If You Were To Ask Me

 I'm probably the wrong person to ask. Before my mom decided to pick my dad up and dust him off to marry him, she had a string of "nice safe men" to date. This was before gay men were invented. She was just happy to have someone who liked opera to hang out with and didn't always push her into situations in which she did not want to be. There was no judgement. Just appreciation. 

Later, once the closet began to burst open in the seventies, it turned out that one of these very good friends was not only gay, but created two of Boulder's enduring restaurant institutions: The Gondolier and Tico's. One of my very first summer jobs was working as a dishwasher at Tico's, which employed a great many "nice safe men." One time, early in my employment, a cook made a sideways comment about me as I was bringing clean plates to the kitchen. The rest of the summer was a hot, sweaty mess, not because of anything remotely connected to sex, but because the dishwashing room was always at least thirty degrees hotter than the rest of the building, and the steam mixed easily with all that melted cheese and refried beans. 

It was sometime around then that my godfather, another of my parents' high school chums, came out to them. And it was no big deal. He was the same guy I grew up with minutes before, and was the first person to encourage me to try and get a handle on my drinking. Thank you, godfather. 

So when I see that right wing idjits are making videos and posting them to try and shame Target out of selling Pride T-shirts, I close my eyes and count to ten. Maybe when I open my eyes again this group of intolerant insecure inhumans will have ceased their protestations and gone back to the quiet place where their voices are what they are: a minority. Because I can remember being labeled "queer" and "gay" as early as elementary school, and I learned the trajectory of these words, aimed directly to the head and the heart. When I became a teacher, I watched again as the torment of children without a clue about what gay might be used these barbed epithets to make their peers fuss and cry. 

And in there somewhere, a genius decided to make it about Pride. Own those words. Use them to build up community, not to tear it down. And then one of the nation's biggest retailers decided that it was a market that they could sell to, and the Rainbow Section of Target grew. Until some monsters with a passing capacity for the use of a cell phone began to confront customers in stores across the country to let them know just how closed their hearts and minds were. 

And Target, claiming that they were trying to protect their employees from verbal and physical abuse, retreated. 

And I think that's awful. 

But I'm probably the wrong person to ask.