In many ways, my attachment to human freedom was completely compatible with my right to live freely as a homosexual.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Most simply but profoundly, I chose to live an honest life, which I think as a gay person is not a given.
I chose to treat the homosexuality like I would treat any other form of sexuality.
My reasons for declaring a sexual preference had to do less with the pursuit of personal freedom than with the lust for pure shock value.
Personally speaking, growing up as a gay man before it was as socially acceptable as it is now, I knew what it was to feel different, to feel alienated and to feel not like everyone else. But the very same thing that made me monstrous to some people also empowered me and made me who I was.
My image had always been very heterosexual, very straight. So it was a nice experience for me, a chance to clarify my own feelings about gay and lesbian civil rights.
I made my own assessment of my life, and I began to live it. That was freedom.
What's real freedom? Real freedom is being able to not have my way and still be just as happy as if I did.
As straight Americans we have two choices: we can choose to sit back and enjoy our rights as we have them, or we can realize that it is actually not freedom at all when our friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues do not share these basic rights.
My activism did not spring from my being gay, or, for that matter, from my being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me.
As a gay person, my life has been marginalized.