So did my friends, who set out for the Bay Area, San Diego, and Los Angeles. My own destination, two months after graduating high school in 2012, was a town just outside San Francisco. While I only stayed only seven months, it was refreshing to see so many different types of people and no one batting an eye at them. Everyone seemed free to express their gender how they pleased.

But times and places can change–and fast. After moving back to Merced, I began to see more openness and diversity. And so one day in late August, I found myself driving to the opening of the town’s first-ever Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center, right in the middle of downtown on G Street.

I had followed the progress of the Center from friends who were heavily involved in its making, from obtaining grants to preparing the space. But I was anxious as the opening date approached Merced. I was not sure how many people would show up. I worried that no one would be there at all.

It was a miserably hot day, but I swear the short drive to the center felt like one of those breezy San Francisco evenings when you’re anxiously waiting around to see your favorite band play. When my sister (with whom I live) and I finally turned onto G Street from our apartment here in Merced, in our truck, we were surprised to find that all the parking spots were filled. It was the first sign that something exceptional was taking place. Outside the Center, a crowd struggled to get into the building which is located in a business area surrounded by tax offices and immigration lawyers. More than a hundred people of all ages–parents, children, young adults–had showed up.

My sister and I walked through the Center, which has spaces for meetings, a library of books and videos, and an office area that visitors can use to do computer work like job applications or homework. There is also an abundance of educational material about sexual education, sexual identity, domestic abuse, and related topics. The whole place is brightly colored and welcoming.

While eating chocolate-covered pretzels with rainbow sprinkles, I caught up with old pals and made sure to congratulate the friends whose pioneering work created the center. As we headed out the door to leave, we ended up staying an extra 20 minutes, greeting people who kept arriving.

Then, as we were starting to drive away, the board members hoisted the rainbow flag outside on top of the building. My sister agreed to stop in the middle of the road–despite getting a green light–so I could take pictures. I shouted “amazing” and started to tear up. I have seen the gay pride flag countless times in different cities. In fact, my mom had one on display inside our house when I was younger. But to see it raised publicly in my small town meant something different. It is a flag no one will be able to miss, on one of downtown’s busiest streets. It reassures people who have been in Merced their whole lives that this is a safe place for them, and it says the same thing to anyone who’s just passing through.

Can a rainbow flag change Merced? Yes.

The flag, and the new Center, made me realize that Merced has more to offer people like me than I ever believed. It has a sense of community I hadn’t appreciated. And it offers a place where one can feel safe.

UC Merced is bringing in thousands of new people every year, and we want them all to feel that this is a united community where they are safe to grow and change. For now, I still intend to make a life somewhere else. But I look forward to visiting the place I’m from, and watching it change.

The post Can a Rainbow Flag Change My Small Town? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s a very old bit of wisdom in a state founded by people who abandoned their homes and families to move here and fail to get rich in the Gold Rush. But this lesson has been given fresh context by a new book (Jo Becker’s Forcing the Spring) and a new documentary film (The Case Against 8, which opened in theaters last week) that provide behind-the-scenes accounts of the successful effort to invalidate Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage.

The passage of Prop 8 in 2008 was a huge defeat for advocates of marriage equality, and, in its aftermath, it seemed prudent to pull back and wait for years before seeking to overturn the decision. But a small group of political consultants, Hollywood players like Rob Reiner, and lawyers (among them Ted Olson and David Boies) grasped that Prop 8, while a loss, was a strange sort of gift to their cause. Instead of cowering in the face of a voter verdict against marriage equality, they chose to show how a popular vote against the rights of gay couples was itself evidence that such couples faced discrimination and needed the protection of the courts. As one member of the legal team challenging Prop 8 tells Becker in her book, “The other side is going to pound the table and say, ‘The people have spoken! The people have spoken!’ And we’re going to say, ‘Yeah, that’s part of the problem.’”

It took less than five years for a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last spring to effectively overturn Prop 8—and in that time, thanks in no small part to the 2008 loss, public opinion shifted in favor of same-sex marriage both in California and across the country.

One might think that in California, with our long history of succeeding in the face of spectacular failures, another story of using defeat in service of triumph would draw a ho-hum reaction. But the film and especially the book have come under hot attack from liberals who say the team challenging Prop 8 was reckless and glory-seeking, and should not have been so quick to take on the initiative.

I find such criticism depressing, because the impatience of the Prop 8 challengers is precisely what California needs. Unfortunately, as the state has grown older and less dynamic, Californians and their leaders have become a cautious lot. Despite their deep concern about the state’s persistent problems in schools and taxes and budgeting and prison, Californians consistently tell pollsters they have little stomach for big changes.

It’s as though we’ve forgotten our past. Throughout California history, we have prospered by accepting the ill, the war-damaged, the politically persecuted, the poor—embracing the world’s losers (starting with those 19th-century prospectors)—and building the schools and infrastructure to give them a second chance. After all, this is a state that all but pioneered legalized discrimination against immigrants—who nonetheless flocked here and built California into one of the most prosperous and welcoming places on earth.

Our signature industries were built on failure. We became an early-20th-century oil giant because of men like Edward Doheny, who had experienced business losses and learned hard lessons before coming to California. Our aerospace and defense industry prospered from the terrible human loss of wars, and cleverly remade itself for growth even in times of peace. Silicon Valley, the land of the failed start-up, has built the current Internet explosion on the hard lessons of the late-’90s tech bubble. Some of today’s richest Californians made their fortunes by investing during some of our worst real estate busts.

And no one knows how to do bombs like the good folks in Hollywood, a place full of unprofitable movies and rich people. Ask yourself: How many rom-com Hiroshimas did Matthew McConaughey drop on the movie-going public before he finally figured out how to make Oscar gold?

This success-from-failure pattern runs even deeper in California politics. The current California Constitution was produced in 1879 after three decades of failed attempts to call a convention. The victory of an egregious 1964 ballot measure blocking fair housing legislation was overturned in court, then went on to inspire a stronger fight against housing discrimination. Proposition 13 was Howard Jarvis’ third try at a game-changing tax measure; two previous attempts blew up, defeats from which he learned and drew strength. The celebrated political reforms of redistricting and the open primary have a similar history—success arriving only after big defeats.

Certainly, it would be nice if making progress in California didn’t require getting kicked in the head first, but that’s not our pattern. Of course, it’s not just the big defeat that’s essential to victory; it’s having the right attitude about that defeat.

The successful challengers to Prop 8 couldn’t be sure of victory. But as Forcing the Spring and The Case Against 8 show, they shaped their legal fight to educate the public so that even a defeat would win hearts and minds. And they capitalized on setbacks along the way. When the U.S. Supreme Court barred broadcasts of the federal court hearings on Prop 8 in San Francisco, they made a virtue of the blackout, stepping up Internet coverage of the case and even encouraging a famous screenwriter to produce a play of the proceedings.

Indeed, the very existence of the new book and film about Prop 8 show the virtues of the big loss. Prop 8 is a dead letter, but it’s still being used to advance its opponents’ cause.

This may be the bloody secret of success in this beautiful and brutish place. You gotta get out there and get clubbed over the head. And then you gotta grab that club and never stop hitting back.

The post Are Californians Big Losers? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Four years ago, a lower court decision struck down this same law, which bans “carnal acts against the order of nature.” Its reversal is a shock to liberal urban India and a significant setback for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people here. And, perhaps most dangerously, it has energized a radical right-wing fringe that no more represents the average live-and-let-live Indian than does RuPaul.

I was born in San Francisco, raised in New Zealand and Michigan, and have lived most of my adult life in the Bay Area. When I visited India in 2009, I was pleasantly surprised to find a vibrant LGBT movement. The night I landed in Mumbai, I ended up at a party where 60 or so lesbian and bisexual women had gathered to dance, drink beer, and eat biryani. I wondered aloud to a new friend: How I had missed this hot queer scene before? Had I been too wrapped up in family and work on previous trips to India in the 1990s?

“You couldn’t have found us,” she told me. “Back then we would spread the word, by phone, to meet at a certain restaurant at a certain time. Then we’d each show up with a red rose, so we could find each other.”

This revolutionary shift in the lives of LGBT people in India is mostly due to the 2009 decision to reverse an archaic law known as Section 377. Since 1861, the law had been used to harass, blackmail, and occasionally prosecute people suspected of engaging in sodomy. Also targeted in recent decades were HIV workers trying to conduct outreach and distribute condoms among transgender people and men who have sex with men.

“[The] underlying theme of the Indian Constitution … is that of ‘inclusiveness,’” the lower court said in 2009. It noted that tolerance for difference is “deeply ingrained in Indian society, nurtured over several generations … [and] traditionally displayed, literally in every aspect of life.”

Since moving to India in 2010, I’ve seen that inclusivity every day; it’s hardly optional, in a dense population where people of all castes and creeds live in close proximity. When it comes to gender expression, visitors are often struck by how Indian men hold hands in the streets openly—not as a romantic act, but as part of a range of masculine affection that’s wider than what is available to most Westerners. The local transgender community, though impoverished and often scorned, has deep historic roots and an acknowledged role in society. Ancient sources of same-sex eroticism and transgender identities in India, from texts to sculpture, are well documented.

In the wake of the 2009 decision, an Indian who loved someone of the same gender was no longer a criminal, for the first time in nearly 150 years. People gathered publicly without fear of police raids, underground organizations brought their work into the light, and community businesses emerged. And thousands of people began to march in LGBT rights parades.

For me, the energy of these events was electric. I came out, to myself and to my family, as a college student in California in 1991. I had marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City, and along the Embarcadero in San Francisco. But by the time I left the United States, I was so coolly jaded that I hadn’t been to a Pride parade in years.

Here in India, though, I was delighted to march and chant and hold up picket signs till my feet, throat, and arms ached. Over the past four years, these exuberant events rippled out from Mumbai and Delhi to all of the medium-sized cities and even to some small towns. By last year, revelers threw aside the masks they’d once worn to shield their identities in favor of rainbow boas and saris festooned with sequins.

At Mumbai Pride this past weekend, the mood was angrier—but more determined. There was keen awareness that the judges, in making their recent decision, had glanced dry-eyed through a petition from parents who passionately argued for full citizenship for their beloved queer children. They’d brushed over the pleas of healthcare organizers who testified that driving people into the closet makes preventive work harder, and subjects street health workers to police harassment. And they had ignored the Government of India, which has refused to defend the law and filed a 77-point argument for overturning it.

Instead, the judges took the side of a handful of fringe religious types, including a TV astrologer and a bushy-bearded guru in orange robes, who claims he can cure my lesbianism with yoga.

Now, night after night, the right-wingers shout out bigotries from the many small boxes that, Hollywood Squares-style, divide our television news-and-debate shows. They stage anti-homosexuality marches, a phenomenon scarcely seen in India since the late 1990s. They plaster our walls with posters calling for the death penalty for homosexuals.

Still, no arrests have been made, and activists are urging people not to panic. The full impact of the court’s action remains to be seen.

There is bad news: On LGBT listservs and Facebook groups, people across the country report new cases of bullying, harassment, and even violence. A general chilling effect is evident; as a diversity consultant in Bangalore (“the Silicon Valley of India”), I’ve seen several corporations press the “pause” button on their LGBT diversity efforts.

There is lukewarm news: Most mainstream religious leaders and politicians have kept quiet, or issued neutral, fence-straddling statements. Unlike in the United States, sexual morality is not a wedge issue between parties, and there is no great political capital to be gained by ranting about it—at least, not yet.

There is some encouraging news: Urban, progressive India is appalled. At a time when India wants to be taken seriously on the world stage, in forums like Davos and the G8 Summit, some Indians fear that such a backward stance is a step in the wrong direction.

Meanwhile among the 72 percent of the country that is rural, and the 69 percent who live on less than $2 per day, not much is likely to change. For eons, same-sex relationships here have taken place covertly and without the benefit of queer community, or even what we would understand as a “gay” identity. “Backwards” India cares more about the rising price of onions and petrol than policing homosexuality.

And finally, there is good news: In the wake of the decision, a fierce new wave of organizing has emerged, including spontaneous protests that unite LGBT people and a younger, more liberal generation of straight Indians. Their slogan, “No Going Back,” is part of a larger, multipronged attack strategy created by dozens of small grassroots groups, established nonprofits, lawyers, and other professionals donating pro-bono services, and a coalition of funders. In gearing up for the struggle ahead, a community that was in danger of becoming complacent is now galvanized to political action.

As a queer American, I was thrilled last July when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, granting full federal rights—including immigration—to gay couples. I’d never been a big backer of the mainstream gay-marriage movement, but I was surprised by the wave of emotion that came over me when I heard the news. It was the warm, unfamiliar sensation of being a full and equal citizen of my own country.

When my parents arrived in America in the 1960s, they had to swear they were not Communists, Nazis, mental patients, prostitutes, polygamists—or homosexuals. Yet now, if I wanted to, I could fulfill the deepest wish of the archetypal Indian-American: to bring home an Indian bride from the motherland.

India has just closed a brief, four-year window in which its LGBT citizens had a similar taste of legal equality. For every setback, though, there is sooner or later a leap forward. Already in this week’s news, for example, a military unit has instituted a new training program to integrate transgender people into its ranks.

Most important, a transformation has taken place in the public dialogue here, as well as within every individual and family who has been through the terrifying, exhilarating process of coming out. However long and bitter the fight going forward in India, it seems unlikely that the genie can be stuffed back into the bottle—or the closet.

The post Why Does India’s Supreme Court Want Me Back in the Closet? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On a sunny, late spring morning in 1953, his luck ran out.

Months earlier, President Eisenhower had issued an executive order that directed the firing of any government worker found to be gay or lesbian. Hundreds of agents were assigned the task of delving into the private lives of federal employees. Unbeknownst to Forbes, State Department investigators had been looking into his living arrangements. And they didn’t like what they found.

“I arrived for work and there they were,” Forbes recalls. “Three inquisitors. They got right to the point: ‘We understand you are living with a known homosexual.’”

It was true. Forbes was sharing a large apartment overlooking the Seine with an internationally known jewelry designer he had met years earlier in Palermo.

“But I’m not having an affair with him,” Forbes told his questioners. “For that matter, I’m not having an affair with anybody.”

That was true, too. But it didn’t much matter. In 1953, simply associating with a known homosexual was enough to get you fired. And not just from a federal job. The Eisenhower order required private companies doing business with the government to remove homosexuals from their payrolls as well. And, at the behest of Washington, the United Nations and U.S. NATO allies carried out similar purges.

The rationale behind the ban was that “perverts”—the word The New York Times freely used as a synonym for homosexuals—were a threat to national security because their secretive lifestyle left them susceptible to blackmail by foreign agents, who could supposedly induce them to reveal sensitive government information in exchange for avoiding exposure.

Despite the fact that not a single case of homosexual blackmail was ever discovered, the Eisenhower executive order had remarkable staying power. It wasn’t fully and officially revoked until President Clinton did so in 1995. Over a period of four decades, many thousands of gay men and lesbians lost their jobs. And it is impossible to say how many others were turned down for employment because they were suspected of being gay. By any measure it was the longest-lasting and most widespread witch hunt in American history.

Sixty years after this witch hunt—the “Lavender Scare”—began, the U.S. Senate voted to outlaw workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Whether or not the bill senators passed last week makes it through the House, it’s more evidence of how far the government and the public have come on gay rights. But it’s also a reminder of a period of American history that’s been almost entirely forgotten.

Why doesn’t anyone know about a 40-year purge of thousands of innocent U.S. government employees and contractors? Because it was in everybody’s interest—the victims and the government alike—to keep the witch hunt a secret. Few who lost their jobs wanted to tell family or friends why they had left the government. Most were deeply in the closet and wanted—and needed—to stay there, particularly if they hoped to get other work. When confronted with evidence of their homosexuality, most resigned on the spot in exchange for a promise that their reasons for quitting would not be revealed. Those who balked were warned that they would be subject to further investigation; agents would visit their families and friends, who would find out about their sexual orientation.

“I submitted my resignation immediately,” says Bruce Forbes. “They didn’t have any evidence that I was gay, but if they had continued to investigate, they would have found it.”

Government officials had their own reasons for keeping quiet. They worried that if people found out just how many homosexuals were being fired, they’d demand to know why the government was sloppy enough to have hired so many of them in the first place. The result was a conspiracy of silence that benefited both sides.

In the mid-1990s, historian David K. Johnson got access to thousands of pages of newly declassified government documents that told this story in vivid detail. His 2006 book, The Lavender Scare, was the first to reveal the extent to which gay men and lesbians were victimized.

“These documents showed that this was no ad hoc campaign to get rid of a few troublesome gay people,” Johnson says. “I found page after page with the names of hundreds of people who lost their jobs. Transcripts of interrogations. Manuals instructing security officers on the best techniques to pressure people into confessing. Notes describing conversations with informants. It was chilling.”

Armed with this information, Johnson tracked down and interviewed dozens of individuals who experienced the Lavender Scare firsthand—victims of the scare and government officials alike. Thankfully many were still alive to talk about it.

As for Bruce Forbes, he quickly found another job—a better one, in fact. It would be decades before he revealed the real reason he quit the Foreign Service. His story, like those of other victims of the Lavender Scare, documents an important part of our past that nearly became lost forever.

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That was the message from a panel of experts on marriage, constitutional law, and Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender rights during a Zócalo/UCLA Williams Institute event at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art.

In the short term, panelists said, the Supreme Court decisions would have clear results: more equality for marriages, and more marriages. Williams Institute research director M.V. Lee Badgett said that there are an estimated 650,000 same-sex couples in the U.S. and that 100,000 of them are already married.

Do the math, and “that’s a half million couples who could still choose to get married to someone of the same sex,” Badgett said. She predicted that people would get in their cars and get on planes to marry in the states where it’s legal. “New England is lovely this time of year,” added Badgett, a Massachusetts resident.

And San Francisco chief deputy city attorney Therese Stewart, a key player in California litigation on the subject of same-sex marriages over the last decade, said in response to questions from Los Angeles Times federal courts reporter Maura Dolan, the event’s moderator, that there was little chance that groups who backed California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage would be able to use the courts to stop the new marriages.

Stewart noted that the court decision that barred San Francisco from marrying same-sex couples when then-Mayor Gavin Newsom did so in 2004—on the grounds that a county had to follow the state on questions of marriage—would, “now that the tables are turned,” prevent a county from refusing to marry same-sex couples today.

But the panelists agreed that the future is harder to predict outside of California and other states where same-sex marriage is now possible. While the panelists indicated that voters and courts would move in the direction of equality for all marriages, they were uncertain about the pace of change or how it would play out in different states.

David Codell, the Williams Institute legal director, noted that in recent days there have been new cases challenging limits on the rights of same-sex couples. These include lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania with the aim of bringing the issue back before the U.S. Supreme Court. He and Stewart said they believed the language of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act would be of assistance in such challenges.

Badgett said there should be momentum as more states overturn bans, with same-sex marriage looking less threatening to those who are now opponents. “There’s a tipping point,” she said. “The more states that allow same sex couples to marry, the harder it is to make the case that something bad will happen, because,” Badgett said, “we haven’t seen anything bad happen.”

But Codell, while anticipating progress for equality of marriages, said some states could hold out for decades, forcing federal action. A majority of the Supreme Court justices were unwilling to decide the question of whether state bans were unconstitutional, but, again, the striking down of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, suggests the court could eventually rule that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry in all 50 states.

“I think we have a pretty good sense of where the court will come out if, at the time the court takes the case, the same justices are on the court,” Stewart said, though she said that could easily be four or more years away.

The panelists were less certain about the effects of the Supreme Court’s decision on some 1,100 federal regulations and statutes governing everything from taxes to pension benefits.

Codell said “there are a lot of open questions” about companies who have cited DOMA as a basis for excluding same-sex couples from pension and retirement benefits. Stewart said the decisions create a number of thorny questions revolving around time. To what extent can the new federal recognition of same-sex marriages be retroactive? And how would applying that recognition retroactively change taxes and benefits? Codell noted that such questions could create litigation and new questions when it comes to divorces between same-sex couples. He also counseled patience as the federal government figures out the new realities: “I think we need to wait and see what regulations will be issued.”

Audience questions on specific subjects suggested the thorniness of the many new practical questions. One audience member asked how he and his fiancé, in Spain, should pursue marriage in the wake of the new decisions. (Consult an immigration attorney was the panel’s answer.) Could my partner and I roll over our domestic partnership automatically to marriage? (There’s nothing like that in California).

The panelists said it’s also unclear what effect the decisions will have on other rights questions. Badgett predicted that the rights of the transgendered would get more attention. She also said she expected a renewed push to fight employment discrimination against LGBT people. On the federal level, she said, there is still no law against employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and fewer than half of the states have such laws.

The panelists noted that marriage is hardly the only civil rights issue being debated in the country, and they wondered whether the coalition that backed marriage equality would stay together on other issues. “The immigration issue, for example,” said Codell. “It’s not as though this marriage struggle is the only one.”

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