(Vanessa Williams and) All of Broadway Says Goodbye to Rosie — Page 2

Well, it's impressive that she made it to 2003 without knowing a 'mo who didn't want to formally recognize his relationship. I thought she put her foot in her mouth and I got over it; it was asked why PalJoey mentioned here, so I was just schoolin' those who weren't there.

And to me it's not so much about gay marriage (as I've never been remotely close to someone who I would have gay married, nor do I picture it in the foreseeable future) as it is about states ratifying their constitutions to prevent people from having rights that most of us never had in the first place and America's continued acquiescence to the demands of religious extremists.

Updated On: 11/19/08 at 03:31 PM

http://www.insidesocal.com/outinhollywood/2008/03/bette-midler-the-divine-one-ta.html

SEXIST? In what way is saying she didn't know any men who wanted to get married to each other sexist?

"Well, it's impressive that she made it to 2003 without knowing a 'mo who didn't want to formally recognize his relationship."

The thing is, we recognized our own relationships and recognized the relationships of our friends and we recognized the marriages of our heterosexual counterparts capsizing with great regularity.

There's a reason it was called gay liberation, and that is when Bette came up.

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I know that, Phyl, but Bette also has a point about lesbians coupling. As I said in another thread, 80% of the gay marriages in Massachusetts in the first year were among women. Pointing this fact out can not be interpreted as sexist. It's the truth.

The other thing you have to know is, many of us were not invited to the meeting when the Human Rights Campaign decided gays in the military was suddenly THE issue, nor did we realize that cases that worked their way through the courts of Massachusetts, (the way we all used to be taught in civics classes as the way things change in this country) would suddenly become the de facto issue of the gay movement. Well, actually, it didn't until San Francisco had its civil disobedience action.

Which, incidentally, brings this thread back on topic, which is to Rosie O'Donnell. I believe her take that she got married as an act of civil disobedience and that she and her partner recognize that marriage is very old school activist. "We'll do it ourselves and we don't need the larger culture to tell us what we have." I get it. But it pisses off the strict assimilationists.

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We're in a world of 30-second attention spans and I'm pretty sure one issue is all we get anymore.

The other thing is, forget the notion of unity. It'll never happen because there is no such thing as a monolithic gay community. In the 1980s, Armistead Maupin wrote a single sentence that was incredibly liberating for me to read:

No, all gay men are not my brothers.

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