What This Means to Me - Bio

There are a lot of things that the election of Barack Obama means to me. There are a lot of very specific reasons why I feel so much more full of hope today than I did when I woke up yesterday. And in order to do that, I need to explain some context for me.

The first election I was able to vote in, I voted for Bill Clinton. I was excited, saw hope for the ability to take part in a political process, and saw the world as a much more clearly-defined fight of good versus evil. During that term, Bill Clinton turned around to offer us the Defense of Marriage Act, Don't Ask Don't Tell, only increased HIV/AIDS funding by a fraction of what we had hoped he would, and got us involved in several overseas military operations. We enacted sanctions against Iraq that served only to bolster Saddam Hussein's power base within that nation while crippling the livelihoods of most of the citizenship of the country. And finally, when Clinton himself failed to be there to support the queer community in our struggles, he found himself in a public scandal where he abused his power and position by engaging in a sexual relationship with an intern, and turned back to the same community he neglected, saying "you know what it's like to be marginalized because of your sexuality, why don't you come help bail me out of this now?" And most of the members of the leadership of our community seemed to take that line.

That was the guy I voted for. That was the result of my first vote as a full-fledged citizen of the United States of America. That was the action that I was supposed to be proud of.

In the meantime, I came out of the closet myself in the same year. After somebody scrawled an anti-gay epithet on my dorm-room door sophomore year, I reacted with probably more fear than should have been resultant of what was likely more a random act than something that was specifically targeted toward me. But I then channeled that fear, became angry, and realized that I didn't want anybody else to have to live with the fear that I had experienced. I sought out the university's multicultural division, attempted to resurrect an existent-but-dead gay-straight alliance, and though I was told that the organization wouldn't be able to have an official connection to the multicultural division, they expressed support for what I was doing.

In those days, I had effectively kicked down the closet doors. I determined that making the organization into a support group, while nice for the couple of students that showed up for meetings, would not allow for any sort of real or long-term change, I had determined that I wanted the organization to be more activist and social-change-based in nature. With a long history of Catholic upbringing, and a connection to various Catholic social justice teaching at my back, I was able to ward off and fight against all of the religious-zeal opponents to SAYSO's mission, and was able to sway public culture within the university.

At the same time, I took my anger at not being included in the multicultural division's umbrella and turned it around. I recognized that I had no right whatsoever to be angry at others not reaching out to help mend our issues as queer students, if I myself was unwilling to understand and take on the issues of the POC on campus. And thus I began reaching out to the AHANA communities on campus, attended as many cultural celebration events as I could, engaged in struggles, joined the multicultural task force, helped organize the diversity conference held at the school, and even became, my senior year, one of the co-directors of cultural celebrations on the student council.

Those same years also marked the height of activism surrounding the janitorial staff on the university. Before I'd entered it, the university had decided to fire the entire staff and re-hire them the very next day through an outsourcing company. This cut their wages substantially, meant that they were no longer eligible for benefits (including tuition remission for themselves and their children, which was a tremendous blow to opportunity), and that they were greatly more vulnerable in their positions. Over the course of years, students, faculty and staff had been mounting protest to the decision and asking for some sort of benefits for the mistreated workers to be enacted, that the university was responsible for their welfare. This all came to a head while I was at school, and I took part in rallies, teach-ins, a sit-in, and a hunger strike. I was one of two students chosen to sit on a committee with two faculty and two administrators to come up with university policy dealing with any outsourced workers. Including the right to organize.

The janitorial staff finally gained recognition of their union, were awarded their first union contract while I was there, and while struggle was everywhere, everything was possible. Few students wanted to take part in the goings-on with the gay-straight alliance, so I did most of the work on that front. I was one of about 15 key players in the unionization fight, and I was one of the most prominent white students in the multicultural relations division. When I was getting ready to graduate, and I approached a counselor because of all that I saw still needing to be changed, and felt as if I hadn't done enough, one of the most shining memories in my life was her response that "my name has become synonymous with change on this campus."

Even still, when I look back and see the changes that have occurred on the campus of that university, which has now enacted a full-fledged safe space program, is being recognized as the most queer-friendly catholic institution in the US, and has slowly grown to become a campus where diversity is a prominent issue, I can't help but look back with a sense of pride. Because in those days, the struggle was uphill, and I always felt alone, but I also felt that I could do anything. Even as a single person, I was able to move mountains.

I graduated in 2000, and instead of doing the expected thing and going to grad school, I went to live in the New Haven Catholic Worker. At the time it was entitled the "Cesar Jerez Catholic Worker" but has since changed its name to the "Amistad Catholic Worker". I took part in an action protesting Sikorsky Aircraft and the fact that it lobbied Congress to waive its own human rights standards for giving foreign military aid to Columbia, then turned around and was awarded a $13 billion dollar contract to construct Blackhawk Helicopters to the Columbian military. Helicopters which had already been known for use in terrorizing dissidents in the nation, including assassinating union organizers, supporting paramilitary groups, and other acts of state-sponsored terror. I was arrested for trespassing in an act of civil disobedience.

During this time, I saw the campaign of Al Gore and realized that his policies would have meant more of the same betrayals that Bill Clinton had heaped upon my first political act. Knowing that the Green Party had no chance of winning anything, I determined that I'd feel better voting for somebody who I believed in, rather than voting for somebody that I thought would merely be marginally better than the other guy who had a shot.

When Julie approached me about parenting, my first thought was an emphatic "hell no." But after a lot of thought, I realized that I had always wanted to be a parent as a child, growing up, until the point where I came out and simply *assumed* that I could never parent as a gay male. I also had very doubtful concepts about the prospects of relationships in general being unstable, and so I figured that if ever there was a way that I would bring a child into the world, that was the type of situation I'd do it in... a friendship, based upon concepts of community and mutual responsibility. I moved to Maryland in December of 2000, only six months after having moved into the Catholic Worker, and began a new life.

I spent many of the next years volunteering with Amnesty International, The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League, and was a member of a community advisory board for HIV vaccine trials. I got a job that I loved working as a conference organizer at the National Minority AIDS Council, and stayed there for three years.

But in 2000, Bush went into office, even based upon a stolen election. In 2001, at the first conference that I was organizing for the National Minority AIDS Council, the United States Conference on AIDS that was scheduled to begin on September 13th had to be canceled because of the terrorist attack that had occurred exactly 2 days earlier. I witnessed activists in those couple of days scramble to do whatever they could to get to the hotel, make it to the conference anyway, and put together whatever bare-bones program they could, because the mission was more important than the fear.

Bush cut HIV/AIDS spending substantially, many program funds were diverted into faith-based and abstinence-only programs, and after 3 years with NMAC, I was laid off due to a lack of unrestricted funds in the organization. I had identified so strongly as an activist that I took the first non-profit job I could find, as an office manager for an environmental funding organization for the Galapagos Islands. The mere three months that I spent there, I realized that I had a problem with an overinflated ego for the accomplishments I'd made, as I disdained doing filing and answering telephones as my primary job functions, couldn't bear the constant racism of the director and two of the other people in the office who could never stop talking about why Asians shouldn't be allowed to drive, and that the people of Ecuador couldn't figure out a way to run an organization properly if their lives depended on it, and how stupid they all were. That I was having to commute 2 hours each way to get there didn't help matters much. Three months later, it was mutually decided that the relationship wasn't working, and we parted ways. I took a job temporarily at Home Depot while applying to other activist jobs.

When I landed at the Family Pride Coalition as a Development Associate, I thought I'd finally landed home. I was greatly demoralized already by what had happened, but had seen a great deal of possibility. Unfortunately, I also learned that I was not the superman I'd envisioned myself as in college. Development work comes hard for me, and outside of grant writing, I haven't tended to be particularly successful at it. The people I invited to our major annual fundraising event never materialized, keeping track of the membership database gave me bad flashbacks of my previous job doing filing, and prospecting for corporate sponsorships was immensely straining. I managed to get through it, and was building their grant program from scratch, but after another short three-month stint, the Executive Director called me in and told me that, while she liked the grant work I was doing, she couldn't justify continuing to pay me a salary. I was out of a job again, and more demoralized than I had ever been before.

By this point, Bush took office again, and this time it was clear that he didn't steal it, but the American people offered it to him freely. I went crawling back to Home Depot, and promised to stay for a year so that I could add some degree of stability to my resume again.

If ever there was a time where I crashed and hit a low, that was it. The thing that kept me going at that point was the fact that Sara was pregnant with Dayton, and I continued to do volunteer and consulting work with the Task Force, Equality Maryland, Amnesty International, and the DC Rape Crisis Center.

But as my one-year commitment turned to two and then three, and I realized that I was straining my time while still not getting any jobs, and never feeling as if I'd come out of the state of burn-out that I'd gotten myself into, I had to cut myself off from all volunteering and other political activity completely.

What conclusions I'd come to were the fact that I'd literally given my life for the sake of change, and yet time and again, it felt as if organizations and the people within them were doing it for the sake of their own careers, and were willing to do anything to anybody in order to get what they wanted. I took very small consolation whenever I found out that the ED who'd been running Family Pride at the time of my departure had almost driven the organization into the ground, and that the ED who inherited the organization from her was having trouble paying the bills in the years to follow. I still had taken the firing as a blow to my own abilities, and to my own self.

This is where I lost all hope in humanity and the world. People had CHOSEN George W Bush to lead them, TWICE. I'd lost my job in the HIV/AIDS field because funding was becoming scarce there, and I realized exactly how unstable it was of a field. I realized that I couldn't bring myself to work in an organization that didn't share my values, but also realized how few organizations DO share my values. And again, Family Pride had been the Mack Truck to my limping pride, for it told me that I not only was not the superman who was able to accomplish anything with determination alone that I'd believed myself to be four years earlier, but that stability wasn't anywhere. Not only that, but what sacrifices I'd made for the community and the world in years past didn't matter now, and never would again. What mattered was what I was doing now. And what I was doing now, and still am, is working at Home Depot, a company that has anti-union policies, that despite reputation does NOT treat its workers well, and which is a company focused not on values but on profit.

Given all of that, I shouldn't wonder about the fact that I started feeling abandonment issues and an overwhelming need for validation from loved ones. In the days since, I've fallen into a pattern of neediness, obsession, and self-victimization in some sort of search for love that is supposed to give me the sense of meaning that I used to find in the world.

But today is a different day. Today, voters across the country have re-affirmed to me that we CAN make a difference again. That maybe the need for a connection with one another is more important than the desire to set ourselves apart. This morning, I've read exhortations from other nations that have been borderline adversarial with the United States, brimming with excitement for a new day, where we can work together WITH our fellow nations, rather than as a bullying dictator of nations. Today, I live in a world where economic recession will only continue so far before it backtracks and returns. Today, I live in a nation that is going to recognize the NEED for social programs, the overwhelming need for HIV/AIDS funding, the crisis that exists within Washington, DC itself with such high incidences of HIV infections.

Is this world or nation perfect now, and getting better? Not yet. The votes have still come in that have given California, Arkansas, and a number of other states constitutional amendments writing discrimination into law in those states. However, I also can't help but remember when the Romer decision came out, banning all sodomy laws, and thinking "Thank god, now we can really strategize our movement, get the government out of the business of determining what types of relationships really matter, and create a REAL social change in how our nation defines human interactions and relationships with one another." Before hours later, when Robin Tyler and other activists hijacked our movement, made public declarations that marriage was the next battlefront, and forced the entire movement into a stage-play that was inevitably headed towards this tragedy.

There is still a silver lining to that, though. We have our proof that Marriage was the WRONG FIGHT. We know now that the REAL challenge is social change. The REAL challenge is to get the government OUT of the business of marriage entirely, not to simply open up the window of marriage a little bit to include a few more people. The REAL challenge is to make *everybody* matter, not just a couple more than yesterday.

And today, with our first-ever Black President-Elect, we have the ability to DO that social change-building. We have the opportunity to change people's hearts and minds. We have the chance to enact universal health coverage, recognize the needs of ALL people within our nation and world, and work towards a better place for all of us. Not just the few and the powerful. Not just the Bushes, or the Clintons, or the Robin Tylers, or the HRC's, who can make back-room deals that cut out entire sections of our community in the name of marginal, incremental, or "pragmatic" improvements that set more obstacles towards future progress. Instead, we have opened up the path towards REAL progress. Towards a politics that does what is right, not just what is the next step that some privileged pundit has laid out for us.

Possibility has opened back up. We have a voice again. And we can express it. And with that renewed voice, I have felt empowered now in a way that I haven't since college, or that first doomed USCA. We can do it. With shoestrings and breadcrumbs, if need be. But we can do it. *I* can do it again. *I* have a voice, and I can speak out with it, to make certain that our movement is not hijacked again. To make certain that our country is not hijacked again. To make sure that our WORLD is not hijacked again. Because today, it is ours. I have a piece of that world again, and this time, I know that I cannot let it go. Because I've seen where that leads, and I never again want to go back into that dark, cold night.