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TONY MARSHALL: It was of course an immensely significant moment when the President of the
United States said that he believed in same sex marriage.
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I feel enormously proud of much of what our community has achieved.
I would not have necessarily been willing to bet that by 2012 I could be legally married,
which I am.
I am now given what we've seen recently, I mean the fact that you can now serve openly
as a lesbian or gay man in the military is quite remarkable.
And the fact that it took the time that it took from Clinton first attempting it to now
and that we had to go through Don't Ask Don't Tell, which I actually think interestingly
created a sort of legally impossible situation that had to be remedied so I don't join in
people in kind of vilifying Clinton for making that compromise move, I think it's far better
than just burying it which I think a lot of people would have done.
I think it took courage for him to do it.
But, y'know, we're now at a point where the President of the United States, both Clinton
and President Obama speak openly at lesbian and gay fundraisers all the time.
it was of course an immensely significant moment when the President of the United States
said that he believed in same sex marriage but when he went one step farther and talked
about same sex marriage specifically in the context of families of lesbians and gay men
and bi and transgendered people having kids which was y'know a big deal.
It's important to remember that all of the political gains that our community has made
y'know since the early years of LGBT revolution, before Stonewall, that during the course of
this, we went through, and this is unprecedented in the history of groups of oppressed people
struggling for liberation, we went through a biological catastrophe that was used by
our enemies, or they tried to use it, y'know not only to shame us back into silence, but
in a certain sense one could say malevolently to y'know kill us.
I mean the refusal of the Reagan administration not just to not talk about it, it was actually
to guarantee that the people who died of AIDS during those years and who caught it and people
who were at risk for catching for people infected, these people were more at risk and died more
terrible deaths and they had fewer support services, far far fewer than they should have
had.
It would have been easy I think in a certain sense for our community to accept that y'know
we were y'know—that AIDS was some kind of judgment rendered against us, but instead
of accepting that, the LGBT community used the catastrophe to illustrate the consequences
of homophobia and actually made progress during it rather than a setback.
So I think that's astonishing and I feel like y'know, we fought very hard and we continue
to fight very hard and I think we're a really impressive bunch of people.
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I'm hopeful that there will be soon in some form either in a supreme court decision or
through legislation, a recognition that we are covered by the 14th amendment—that we're
entitled to equal protection under the law which means equal protection under the law,
not some equal protection under certain laws.
A long time ago like in 1993, I wrote that I thought there was a time coming soon when
we would be able to serve openly in the military and get married, but we still wouldn't have
achieved the real radical implications of our movement and I think that that's also
true.
I think there's been a great deal of serious questioning of what gender is, of what sexuality
is that's implicit that's been always inherent and that was a big part of the actual sort
of articulated objectives of the early moments of LGBT liberation that has sort have gotten
buried.
The T part of it is really interested.
The transgender questions bring us back sometimes to some of the notions of a plasticity of
gender and sexuality that early LGBT thinks and activists talked about borrowing from
feminists.
We've gone through a kind of bougie phase where the revolution has turned into the accomplishment
of very important and achievable civil rights, but there's still an unrealized radical vision
and—which I believe is achievable through democracy.
I think that there are radical—that revolutionary changes can happen through non-revolutionary
democratic means and I'm excited to see us move in that direction and I think that I
see among young people a lot of kind of openness towards y'know these 19th century, late 19th
century categories—gay and straight—and at the same time also the astonishing work
of LGBT historians in terms of remembering where we've been which is immensely important
that we don't forget how we got here.
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I'm Tony Kushner.
I'm really thrilled and happy to be THNKR and your'e watching and hopefully having an
Epiphany!