I am up in Provincetown on Cape Cod, where I spend at least a week every summer.  It’s my favorite town in the United States.  Saturday night we went to see Varla Jean Merman, one of my favorite drag performers.  Varla asked a male couple (John and Bill, I believe it was) in the audience how long they had been together: when they replied “21 years,” the audience applauded thunderously in response.

This is a pretty typical reaction in largely gay audiences whenever a couple announces they have been together for a long time, but Saturday night caused me to think about why such a reaction always occurs.  I don’t think many straight couples, in a largely straight audience, would have get a similar response for announcing they’d been together 21 years.  But for gay people such a statement is a retort to all the years we were told we were sick, we were deviant, we were bad: it’s a victory over those voices, over the right wing politicians that denigrate and demean our relationships as less than “real marriages,” over the religious right wackos who claim being gay is just about sex and not about love.  The audience is applauding not only for the couple and their personal victory but also for the victory that their relationship represents for all gay people.  Despite all the obstacles put in our path, we do find a way to make lives together and create families and sustain relationships even in the midst of a hostile world that tries to undermine us at every turn.  Good for you, John and Bill, we’re saying: and screw you, all the people who try to keep us down, we’re also saying.

And I am happy to say I was one of the ones applauding the hardest, for both reasons.

Posted by Kevin on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 9:49 am.