Writing your memoirs literally changes your life.
As I’ve discovered in writing “And Then I Danced: Traveling the Road to LGBT Equality,” looking back on years of activism has given me a wonderfully upbeat outlook. There’s one question I keep getting about this process that, up until recently, I hadn’t really had a good answer for. It’s a simple question, but since the book covers so much of my involvement over the last few decades, I could figure out what context in which to place it. The question is: “What did you learn from your book?”
The answer I’ll now give is somewhat strange, but to me delightful. Here it is: I can die tomorrow and be a happy man.
OK, so I think you’ll want an explanation of that (and yes, I’m smiling as I write it here for the first time).
Like many of you, my parents played a major role in who I am today. Their wishes for me were, like all parents, that I should be happy and married and contribute somehow to the betterment of the world. To that end, my parents and my grandmother instilled in me the need to fight for civil rights and to live a diversified life. My family didn’t just speak those words, they lived them.
My grandmother took me to my first civil-rights demonstration when I was 13, which years later connected to me asking Congressman Robert N.C. Nix to be the first African-American to sign onto the first Equality Act, the predecessor to the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, introduced in Congress in 1974 by Bella Abzug. My parents became proud parents of a gay activist and marched in gay Pride marches and appeared with me on “The Phil Donahue Show.” They saw my work as me keeping that promise to fight for civil rights and progress.
So, the book showed me that I have fulfilled my dreams and accomplished the wishes my parents had for me.
There are only two things that I regret. I don’t have a copy of that Phil Donahue tape (although I do have photos; one appears in the book), but more importantly, my parents didn’t live long enough to see me happily and legally married.
But it is still a happy story.
And it’s one that will continue, as I don’t expect to be dying any time soon. In fact, I’m planning on building on that legacy that my parents would be so proud of.