Was perusing FB when I read a comment from Kim Pearson (yes, THE Kim Pearson) about how her child and his friends were told by a homophobe at a bookstore they were minding their own business in that they should all 'move to San Francisco'.
Excuse me?
I've heard that crap before, too. The last time I had that comment uttered at me I told the person "This is the United States, and I can and will live anywhere I wish to live that makes me happy."
Homophobic conservafools seem to think, and sadly that sentiment is echoed by some TBLG peeps as well for different reasons that we TBLG folks need to cluster in some ostensibly blue areas.
No, we don't.
If you wish to live there, fine. I've been to the 'Gay Bay' area twice. I ventured north to Vallejo in 1988 and was at the Creating Change Conference Oakland hosted in 1999 . I stayed in San Francisco and had a blast. It's a beautiful place to live. But Texas is home.
One of the lessons I learned from reading my people's history and living in Kentucky is that you don't abandon your birth state and let the wingers have it unless it's absolutely necessary . If they get control of it, it will become less tolerant and progressive.
Unless your life is in imminent danger, you fight with every fiber of your being to make it a more progressive place to live. If you can't flip it totally blue, at least work to make it purple and get the blue part later.
A reason the wingers want us to move from red or purple states is not only does it dilute our political clout, it's so their homobigoted behinds can be psychically soothed in their fantasy that they live in a TBLG-free zone. They can claim they don't see or know any TBLG people, and there's no need to cover us with civil rights laws if that's the case.
It also allows them to cover up their bigotry and hatred towards us in front of their ostensibly homogeneous neighbors and friends .
The more they have to see us happily living our lives and interacting in the communities we inhabit doing mundane things, the more it pisses them off and forces them to deal with the question of why they have such a visceral hatred of TBLG people.
Let's get real for a moment. If you are a happy cisperson secure in your gender identity and sexual orientation, TBLG people peacefully living our lives shouldn't bother you. If you do, then you have issues you need to see a friendly neighborhood counselor about.
It also means that sooner or later, that veneer of fake tolerance they claim to have for people not like them will be exposed for all the world to see.
So naw, I ain't moving to San Francisco unless it's a job offer with serious money attached to it. If you homobigots and transbigots don't like the fact my peeps live in Montrose, various areas of Houston, Texas, small towns and large cities, various red states in the Deep South, the Midwest, the Rocky Mountain states, the East and West coasts and countries all over this planet we share, better deal with it.
We are part of the diverse mosaic of human life, we have just as much right to live anywhere we want as you cispeople do and we aren't going anywhere.