The KTLA Morning News just ran a story about a campaign launched by West Hollywood's Sean Hertherington to have everyone “call in to work gay” today to demonstrate outrage over the passage of Prop. 8 and how, “You really can't live a day without a gay.”
The memo obviously did not reach World Weekly HQ. In fact, it did not reach much of West Hollywood, as KTLA's reporter interviewed several people at a Starbucks there–on their way to work.
Hertherington's heart is in the right place as it is important to remind the masses of the fiscal and cultural impacts of gay and lesbian citizens, much as it was with Mexicans in that horrible A Day Without a Mexican movie.
But the West Hollywoodian takes it farther, having everyone, in essence, out themselves. That's an important distinction.
]
By showing we are all in this together, that if you discriminate against one of us you discriminate against all of us, it solidifies the notion that the anti-Prop. 8 campaign is really a quest for civil rights for all and not, as proponents argue, one group of people seeking “special rights.”
But, come on, mass blue flus never work, especially not now, in this economy, when one's job is about the only thing people who have not been laid off have to cling to.
There is a better way to make Hertherington's point. It hit me when I came upon a woman with a man-cut hair style and sensible shoes at the airport. She was wearing a Mater Dei sweatshirt.
What if gay and lesbians, and their expendable incomes, bought shirts, jackets and sweatsuits adorned with the logos of individual churches and religious organizations in their areas that pushed Prop. 8. (If these groups do not sell attire with their logos, who better to make them than gays? I'm just sayin' . . .) Wear these matching outfits, as same-sex couples, around town and, especially, the fronts of places depicted on the logos as their followers are entering.
And then, this is key, make sure those followers see you two making public displays of affection. This will show them we all, gay and straight alike, just want the same thing, love, that we all respect everyone's right to practice their faiths (see, we're honoring them on our chests!) and that, yes, we are all gay.
Okay, maybe skipping work would be easier.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.