Almost Famous

Over the weekend, Wilber and I were having a lazy-Saturday-afternoon bagel in the bagel shop near the house. We noticed a news reporter and her cameraman outside the window of the shop, looking in at the customers. Wilber joked, "They must be coming in to interview me."

Sure enough, the reporter and cameraman walked inside and walked straight over to our table and said, "We'd like to interview you two."

"About what?", I asked.
"About your thoughts on same-sex marriage."

"What?", I thought. "Are we wearing a sign or something? Is G-A-Y stamped across my forehead?" I was a little perturbed by the implication.

As it turns out, the lady was a reporter for a Filipino news network, and they were interviewing New Yorkers about their feelings regarding same-sex marriage and its not being legal in this state.

On camera, I made some comment about how it's a shame that it's not legal, etc, etc. Very creative, I know. Then they turned the camera to Wilber. He spoke so eloquently about how New York is such a diverse, progressive city and how it's counter-intuitive that same-sex marriage isn't legal here but is legal in other seemingly less-progressive states. Well said, babe. You're a natural in the spotlight.

I thought it was interesting, given my previous blogpost, that someone would then turn on a camera and call on me to defend my viewpoint.

So today, I'm walking down the street and this representative from the Human Rights Campaign (a GLBT-rights organization) stops me and asks me to become a partner of them and support the end of workplace-discrimination for gays. People are coming out of the woodwork this week calling on me to advocate for equal rights for the GLBT community. "YES!", I replied. Awesome!

Gay rights is one of those things that I believe strongly in. But sometimes I am still a little wary of making that belief known publicly.

Not anymore.

I'm a member of a community. The community needs help.

Here I am!

Let's go do this thing!