While a student in the 1960s at UC Berkeley, I had denied my homoeroticism. But in 1978, anti-queer sentiment drove a California initiative to prevent gay people from teaching in public schools. The time had come to admit that I was as gay as springtime.
I had not recognized it earlier, despite the signs. With short-cropped hair and a wardrobe of jeans and work shirts, I liked to hang out at Berkeley's Brick Hut lesbian collective. Way back in eighth grade, I was thrilled with disturbing rushes of warmth around girls, especially Kimmy Gibson. My mind would go blank and my cheeks would flame up whenever I tried to talk to her. Yet I knew this was a secret thing I could never speak of. To appear normal, I had straight sex well into my 20s, hoping the gay feeling would just go away.
To fight California's anti-gay proposal, lesbian singer and songwriter Holly Near asked the hidden women's community to "come out of the closet." We needed voters to recognize that they already loved a gay person and trusted us around their kids. We were teachers, friends, grocery clerks, and family members. I gathered my courage and slowly talked to my people. Their responses were liberating.
"You know, I have lots of gay friends," one colleague told me.
Another said, "Big secret. I already knew."
For years I still felt depraved, as though gayness were something to be ashamed of. With all my internalized homophobia, I am lucky I lived in the Bay Area, where the blend of progressivism, counterculture, and individual freedom made my coming out smoother than many others.' But for all gays in this country, much has changed over the past five decades — and much has not.
Gays in hiding. In 1967, visiting Chicago with my dad, he pointed out queens on Rush Street and dykes in Old Town. In those days, many homosexuals lived in secret urban communities. I did not yet know that even more of us hid in plain sight, pretending to be normal.
Politics push us. A decade later, California politics drove me to join a Berkeley crowd of wild and wonderful women working to stop anti-gay initiatives. I felt at home. Once I came out, I quickly moved from "frozen with shame" to sharing with people close to me.
Queer without fear. By the 1980s, gay groups and clubs gave us opportunities to hang out in supportive spaces. Enough people had come out publicly over the previous 15 years that society began to accept gayness as something within the limits of normality, edging on acceptable.
Then the AIDS epidemic hit us, and I forgot all about social stigma. Caring for our brothers became our lives' focus; who cared what straight people thought?
Religion condemns us. But some straight people cared a great deal about us. Catholics and Christians continued to condemn us and forbid us membership in their communities or rituals. Anti-gay legislation appeared across the states. Eventually, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1993. U.S. marriage existed for straight people, period.
The Pride movement. All was not lost. Soon we had celebrity role models on primetime TV and in major league sports. Dan Savage started talking straight about queer sex. In the 1990s, so many public faces came out, even I felt normal. Every family had a gay member, and in the early 2000s the Supreme Court decriminalized our lifestyle (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003). Pride celebrations, née Gay Days, appeared across the country, as we began to celebrate ourselves. Escaping from shame through uncertainty, acceptance, and defiance, I moved toward righteousness and pride.
Gay marriage? To my astonishment, in 2004 gay marriage was legalized in Massachusetts. State after state followed. In 2015, the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision ended bans against our unions. Gay marriage was protected in all states. (The court had legalized same-sex marriage in California two years before Obergefell.)
Backlash. The next year, 2016, the MAGA movement gained power and momentum. Hate crimes began to rise. Three friends of mine were excommunicated from their families of origin for being gay. Yet when Jill and I got married, everyone we knew, including the staff at our honeymoon hotel in Carmel, celebrated us without any apparent prejudice.
As queer life expanded to include a richer variety of gender and sexual expression, the backlash grew. In 2025, MAGA will take over both national legislative houses and the leadership of the executive and judicial branches. We gays are certainly at risk of losing rights of citizenship in some of the states.
And we rise again. When that happens, we will rise again. Those of us who are "different" — by color, race, class, physical state, sexual preference, gender identity, or whatever — no longer live in the shadows. We are the ordinary people of the world. And we are out.
Even when we are outlawed, condemned, degraded, or publicly shamed, we won't stop claiming our full untarnished humanity and the right to live by our own inner lights. All over the world people will look to the Bay Area as a bastion of liberty, lighting the way towards acceptance and pride. We will not go back.
Rikki West, a lesbian who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, is the author of two memoirs, "Rootlines" and the upcoming "The Empty Bowl." Connect with her at rikkiwest.com or [email protected]
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