8

Last night I saw the play 8. If you don't know, 8 was "written" by Dustin Lance Black (writer of Milk) using mostly court transcripts of the appeal of Prop 8 in California. You know, the play wasn't going to move a mountain in my heart. Boulder and I talked on the way over saying, "I hope it's actually a good play. I hope there's tension, and it's not just a blatant GAY RIGHTS, GAY RIGHTS, GAY RIGHTS FOR ALL." Because if I wanted to hear that, I would just get out a Talkboy and listen to my own diatribes. I go to the theatre to be moved--even if that just means having empathy for the other side.

Well, it was pretty one-sided...but, then again, IT WAS A TRANSCRIPT OF THE COURT PROCEEDINGS. So, actually, that was pretty crazy eye-opening. Did you know the defense could not keep witnesses to save its life? There ended up being, like, one dinky witness who had any potential say in the matter. And he was proven as an insufficient witness by the end of the trial. No one with any credibility could testify against gay marriage. Lead defender Cooper's final stance in front of the judge and the State of California was that there are no reasons or facts that say gay marriage will harm our society, but the fact that we don't know what will happen is reason enough to keep prohibiting it.

And that's how Prop 8 failed.

So, while the play wasn't, like, amazeballs, it was a reminder for me--this is an issue that has no business still being an issue. We have to keep pushing.

Afterward, a couple guys in the play I knew and some other colleagues went out for froyo. A bunch of them are in a Theatre for Social Change class right now, and they just finished a lesson on ethnography and presented monologues. "You didn't present yours," someone said to one of the guys. For some reason, we all pressured him to deliver it right there, and for some reason he did, very casually.

To write it here sounds melodramatic, but this man was once a boy who liked the arts, and his father was embarrassed, and this boy who liked the arts ended up loving other men, and he was kicked out of the house, and this man grew up to be sitting in a froyo shop tearing up, others tearing up around him, talking about this. Because PREJUDICE HURTS. And that is SAD. And, sometimes it's tempting to think, "Okay, the gay issue has gone on enough. There has been progress. It's not that bad anymore." Wrong, muchachos. Keep fighting.