Dear Toby, letters to my gay nephew

  6/19/2022 One of my Zen teachers, Bob Aitken said to me, “We don’t realize that we’re making history when we’re living it.” I don’t know if he was quoting someone, and he was talking about the upheaval in Buddhist practice once it hit the shores of Hawaii and California, but I think of it as I reflect on my history in the early gay liberation movement. Recently Shivam, a friend of Kumar’s, was visiting, and when I began to tell the story of Harvey Milk, I went searching for Gus van Zant’s Milk on Youtube. I couldn’t find it, but some raw footage from “The Mayor of Castro Street” came up. It was the march from Castro Street to City Hall at about noon on January 9, 1978 to witness Harvey’s swearing in. And there, not more than 6’ behind the smiling Harvey with his arm thrown over Jack Lira, I recognized my 34 year-old self. I had a rather stern determined look on my face, not as exuberant as the majority of the marchers, but I was there. I had forgotten about that event. As a matt...

May 21-22, 1979 I missed Stonewall, but on White Night, I got slugged by a fat Irish cop in front of the Elephant Walk.  A decade earlier, my response to Stonewall was to organize a stuffy seminar on the Church and Gay Rights at Woodstock College. My response to White Night was to become a radical.  The San Francisco community’s response to White Night was far more ferocious than Stonewall. Our sense of outrage ran deep. In just a decade, we really had thrown off centuries of old stereotypes. Momentous change had happened in the community. For us, being gay was simply a fact of life. Stubborn segments of the general society were lagging behind, and they were about to feel the fury of the men and women they intended to keep in their place. We had won a place at the table, fair and square. It had been taken away violently, and the consequences of assassinating our leader was going to be a blink and a nod. Never again and certainly not in San Francisco. The verdict was announced ...