Having grown up Catholic, I gained an early appreciation for ritualistic baths and ceremonial cleansing.  The act of baptism was something sacred to me, and I suppose for those who are devout believers, it still is.  As a child I would peer my eyes above the pews in front of me and stare in wonder at the priest, who I deemed had magical powers, as he splashed the holy water on the head of some unsuspecting babe.  But although the ritual and the priest as magician intrigued me, it was the water that took on the most alien and unusual quality of all.  The magic was in the water and it fascinated and frightened me.

These thoughts came rushing over me while watching Milk, and like the water itself, I was filled with a sense of something greater than myself.  I was filled with a reverence for something spiritual, but it was no God that pulled at me, it was the aged and crooked hands of a time that came before.  It was the reenactment of Harvey Milk’s story that baptized me into an entirely new church of mankind, and it came out of nowhere.  A movie I attended more on the desires of a friend of mine than the desires of myself, had managed to help me realize what gay pride was really about.

So let me start at the beginning.  I’ve always struggled to understand all the gay pride hysteria.  As a angry youth I marched for environmental, political, and human rights concerns.  Not once though have I marched for my own rights, the rights I merely adopted and took on, the rights that have actually seemed a chore to bear at times.  I’ve struggled to understand how my fellow members of the queer community could devote so much time and energy to something that I feel has been quenched.  I’ve grown up in a world and have felt, for the most part, completely free of discrimination,  I’m privileged to be who I am, and would have it no other way.  In fact, I’ve even found myself pitying straight people.  So, why should I, of all people devote my time and energy to a cause that I feel has been dealt with?

Well, my friends, Gus Van Sant and Sean Penn have finally given me a reason, and this movie, out of nowhere, put it for me in bold brassy typeface: PRIDE ISN’T ALWAYS ABOUT YOURSELF.  It’s ridiculously cliche to even go there in such a public domain, but dammit! here I go.

Pride is about the state of the world and how quickly things change.

It is about the people who make the change happen and the rest of us that ride the wave.

It’s about being thicker and richer in character, and knowing somehow that things can, and will be better.  I’ve not once, even thought that I deserved more, because I thought I had everything all along.  And maybe I do, maybe all the fights that were fought before I was born were done with self-serving intentions, but I have everything because of them.  And perhaps, I will never understand the oppression that those who came before me have dealt with, but my misconception has been, until now, that I should move on.  My misconception has helped me to realize how recently all this oppression happened.

If each and everyone of us just reached into history’s bag of bones we’d quickly realize that 60 years ago is nothing, and 30, is even less.

So in essence perhaps there is something magic in the water.  Perhaps the fountain pop machine at the Scotia Bank Cinema downtown is being fueled by holy water and I, in fact have been baptized again.  I’ve been invited into a whole new church of thought regarding everything that I am and everything that I’ve come from.  I am entitled to this life as much as the next one, but I should not presume so quickly that all I have is the road in front of me.  I will never forget that 30 in the past is nothing, and 30 years in the future is even less.  And I will never forget that there is always a brighter and better world to look forward to.