out established 1986 Vol. XIX. No. 5 June 2004 editorial Pride and Joy and Shame at a year it has been since last year’s Pride! The US. Supreme Court ruled state sodomy laws unconstitutional, at last free- ing gay men (and only by inference, les- bians) from the stigma of criminality based solely on private sexual acts in our own homes. The implications were huge: all those laws and policies that told us we were not worthy of certain jobs or of adopting children or raising the ones we already had — because, after all, we were known criminals if we were at all open about our sexuality — were now shown to be discriminatory, sheer bigotry. _ And, dam, if Antonin Scalia’s bit- ter dissent from that decision wasn’t right on the mark. The Court majority ruling, he wrote, would open the door to gay mar- riage. Soon thereafter, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court told state officials that they could no longer deny same-sex couples equal access to marriage. The Court leaped beyond Vermont’s Supreme Court when it affirmed in February that civil unions were “separate but equal” and that “sepa- rate is seldom if ever equal.” The Court denied the Commonwealth’s legislature the option of wiggling out of equal mar- riage by that route. That same month, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome jumpstarted the whole process by directing county clerks to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and pioneering lesbian activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, with a half- century of love and care between them, were the first. A handful of other towns and ' counties joined in before they were all, sooner or later, stopped by court injunc- tionsi filed for by right wing organizations. But despite the right’s best efforts, nothing could stop equal marriages from taking place on May 17 in city halls, churches, and other gathering places throughout Massachusetts. There, captured in front-page photos in mainstream daily newspapers and on millions of television screens, were scenes of Pride. And Joy. And Love. How different these images are from the ones released just the week before. The U.S. military, notorious for its homophobia, had documented for itself members of its own units abusing detainees in Iraq (with later revelations about similar situations in Afghanistan and earlier ones, mostly ignored, about the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo). While, yes, everyone from the White House on down has declared how “appalled” they are, it has been left to the gay and lesbian press to notice the high percentage of the abuse that is about forc- ing male prisoners to enact or simulate sex with other male prisoners, or to endure being raped by male guards. New York’s Gay City News carried some of the provocative photos under banner head- lines: “Pentagon’s Anti-Gay Culture at ‘ Heart of Iraqi Prisoner Abuse Scandal” and “Impeach Rumsfeld.” Commentators, including gay Muslims Mubarak Dahir and Faisal Alam, and spokespeople from gay and human rights organizations, have decried the abuse in general, and the homophobia expressed thereby in particular. The author of Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality, Patrick Moore, told GCN he “felt the government had found a way to use sexuality as a tool of humiliation both for Arab men and for gay men here,” and that the pictures evoked “ a deep sense of shame as a gay man.” We don’t have to accept this shame that others are so eager to heap upon our shoulders, insinuate into our hearts, and etch onto our minds. We must not be confused — the acts depicted and reported are not about our sexuality, but about the perpetrators’ limited imagination of their own worst fears. The difference between the Abu Ghraib abuses and our sexuality is the difference between rape and love. We reject any shame associated with these images. We do not reject our obligation to care about and for these damaged human beings. We accept our responsibility to take action to stop these abuses. And we recognize that all the shame belongs to the perpetrators of such outrages. This shame belongs to the system that encourages them, to the hypocrisy of the military and religious doctrines that dehumanize ordi- nary people: the victims being mistreated, those of us whose sexuality is being per- verted for use as a weapon against those victims, and even the low-level soldiers following their orders and indoctrination. Let’s face it: any soldier who would com- mit such acts has been dehumanized about as much as the “detainee” he or she has abused. The thing about shame is that it can easily turn into a rage that can burn at a low simmer for years until the right opportunity comes along. The Stonewall Rebellion could be characterized that way: __the simmering rage from the years of shame, harassment, and arrest experienced by the drag queens and butch dykes at the bars finally exploded on a hot night in June. We date our Pride from that shame- shedding explosion. We have overcome the shame with which society has tried to smear our lives. We have our Pride and our joy and our love, which now speaks its name loud and clear. We won’t go back.V Euan Bear, Editor Production Notes: Tongue in Cheek by Kevin Isom and Queeries and Quandries by Lavender Lizzie were held due to an overwhleming amount of local and timely articles and viewpoints. Look for them in the July Pride issue!