[Coming Home to America cover]

Coming Home to America

The Introduction, by Torie Osborn

April 25, 1993. The crowd was an endless, shimmering sea of people and rainbow flags that stretched out beyond the horizon. That sunny day, under a brilliant azure sky, 850,000 gay men and lesbians, along with friends, family, and allies, marched, chanted, and danced together, shouting themselves hoarse and feeling alive with a passionate sense of possibility. Our moment in history had arrived. The crowd's energy pulsated across the stage as I stood waiting for my turn to speak; hope was palpable in the air.

Standing on that stage, I flashed back to the two earlier gay rights marches. Seventy-five thousand of us rallied in October 1979, but it was a stealth gathering that few others were even aware of. In October 1987, a phenomenal 600,000 of us came together. Thousands were arrested in militant AIDS protests across Washington; a mass wedding celebrated hundreds of our committed relationships. Following the 1987 march, chapters of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), P-FLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), and GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) sprang to life in cities all across the nation. But there was almost no coverage of the march in the mainstream media, so most of the world never heard about one of the largest, most energetic civil rights demonstrations in American history.

This day was different. By any measure this march was a triumph; not only were we nearly a million strong, but the mainstream media were omnipresent. The 1993 March on Washington was beamed into American living rooms everywhere. This was our year, it seemed -- as if gays and lesbians had suddenly emerged from society's shadows, our lives and our issues bursting forth into the dazzling sunlight of public attention. As I took my place at the podium that day, I felt a part of a new and promise-filled moment in history. America's outcasts were finally coming home, from the margins to the mainstream.

But that optimism and buoyancy were not to last.

The crushing defeat on the gays-in-the-military issue a few months later quickly eclipsed our moment in the bright April sun. The political pessimism that followed spread through the gay and lesbian community like a dense, dark rain cloud. We had mobilized for Bill Clinton with an outpouring of grassroots enthusiasm never before seen in our community, and now our loss left us mired in confusion and deep discouragement that have dominated the mood of the gay community ever since. Even the 1996 Supreme Court victory -- the historic 6-3 pro-gay-rights decision striking down Colorado's Amendment 2 -- was overshadowed by the ugly storm of homophobia generated that political season by allies and enemies alike about the gay marriage issue.

The 1993 failure on the military issue also set in glaring relief other weaknesses of the gay and lesbian community that remain core challenges today: we were being outspent and outspun by a powerful radical right, whose influence on policymakers was strengthened by the widespread ignorance about gay and lesbian people. (Newsweek wrote in 1993 that only 43 percent of Americans reported even knowing someone gay.) It was also painfully clear that, as a movement, we were severely underdeveloped, with little capacity to mobilize large numbers of our own people, let alone others beyond the confines of the gay world. Worst of all, we lacked any coherent strategy or vision. There was little connection between local communities and national groups, and bitter infighting between and among key groups and individuals was sapping whatever constructive energy we had.

This book grew out of that sunny April day and its dark aftermath. I wanted to help counteract the confusion that has set in, because I see within the gay and lesbian community a wealth of talent and determination that, called forth, can truly change the world. I also believe that we have had too little opportunity to see ourselves clearly, with vision unblurred by homophobia and fear from within and without. Until we can grasp the full spectrum of our strengths, we will not be able to seize our potential power.

I have had the honor of being an activist for thirty years, and much of this book springs from the journey of my own life. In particular, it has grown out of thousands of conversations over those years with hundreds of people I've worked with, watched, listened to with awe, and learned from. Their stories populate this work because they animated my own life and thinking. They are my heroes and heroines, and the themes of this book emerged from observing and admiring their real-life struggles and experiences.

My greatest hope for this book is that it will serve to hold up a mirror to a group of people I think are awe-inspiring. I hope that this mirror shines back some of the many ways that the ordinary lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered Americans -- and their family and friends -- have made them extraordinary. We are all on a journey, individually and collectively, and it is a journey that, I believe, has enormous significance. We who have been exiles from our families of birth and from mainstream society, are, at last, coming home from the outside -- and the world will never be the same again. Our homecoming will, I believe, reveal the truth that the ultra-right most fears: that the people it demonizes in fact represent the very best of what America can be. Far from being immoral people, we are a highly ethical, thoughtful, caring, and extraordinarily talented people who quietly embody some of the very values that this country desperately needs to tap more vigorously: personal courage and honesty at all costs, self-reliance, community concern, love of family, spiritual depth, and a desire to help leave the world a better place.

On the morning after the 1993 March on Washington, I went for breakfast at a coffee shop near Dupont Circle. A group of young people sitting at the next table recognized me and called me over to join them, excited and bursting with talk. Eight high school juniors and seniors from Seattle, they were part of a contingent of thirty who had chartered a bus to come across the country to the march. They were four girls and four boys, white, black, Latino, and Asian, and I'll never forget their shining faces, bright eyes, and impassioned words. Their stories -- and their diversity -- reminded me of just how far we'd come: these eight kids (and most of the rest of the busload) had engaged in a communal coming-out rite in advance of their trip east, all telling their parents they were gay, lesbian, or bisexual on the same night, only three days before the bus was to leave. They giggled while telling me of the many interwoven phone calls to calm last-minute jitters that night; they sadly shared the story of two boys in their crowd who were immediately grounded and prevented from making the trek (several others were also grounded but decided to sneak out anyway). They all expressed no small amount of anxiety about returning home to Seattle and facing their parents. They threw a million questions at me and, during the two hours we talked back and forth, I came to see them as a kind of microcosm for our community: their diversity, their strong bonds with one another, their gutsiness and humor, their inherent power to change the circumstances of their lives and to shape the world around them. Meeting them was one of the best moments of the 1993 March for me and I deeply regret losing the piece of paper on which they wrote their names. But their faces and their stories are unforgettable and many of their questions burned into my brain:

What is the role of the individual's coming out in our big-picture political strategy?
How do we move our activism from cynicism -- or rage -- to hope, and sustain it over the long term? How do we counteract our internal divisions?
What exactly is the art of building community? And how do we translate that spirit into creating permanent institutions for future generations?
What are the values that drive us, consciously and unconsciously, as we craft our culture, our communities, our movement? Do those values have relevance in the broader, nongay world?

Their questions are some of the central ones for the gay and lesbian movement, and Coming Home to America is my attempt to address them. I hope this book reaches those young people, wherever they are today, because in their fearless asking of the right questions lies our future. With their passion and determination, America will some day soon become a real home -- a place of belonging and replenishment, of safety and empowerment -- for all of its people.

Our journey home to America, like every other journey, both great and small, begins with a single first step. For us, that first step is coming out.

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