguel nor Elly had a second thought that Zoe next door had two mommies.

I miss the quilt of skinny, skimpily-clad gay guys sunbathing on the green slopes of Dolores Park, to the giggles and gasps of the Latino immigrant mothers who brought their children to the playground there. Only San Francisco can serve up such a funny cultural stew.

And I miss this first Sunday of summer when the rainbow flags and the men and women marching under them come storming out of whatever last closet remains. I miss the "Dykes on Bikes" who storm at the forefront on testosterone Harleys. I miss the Gay Campers Association, with their walking tent that suggestively bounces up and down every time it takes a rest. I miss sitting on the slopes of that same Dolores Park on the Saturday night before, emptying a bottle of champaign with friends and then rolling down the hill into the center of the Gay Universe at Castro and 18th to a community under political fire celebrating its existence in full color.

I even miss my daughter's half-crazy fifth grade teacher who I would see on occasion dressed in drag in the Castro. I think he always considered me a straight brethren because I showed up at the school Halloween party dressed as a nun (I will publish that photo here only in response to popular demand).

A few months ago the team here at The Democracy Center did a small workshop on advocacy for a group of Bolivian gay activists working on AIDS prevention issues. I was transported back in time 30 years, when homophobia ran so rampant that gays in California had to face a statewide move to prevent them from being school teachers. Bolivia is rough a terrain for gay people in 2007. Closets are as plentiful as chicha. So imagine the guts of the big guy from Chuqisaca wearing a puffy blonde wig who introduced himself to me as "the Shakira of Sucre".

When my children are my age they will look back on this time of anti-gay politics and sentiment, in both the U.S. in Bolivia, as a classic round of bigotry that had to be outgrown, akin to the votes in my youth that made it perfectly legal in California to refuse to rent homes to black people.

To our gay readers and the others who love them. Happy Gay Pride 2007!!!