Danrambles’s Weblog

So this weekend… bar hopped with friends I hadn’t seen for a while Friday. Saturday night drove to Louisville to go out to Connections. Today had a flat tire that I had to deal with and worked for the evening. Oh. And protested prop 8 and the other 48 (?) states that don’t allow gay marriage.

I spent the days prior debating whether or not to go. As I said in my first video blog, protesting and whatnot isn’t my thing. I had a lot of friends talking about going, and many emails and texts about it, but even still I felt like it was pointless. It didn’t pass in California. And it wasn’t even on the ballot in Ohio. What the hell is the point of protesting? Nothing changes just because a bunch of people meet up and yell. I understood why people would want to protest though. I mean, people are pissed. I’m pissed. If I try to talk about the subject for more than two minutes I become irate. So at least protesting feels like you’re doing…something. You’re being somewhat active at least. Even still, the idea of waking up on a Saturday just to go do something in vain made no sense to me.

The night befoore I spent at the gay bar with two friends, one who wasn’t going and the other who wanted to but was unable due to work. I had no excuse not to go except for my “i’m too smart for a protest” attitude. We discussed the subject at length until turning to much lighter issues. Eventually, I headed home, stopping for cigarettes on the way..which of course meant paying the obligatory sales tax. I met up with my off-again, on-again boyfriend and fooled around before crashing. Boyfriend. I kept thinking about the term as I battled falling asleep. I have no intentions of getting married anytime soon… and in all honesty don’t really like the idea of marriage for anyone. However, I’m only twenty-four. God knows a person’s opinion on different things changes over time. (When I was 15 my friends and I would talk about wanting to die at 30 because it was so old…now I want to go back and hit my teenage self for saying that.) So who knows what could happen. And that isn’t even the point. I love that kid laying next to me… and fuck anyone who thinks they can tell me how far our relationship can go. As it stands, ‘boyfriend’…or the annoying, made-up-by-gays terms like ‘partner’ or ‘lover,’ is the most I can be. This makes no sense to me. Perhaps a protest that results in nothing immediate seems senseless to me, but this is even more so.

Saturday morning I woke up and told my boyfriend that we needed to get dressed…we had a protest to attend. We had no signs or umbrellas…nothing but our bodies in attendance to show our support. It was raining and freezing cold out. In all honesty, I was somewhat let down. Not at the protest itself, but at the turnout. The dock or adonis gets hundreds of people a night, but something as important as this got far fewer. I recognized only a few people… it’s hard for me to go anywhere without knowing many. Most that were there were older, the gay ‘family’ type…lesbians with their kids, gay men who remember when Badlands opened. Where the hell were the coke heads? The drunks? The dudes from the backlot of the dock or the bar owners or the mall queers that ‘don’t go to the gay bars because of the drama’ or…. ? Maybe I’m naive to think that everyone else would have had the same epiphany I had the night before. Maybe the rain kept a lot of people in. I’ll be damned if I hear someone bitch about marriage rights in the future that didn’t attend this past Saturday because it was “too cold and rainy.” I’m not trying to have a ‘holier than thou’ attitude…but what the fuck? Gay pride is INSANE every year. Every homo I know is there, along with toooons of people I’ve never seen before. I guess booze and bjs would’ve been a good incentive to get people to show up.

I’m not trying to piss all over the turnout though. The other blogs talk about how great it was and we all showed our support and Margeret Cho spoke and sang a song (which was great) and all of that. And yes, there was only a week or so of planning for this thing. My worry Saturday morning while getting ready to head over was that this would be a one day thing, but the website ( jointheimpact.com ) and at the protest promises it will continue on. I hope so. And I hope more people show up. I hope everyone gets so fucking mad that they will do whatever it takes to get things to change. We’re not equal….and it’s fucking insane. I’m not a drug addict, a rapist, a child molestor, or a murderer. I don’t intentionally hurt anyone and I pay taxes and support the economy and give to charities when possible. I’m not doing anything wrong, and I’m not asking to do anything wrong.

I had this great intention of writing this blog focusing on the day of… how I was hoping to get into a comedic spat with an anti-gay marriage person at the protest, and how my “PRO-TEST-icle!” chant never seemed to catch on. I had it mapped out in my head and it was pretty funny… but as my mood changed the night before the protest, as did it when I started writing. Sorry if I got too serious or preachy. I hate ‘preachy’ blogs or writings, but I couldn’t help it. Tomorrow or the next time I write I promise to talk about how funny sodomy is or the bad bj I got in high school….. but I can’t promise that I won’t get preachy again in the near future… until the day comes that I can say in a blog, “My friends and I have the same rights as anyone else now. I don’t need to be told by friends in other countries to move to Canada…. I can live my life just fine right here where I am. Now…let’s get onto the dirty butt sex from last night….”