An extract from the column:
Death to the -isms and the ghettos and the phobias that separate us! We advance gay liberation through the mechanisms of legal protections giving us the right to be who we are wherever we want to be whenever we want to be – the most fundamental and modest of the red-white-and-blue American dreams – and through daily personal interactions with the mainstream that show we are different but we are all of one.
Which is why the North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance is wrong to restrict the number of straights who may be on teams playing in the annual Gay Softball World Series.
Dead wrong. Practically, politically, culturally, socially, morally wrong. Whether they are also legally and constitutionally wrong a federal trial in Seattle in June shall decide. A shame if the guardians of the sport allow things to go that far.
A lawsuit, filed a year ago on behalf of three San Francisco softball players after an ad hoc on-the-spot hearing determined that they were "ungay" and therefore their D2 team would have to forfeit its victories in the 2008 Seattle Gay Softball World Series, is scheduled to be tried in June in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, with Seattle District Court Judge John C. Coughenour presiding.
And another:
Some media have referred to the men as "heterosexual." Some have referred to them as "bisexual." The reality is the plaintiffs have never publicized their sexual orientations and the press who jump the gun on this trample on the dignity of people's right to define their orientations on their own terms – or to eschew labels entirely.
What the three men have done, with their gay teammates in a gay league through weeks and months and years of practice, is show publicly their solidarity and support for the queer community and the right for queers to use public playing fields: a right won in places such as California and Washington by generations of queers who lived locked-out, shut-in lives.
Read in full HERE.
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