BY MICHAEL KEARNS

TAKING SPIRITUAL FLIGHT

“Can I have that?” the young woman asks, pointing to the “Vote No on Prop. 8” button that my friend Jay is wearing. A bit less outgoing than your average Starbucks ingénue, she verges on apologetic when she says, “I want to wear it in front of my boyfriend. He doesn't want you guys to get married.”

The weekend before the election, Jay and I had just participated in a guerilla rally to protest Proposition 8, with a host of people of all stripes who seem to share a belief—as we waved signs in the pouring rain and shouted to the heavens—that the Earth, in spite of its widespread toxicity, is shifting on its axis of goodness.

“No matter what happens,” one of my students asserts, in anticipation of the potential Prop. 8 response, “we shall prevail.”

Yes, President Obama, we can.

At the electrifying election night party at Akbar, I see flashes of my brothers—the ones lost to AIDS—and tried to imagine the expressions on each of their faces as Obama delivers his exalting acceptance speech: Robert Chesley, James Carroll Pickett, Max Drew, Paul Monette, Justin Smith and on and on.

The news that Prop. 8 passes reminds me of those men; the way that their righteous anger transformed this city, back when they took to the streets and shouted their (often diseased) lungs out. The hateful acts of discrimination that fueled those boys (and many of them were still boys) is the same color of hate that drove the Yes on Proposition 8 political campaign. It's the hate of the ignorant and the bigoted, driven by religion's perversities.

In anticipation of the second rally in as many days, I designed my own T-shirt. On sky blue cotton, in pink and red and orange paint, I scrawl the words, “We shall prevail.”

Yes, President Obama, we can.

“Did you think, 20 years ago, that you'd be on the streets protesting gay marriage?” Jay asks me as we make our way to the Mormon Temple in Westwood. “Honey,” I say, “20 years ago? I thought I'd be fuckin' dead.”

At some point, we face a chorus line of cops straddling their motorcycles, poised for battle, determined not to allow us to march down the next stretch of Wilshire. An angry voice shouts, “Run!” I don't know what it was that overtook me in that moment, but I—along with several dozen others who were literally on the front lines—run like hell, past the revving motorcycles, continuing down the middle of Wilshire with unbridled abandon. Out of the corner of my eye, I see one of the cops shrug his shoulders in goodnatured defeat.

Running, I am no longer a 58-year-old man with HIV-related and often crippling neuropathy. I become part of something far greater than age or physicality; I take spiritual flight, part of a movement that is demanding to be able to love. To love one another—that's all, folks.

Yes, President Obama, we can.

While our country fared well overall, there are still pockets of shocking legislation aimed at us. Fueled by a pulpit campaign, over 56 percent of the voters in Arkansas elected to prevent single parents from adopting or fostering children. While the measure also bans unmarried couples, the Arkansas Family Council portrayed the successful campaign as a battle against a "gay agenda."

During this prolonged “learning moment,” let us also take a look at ourselves. How many of us who are demanding “equal rights for all” practice equality toward each other on a daily basis? How many of us continue to impulsively act on our own homophobia, our own ageism, our own racism, our own looksism, our own classism? Let's remember that none of us are without deeply ingrained flaws.

As dusk envelops us in Westwood, Jay and I search for his car, which is buried in the labyrinthine sidestreets, a truckload of vitriol drives by. “Faggots,” they shout. “Fuck you, faggots!”

Several days after the election, I see the young woman with the “boyfriend” at Starbucks. She gives me a look of true commiseration. “I still have it,” she says, summoning a half-smile.

“The button.”

Yes, President Obama, we can.