Iceblink Wrote:In the last Gallup poll taken in May in the U.S. on support for gay marriage, the 65+ age range for support was 42%. The 18 - 29 age range was 78%. We are moving in the right direction. In all age ranges 50 and under there was majority support. One thing to remember about those over 65, they are more dedicate to making it to the polls in elections than the rest of us. It sounds horrible to say, but we are going to find a lot more support for equality when the elderly die off.
What's horrible about saying that?
That's just the way it is and it's the least violent and most lasting way to make long-lasting social changes. It's just a quiet waiting game, a war of attrition, waiting for the opposition to kick off due to natural causes. They deserve no sympathy just for living their lives until their clocks run out after more than sixty years. Not that it matters but just try to imagine how many of them were the people who were celebrating when AIDS came along. It makes me want to go to funerals with confetti and a bottle of champagne to christen the coffins and yell BON VOYAGE.
Robert, the old gay guy I talk about sometimes is 72. He's told me things about what he went through at my age that sound like bad movies. I saw him last weekend and he started talking about living in Tallahassee Florida in 1973 right after AMA decided being gay wasn't a mental disease. It came on the news during a weeknight --- and the gay bars filled up with bigger crowds than on weekends with people there to celebrate. The celebration didn't long. Just a few weeks later the state mental hospital at Chattahoochie started releasing patients who'd been there 20-30-40 years for being gay. They gave the patients bus fare to whatever cities in Florida they wanted, put their clothes in duffle bags and shipped them off to make their way in a world they'd not seen in decades. Some were mentally disabled from lobotomies. Some were blind, deaf or in wheel chairs. Gay people pitched in to find them places to stay and help them adjust to life on the outside.... while all the straight people, politicians and media ignored the entire thing so they could spit and cuss about gays being let out of the hospitals.
Robert isn't getting senile at all but he asks me the same questions all the time. "when's the wedding?" "have you got wedding jitters?" "how are the wedding plans going?" it took me awhile to understand why he does that. Six years ago he buried a man he he spent 23 years with, a man he'd have married if he'd had a chance. All this time I've been thinking all of us need to do all we can to see gay marriage become legal would be for al the gays who aren't even born yet. Now I'm seeing that gay marriage means more to Robert than it even does to me. He spent his whole life battling straight people over gay issues. If it wasn't for people like him none of this would have ever happened... We can sit here today and see gay marriage being legal just three or four or five years away without us doing anything else except waiting for old people to die.
I just hope all the right old people die first. Some old people like Robert need to live long enough to see what they all worked for when it comes true.
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