The Stars and the Cookie Jar

California, New York and Massachusetts have approved marriage as a civil right for persons of the same gender. Twenty-five years ago - the amount of time I have been on the planet - I don't think anyone would have dreamed the world would allow it. But - I think this every time I hear such news - it's so simple, so elementary and essential a thing. Why have we only just started to win this fight?

We've been living our lives together for thousands of years. Two men who loved each other - not master and servant, not brothers - were embalmed and entombed together in Ancient Egypt. Their painted servants, their inscriptions and their grave-goods were shared. Did they spend their time together in secret? And if they had, would they have dared to walk into the afterlife together?*

Every time I consider myself as a person, I think of all that other people have dared. I don't consider homosexuality a choice - I've felt this way all my life, no matter what I've tried or told myself. But there are people who choose, and fight, and dare, and I think to myself, I wish I could be like that.

I've had so many luxuries of culture and environment. I've spent my adult life in places (and metaphorical spaces) so safe, so enlightened that acts or words of hate, when they reach me, seem always freshly astonishing and hurtful. I forget there could be people who defame and reject my existence as a sexual being, because such people are just not part of my world. I announced happily that I had met the woman I love, that we're to be married and one day we'll have children of our own, and the response was universally positive. I have been wished nothing but luck and joy, and every time I think of that, I think: nearly nobody has ever been so lucky.

My fiancee and I are gently affectionate in public. We hold hands everywhere we go. We have visited our sacred spaces together. We have never pretended to be anything but together. No one has ever tried to beat us up, no one has heckled us or called us names. We are safe, and we are lucky. I just wish I understood why, or who, to thank for it. Who made safe this path we're walking?

I feel as if it's my duty as an educated person and an artist, to commemorate whoever those people were. This is why I put ordinary people within the worlds I create who just happen to be gay men, or lesbians, or bisexual or genderless. I want to say my gratitude over and over to these people who did it before me, who were ostracized, beaten, arrested and shamed, and still went on being who they were.

Because it's all so safe from where I'm standing.

*Conversations With Mummies: New Light on the Lives of Ancient Egyptians