[freya]

So, today I was out at lunch (Camille's Sidewalk Cafe) and the weather is pretty beautiful here, so I sat out in the sun -- a little cool, but, hey, this is Rochester, NY, so we take what we can get and are grateful for it!

Anyways, there was a young lesbian couple there, probably late teens, and they were very, very much into PDAs (public displays of affection, not tech gadgets) -- like just as much as any silly straight couple that age that wants all the world to know that they're "in love." And this was not like downtown, in any kind of "gay" neighborhood, but out in one of our southeastern suburbs. And, as far as I could tell, no one -- and there were lots of people around at the time -- was at all phased by their behavior, or even seemed to care in any way.

So, it seemed to me that this is a very, very positive thing: This young couple was acting just exactly like any straight couple that age would act: silly and overly demonstratinve of their in-loveness; and all of the other people around were acting just like sane adults would act around a similar straight couple: ignoring them and their over-demonstrativeness. I found the entire situation to be quite delightful in its everydayness.

And on the way back to my office, it occurred to me that we hear way, way too much about all of the big, scary dangers of being GLBT and of being out, and the mainstream media cannot give it enough sensationalist airtime when some terrible crime is perpetrated against someone because of his/her sex, gender and/or sexual orientation....but on the flip side, we don't give half as much attention to how much things have changed since June 1969 and to how very, very, very much more often than not, being who we truly are as GLBT people is just accepted without word or incident and very much NOT a big deal to anyone. (I'm talking here about most places in the US -- I know this is not the case everywhere in the world.)

And actually, just to put some of this in perpective, I was talking over the weekend to a friend of mine who works at our local GLBT community center and who teaches a workshop on "Coming Out," and she gave me this little statisitc she uses in her workshop (again from the US):

Chances of suffering bodily injury:
Due to an auto accident: 1 in 100
Due to a Sexual Orientation hate crime: 1 in 66,500

Chances of dying:
Due to injuries suffered in an auto accident: 1 in 8,000
Due to injuries suffered in a SO hate crime: 1 in 1,335,000

We don't get coast to coast sensationalist coverage of every terrible auto accident death, do we? Of course not, because, in the first place, it is probably deemed too commonplace to be newsworthy, except for on a very limited local basis, and in the second place, if every single auto accident fatality got the attention of a particularly violent hate crime, a lot of people would be too petrifed to get into an automobile and that would be problematic for society as a whole.

So anyways, I am thinking it might be a good idea to celebrate examples of the ways in which and the extent to which the presence and lives of GLBT people has become commonplace, so this is a thread in which we can share about things that we notice or that happen to us or that we participate in that show how far we have come and how much we have for which to be grateful (to HP, of course!).

freya

....and, if anyone feels a strong compulsion to focus on and talk about the negative and the scary and how far we yet have to go, that's fine, but please start another thread for that purpose, OK?