Friday May 25, 2007 SGN.org |
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Volume 35 Issue 21 |
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Sunday, Sep 07, 2008
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Tour De Life by Beau Burriola |
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| Mary's Baby | ||
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by Beau Burriola -
SGN Contributing Writer I threw my bag on the chair, closed the door of my office, and plopped down into my chair to enjoy my morning coffee and avoid the world for an hour. This, my morning routine, sometimes involves work, but more frequently involves flipping through recipes, pricing tickets to places in the world I've never been to, or otherwise planning for my life after work. This is the way things should be. As I sometimes do, I clicked over to check the Gay news of the day and was surprised to see a huge color photo of Mary Cheney's baby with the Vice President and his wife. The picture filled me with the same sort of grotesque nausea that I got when I saw former Governor James McGreevy treated like a rock star by the Gay community and Oprah, when all he did was cheat on his wife with a man. The morbid curiosity that makes Gay folks like these front-page queer news makes me wonder what stories aren't being told. Mary's baby isn't news to me, at least not in the worthy-of-reporting sense. It wasn't news when she said nothing when she decided to have it. It wasn't news when she said nothing while working on her father's anti-Gay campaign. In my opinion, if Mary Cheney is happy to have her own family kept off the stage while the rest of the Cheney families are up there campaigning for her father, Gay people shouldn't put her on our stage. If she is happy to sit in silence while the ridiculous policies of her father affect her and everyone else like her, we should respect her cowardice and leave her name off our headlines. If she is content to remain a second class citizen, I don't think she is worthy an inch of headline space more than any one Gay person out there who is willing to stand up and do just half their part to make things change. She is so unworthy of a cover story on our papers that we should grant her the oppressed obscurity she deserves. If there is a story in Mary's baby, it might be a story told twenty years from now when she might feel the need to explain to that child why it's important to stand up for what you believe in. It might be a story ten years from now about why she chose to say nothing when she could have made the biggest difference of anyone. It might be a story one day, but today it is no story. Like others before Mary Cheney, simply remaining silent is a right each Gay person has, but it isn't necessarily a right worthy of respect. When our cause has so few people speaking for us already, drowned out by small mindedness of the majority of Americans, silence hurts us all. Constantly highlighting those people who do the least for our community every time they do another bit of nothing is not helpful to any of us. If I printed the Gay news in our nation, I would put Mary Cheney's newest acts of nothing right where she deserves: in the back, behind the automotive and real estate ads, in small, colorless print& but only if she didn't crowd all the other stories that are worth far more space than hers. Beau Burriola is a local writer skipping straight to second page news. E-mail him at: beaubrent@gmail.com |
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visit Beau at www.beaubrent.com
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copyright Seattle Gay News - DigitalTeamWorks 2007