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There is something on my chest that I need to get it out.....and...I know that in expressing my opinion of this issue I may be completely wrong. that said, here we go...
This last weekend our family had the privilege of attending a showing of our movie "The Right To Love: An An American Family" at the LGBT Community Center in San Francisco. All in all I like going to these events because I always get to meet great people and because a movie may reach an audience that may not use YouTube. This particular showing was no exception as it was well attended and everyone we met were great people. In the Q and A portion of the event we all had a great discussion about how the movie can open conversations with our straight friends and family...and how important those conversations are to have. It was at that point that someone stood and and expressed how they felt that our family was a good bridge between the gay community and a conservative straight community because they felt we were "just so normal".
I can't explain it but this just did not sit well with me. I felt like normalcy was actually being used to exclude others who didn't live up to some imagined standard. Now...I know that one of our stated goals with our YouTube channel is to show the world just how "normal and boring" our families(note the plural) are. And furthermore, that is the message that the gay community has to the world...that we are just the same as any one else. But the feeling I had, as I sat in the middle of a city that has so many types of gay people...each as worthy of the civil liberties we are all collectively fighting for is...who is defining that normal? Who are we leaving out in the cold when we establish that some of us are normal and some of us are not. Isn't that exactly the same kind of thinking that we are fighting against in endeavoring to achieve equal protections and opportunities as LGBT people in a world that has historically branded all gay people as "not normal"?
Bear with me and lets talk this out....
