Becky’s Blog

…and it’s just oh-so-familiar, isn’t it?

Of course, by now you’ve heard that House Democrats are expected to strip protections for Transgender-American citizens from ENDA. You’ve probably also heard that the Human Rights Campaign and the Leadership Council on Civil Rights have chosen to not sign onto a letter supporting the inclusion of those protections. Once  again, we in the transgender community find ourselves in the same place we did in 2004, having our basic civil rights sold out from under us by these organizations, our right to make a living free of bigotry and discrimination in the workplace being used as a poker chip by those claiming to be our allies and representatives, those who pay lip service to transgender rights but quickly and eagerly retreat the moment even the slightest resistance is met. How such people can be credibly considered actual community leaders is beyond me.

Back in 2004, I wrote and published an expose of the Human Rights Campaign’s advocacy of ENDA called “In Through The Out Door”. In this piece, I not only called out HRC and Barney Frank for this lack of leadership, but I also told the story of how we discovered the truth of what was going on: We (meaning the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition) went to Washington, lobbied our representatives in Congress, and heard, right from the source, that they didn’t believe that the HRC was on our side.

We protested HRC twice that year, and they finally did relent and vote to only support a trans-inclusive ENDA in August of that year, but they also refused to sign onto a letter in support of transgender inclusion in the hate crimes bill that year as well.

Bear in mind, I’m not saying that HRC or LCCR is necessarily to blame to for the cowardice of House Democrats here, but they were offered the opportunity to speak out on the issue with nine other major LGBT civil rights organizations and they opted not to do so. To me, that, along with numerous other ignored opportunities for HRC and LCCR to speak up and speak out on the equality of Transgender-Americans and our equality indicates that for all the public spin and political posturing, for these people the fight for truly equal American civil rights protections begins and ends on their own doorsteps. It’s not really a surprise, but it is a disappointment. Despite all the hopes we had that these people had finally learned their lesson, we now see that in reality nothing could be further from the truth.

The Task Force and the other organizations who did sign onto this letter have the right idea here. Even if ENDA were to pass without protections for the gender-variant (let’s not forget that gender identity protections would not only cover the transgendered, but also gender-variant gays and lesbians such as butch lesbians and effeminate gay men), these organizations will be on record as opposing it. Essentially, it’s not as much myself or any other individual in our community expressing an opinion on the topic, but rather this public letter which calls out those who refuse to get behind the notion that if we’re just as likely to succeed together as we are to fail together, the only real difference being in how long it takes to happen.

We know this because we’ve been here before. 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry first declared his opposition to treating transgender workers fairly in the workplace by opposing gender identity and expression protections in ENDA in HRC’s Presidential Candidate Questionnaire, but this received little attention from non-transgender-specific GLBT community media, with the exception of the infamous “trans-jack” editorials of then-Washington Blade Editor-In-Chief Chris Crain.

Given how easily Kerry was able to throw the rights of transpeople over the side to suit his own political convenience with HRC not only remaining silent on the issue but even endorsing his candidacy with a 100% rating, it was no surprise that soon afterward he also came out in favor of a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. After all, we made it easy for him, just as HRC and LCCR are helping to do for the next Democratic Presidential nominee. These organizations are once again giving cowardly Democrats a pass on ignoring anti-transgender bigotry and discrimination, and are once again setting the stage for yet another Democratic bailout from the ideal of standing up for the rights of all American citizens.

The last time they pulled this crap, we went after them, and, as they usually do when seriously confronted, HRC backed down. It’s that time again. While I’ll admit that because of my current financial situation, I’m not a paid member of any of these organizations, I’ll also say that of the national LGBT orgs, it’s The Task Force that has consistently demonstrated it’s worthiness to replace HRC as the leading advocacy org of this movement.

Despite Matt Foreman’s history as the Executive Director of the Empire State Pride Agenda when they barred transgender community representatives, including NY State Representative Tom Duane, from even participating in the negotiations for the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA), and that battle’s continuing legacy of depriving transgender New Yorkers of fair treatment under the law in that state to this day, he has since become one of the transgender community’s most vocal advocates on the national stage. No, it doesn’t excuse the past, and The Task Force itself is far from perfect, but they do set a standard for LGBT advocacy at the federal level which I personally don’t believe HRC will ever come close to, much less meet. To me, they’ve earned the right to be considered the primary LGBT org advocating our interests in Washington. It’s not only because they’ve advocated for fully trans-inclusive civil rights laws for far longer than HRC and most of the others, but also because they’ve shown they have the backbone for really effective grassroots, street-level LGBT political advocacy, the kind of real staunch commitment to equality for all of us which the wealthy white gay male elitists who make up most of HRC’s self-involved, wishy-washy, and cowardly, and oh-so-conservative Executive Board will never be willing to offer us.

In 2004, the trans community had finally had enough and we spoke out, loudly and proudly. We told the rest of our community that HRC’s brand of sellout politics was unacceptable to us and we asked them to join with us in making the point. The response we got was as stunning as it was positive. I don’t have exact numbers to share, but I do know that HRC took a major hit in both support and credibility because of it, and their seemingly almost continuous subsequent public gaffs they’ve made that have angered even those who used to form the core of their base of support to the point where many have now gotten wise and moved past their antiquated, lukewarm advocacy style. In addition, Queer youth are coming into the movement with the understanding that HRC isn’t going to represent their interests any more than they’re going to represent transfolks when the chips are down.

The signs are all there, just as they were in 2004. The silence on the exclusion of transpeople in critical legislation, the declining to add their endorsement to a letter in support of transgender equality, their support and lauding of politicians who refuse to publicly stand up for all of us, their avoidance of substantive discussions with trans-relevant media (I plan to try yet again to get an HRC rep on my show to talk issues…my last invitation, offered publicly to Hilary Rosen on OurChart, apparently wasn’t felt worthy of even a response), it’s all happening again. Personally, I think should have the same result as it did three years ago.

It’s not like these people don’t get it, they’re too well-informed not to. HRC and LCCR are proactively choosing not to participate in standing up for real equality for all Americans, just as they did in 2004. The result of their refusal to advocate fairly for all us now should have the same result.

What’s most disappointing to me personally is how much of “In Through The Out Door” is apparently still accurate and relevant today, more than three years after I published it. The piece did help to inspire the kind of change I hoped it might when I wrote it, but it seems that in the case of HRC, the change is only skin-deep. Fortunately, much of the community has grown wise to their games, but it seems at least some of their pet politicians either still don’t get it or just don’t want to.

It’s time to get pissed off again and start calling out people and organizations out when they deserve it. It’s time finish the job that we started in 2004 and knock HRC from its undeserved perch as the leading LGBT civil rights organization and replace them with an organization which understands that civil rights are for everyone, even when they interfere with the interests of rich white gay guys. NGLTF isn’t perfect, but they’re far closer to that ideal than HRC has ever come or ever will. The fact that even the Empire State Pride Agenda has signed onto this letter as HRC and LCCR remain silent speaks volumes, both about how far some in this movement have come in being willing to support and work for truly inclusive civil rights laws, and how for others the only thing that’s really changed in any substantive ways is the rhetoric.

It’s time to take our movement back, gang…let’s go out there and make it happen. No delays, no excuses. The time to have an impact, for all of us, is right now. If we fail in this we only have ourselves to blame.

One, two, three, four, one, two, three…DON’T support the HRC!

Yesterday, I had an experience that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since. I was outside for a few minutes, and a kid, probably about eleven or twelve, pedaled by on his bicycle. He kept looking over his shoulder at me, and then quickly rode away. Just as I was going back inside, the kid came back around the block. As I was closing the door behind me, I heard a young voice say excitedly “I saw the homo! I saw the homo!”.

Yeah, fun times. Not that I actually care what a twelve-year-old and his friend think of me, but it is interesting nonetheless. I’ve apparently become something of a neighborhood attraction. I suppose this really shouldn’t surprise me. I go outside in all manner of gendered presentation, full makeup, no makeup, boobs, no boobs. Of course, I don’t actually go anywhere unless I’m properly put together, but I’m not going to bother just to walk to the mailbox or get something from my car. This particular time I was in full makeup, hair done, but I’d changed out of what I was wearing…all of it, including most of my bust…and was wearing sweat pants and a Josie and the Pussycats t-shirt. Oh and of course, my nails are done. In other words, I was looking about as totally genderqueer as I get. It’s a look I’m perfectly comfortable in at home or around certain close friends and family, but it’s not really something I do intentionally, by actually going for that look (anymore).

What’s most interesting to me about this is not that these kids think I’m a sideshow attraction, but that they think it’s because I’m homosexual. I resist the temptation to label this kid a bigot because I doubt he’s old enough to have any real understanding of what a “homo” actually is. Hell, he might turn out to be one himself in just a few short years. And yet, even though the ignorance of a child is surely not a reliable guide in such things, I find myself wondering if that’s part of the problem, that for the most part, despite all the political progress we’ve made recently, we’re still essentially socially and culturally invisible as transpeople in mainstream society.

I’m not talking politics here, not really. What I’m starting to wonder is if transpeople are perceived as joined at the hip with gays and lesbians because we want to be. That begs the question, of course, DO we want to be? Of course, it makes sense politically, but where is the culture that belongs to transpeople alone? Can we even say we really have one?

There are many aspects of gay and lesbian culture, especially those involving sex and romance, where transpeople often find themselves welcome to be present but not participate, or are simply excluded from. Where are the corresponding trans-exclusive spaces? They are out there, but you’ll have to search them out, and of course, that’s assuming you have a trans community in your area which cares enough to create one.

A few years ago, I co-founded a weekly trans group rap at my local Pride Center. We got a few people the first few meetings, and then…nothing. No one. After a few more, we gave up. As far as I know, the one and only trans group that still meets at the Center is the Gender Rights Advocacy Association of New Jersey (GRAANJ), the political advocacy group.

There’s more to life than politics, despite how it probably feels to a lot of us sometimes. It’s wonderful that we share so many cultural spaces with gay and lesbian people. In many ways, it’s an excellent model of how other differences, such as race and ethnicity, can be all but ignored within the greater context of a community, even as many in that community will tend to divide up along gender lines socially. The problem comes in when you try to fit unconventionally-gendered people into gender-specific spaces. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes it works for some but not for others.

Those of us who create media can help in that, but our impact goes only so far. We can give people a place to come together and to speak to each other through the media we create, but there’s always a buffer there, the media we use in which to get our message out. Some media, like talk radio, is personal, community-oriented, and very interactive. Other media, like the Internet or print media, is less or non-interactive but still helps tour community connect to each other. We can speak to and speak with our community on the grand, worldwide scale far more efficiently than we’re able to face-to-face, person-to-person.

Gays and lesbians generally don’t have this problem, or at least, not to the extent we transfolks do. Think fast: How many local gay bars or clubs can you name? Now, how many lesbian bars? And how many tranny bars?

I used to know of two tranny bars in Manhattan, but one got shut down during the Giuliani Administration. The other, Edelweiss, I believe is still around…and that’s it, as far I know, for the entire City of New York. Nothing in Jersey, except for a club I knew of in Atlantic City twenty-five years ago, nothing in Philly. Even the Pride Centers of these cities don’t offer a whole lot for us.

Where is transgender culture?

For transpeople, it seems that home is where the Internet is. The largest physical gatherings of transpeople almost always involve an event to which transpeople often must travel a long distance in order to attend, such as a organizational convention, and many of these events are wrapped up in political advocacy. Aside from those kinds of events, the vast majority of our intra-community socialization takes place online.

It’s not surprising, therefore , that most of our community-relevant media is Internet-based as well.  Attempts have been made to bridge the cultural gap between the transgender community and the mainstream, but none have proven truly successful yet. We have no LOGO, nothing on Bravo, nothing that really serves that kind of gate-opening role for transpeople that Ellen Degeneres and “Will and Grace” did for gays and lesbians.

As someone who has made her own attempts at trying to span that divide, even after all this time I still wonder how long it will be before the mainstream media begins to get us as well and starts to incorporate us and our perspectives into the mainstream. When you’re still fighting for representation in even the mainstream media which is directly intended and marketed to your own community, hoping for real mainstream inclusion may be just a pipe dream..for now.

Where is transgender culture?

Chances are, you’re not going to find it by turning on your television or even your radio. If you’re not actually travelling somewhere where it happens to surface periodically on a regular basis, you’re probably going to find it online and in print. You can read a hundred writers and get a hundred different takes on what it means to be a transgender person. You can listen to and participate in shows like mine or Ethan’s for social and political talk and debate. You can listen to any of the many great podcasts being created by transpeople. There’s relevant trans community media out there for those who want it and seek it out, but precious little for those who can’t or won’t dig deep enough to find it.

It’s not unreasonable to believe that the reason why everyone seems to think we’re all just another variety of “homo” is because that’s what most of our popular media tells people we are, intentionally or not. We can create our own versions of virtual transgender community centers and rap groups, but it won’t be until our faces, voices, and perspectives become an integral part of popular media that we’ll begin to see that perception begin to change socially and politically in the mainstream in any real way.

Where is transgender culture?

When you really get right down to it, it’s in our hearts, in our minds, in our voices, and in our fingertips. It’s in our collective desire to reach out to each other and be a part of something far greater than ourselves. It’s in the lives we live, the media we create, and the relationships we develop with others like ourselves and those who care about us. It’s in the way we present ourselves, both to the outside world and to each other. It’s in the way we work together, play together, love together, mourn together, and fight together. It’s in how we speak up and say “We are here!”.

It’s not what others have, and maybe it never will be, but, for now, transgender culture is whatever those of us who reach out to touch each other make of it. Until we have the tools to take it to the next step, though, it’ll have to be enough. I just hope we won’t have all that much longer to wait.

Tomorrow’s the big day, when I go for my job offer interview at Target. Chances are, I won’t hear from Barnes and Noble for at least a couple of weeks. It’s fine, I just need to start working again…or maybe more specifically, I need to start making money again. If B&N turns out to be a better deal, I’ll worry about it then.

It’ll be interesting to be working again. I mean, not that I just sit doing nothing every day. I’ve been working on my book, the show, and plenty of other stuff. Still, it’s just not the same thing as getting up and going to work every day. However this all shakes out, it’ll be a good thing for me in terms of a more regular schedule and paycheck. And hey, I’ll finally get a chance to dump off all that weight I’ve put on over the last year from spending most of it sitting on my ass in front of my computer.

Of course, it’s a Friday, which almost certainly means I won’t actually be working until sometime next week. I guess that means I’ve got just a few more days of enforced vacation left…

It’s officially official:

“The Rebecca Juro Show” returns live on Thursday, October 4th at 7pm eastern 4pm pacific on TransFM and QMO. More details to follow, but you can expect lots of stuff you’ve heard from me before, and lots of surprises. It’s me and Mike again, but better. Trust me, this is gonna rock.

At some point soon, I’ll write up a post all about what you can expect on the show, but I wanted to let you know asap that there’s now and official date and time.

Stay Tuned!

…or, at least, a sudden heavy drizzle.

I’ve got an interview with Barnes and Noble tomorrow. B&N was definitely my favorite job in terms of working conditions. Not only were the people great, but  I got to spend the day around two of my favorite things, books and coffee. The inconsistency of available working hours did suck pretty bad, but the time I spent there was a lot of fun. I’ve been investing a lot of time and effort into this interview. I even had my nails done. And yet, wouldn’t you know that something would happen to compound things…sometimes, I don’t think I can ever expect to have the luxury of a simple, easy choice.

Target called tonight and offered me a job. I interviewed with them about three weeks ago, and I’d written them off as a no-go. Of course, I’m no fool. I took the job and made my incoming interview for Wednesday, the day after my B&N interview. I want to know exactly what B&N’s offering before I go to Target so that I can make an informed decision.

B&N has the aesthetic and attitude I’m most in tune with, and the store is about five minutes from home, but Target offers a regular, daily schedule that won’t conflict with my show…that’s a major attraction for me. In addition, the Target job is a placement on a special team which sets up displays, something I know how to do, and do well. That kind of position can often lead to advancement opportunities more readily than just an entry-level drone job. In the end, of course, it’ll come down to money. I need to make as much as I can, right now. Future promotion possibilities are important, but less critical than much as putting as much money as possible in my pocket as quickly as possible. To put it bluntly, I’m sick and tired of being poor.

This is so fucking weird. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had the chance to pick and choose where, much less if, I work. Assuming B&N offers me a job, which I expect, I may find myself with a hard choice to make. All other things being equal, I’d take the B&N job every time. Thing is, I doubt all things will be equal. The interesting thing will be seeing if the hours at B&N will be more reliable than they were in Princeton. If they are, I may well find myself taking the B&N job. In addition, should the word “management” work itself anywhere into either conversation, all bets are off.

Chances are, neither of these companies are going to offer me management out of the gate. I’ll have to earn the right to be considered for those jobs, and that’s just fine. I’ve done it before, twice. It might sound like ego, but the truth is that as a mid-level retail manager, I really am that good…I have to be. If there’s any one truth I’ve learned since working post-transition, it’s this: I have to be twice as good in order to be taken half as seriously. I know the job well, but it’s often a chore to get higher-ups to see past the trans thing. As a rule, the higher-up in the retail management food chain someone is, the more likely they are to be skittish about anything radically different from the norm.

The funny thing that what a lot of these people don’t realize until after I’ve been working for them for a while is that what they’re uncomfortable about is one of my greatest assets in working retail: I’m memorable. When customers come into a store I work in and they interact with me, they’ll often remember me the next time they come in. That’s a major advantage in sales. It’s my very uniqueness which makes me familiar and interesting to customers, and therefore a very effective salesperson and customer service agent. It’s really what I’m best at in retail and has proven a big help in proving my skills on the job. When it’s twice the work for half the credit, I’ll take every advantage I can get.

It’s because of this that the Barnes and Noble job would be very attractive. The Target job may or may not start me closer to a possible promotion and/or raise as a member of a special team, but the B&N job would allow me to use the skills I’m most proficient in. I was the store leader in memberships sales in Princeton, a much larger store. I had regular customers, and I worked in all parts of the store. It was the kind of situation where I didn’t get rich, but I did get a nice regular paycheck, the job wasn’t that hard, the people were very nice, and the whole atmosphere was one I felt very comfortable in.  On the other hand, it was also one that, at least at the time, offered little or no opportunity for advancement.

Even without yet knowing how much the jobs actually pay, there are a lot of arguments for and against both. By this time Wednesday, chances are I’ll have made my decision, assuming there’s a decision to make. No matter what the outcome, this is going to be interesting.

*****

I spoke to Mike Scott tonight, so I can now tell you: The first week in October is when you’ll be able to hear the return of the new and improved “Rebecca Juro Show”. The actual day of the week is yet to be determined (read: I gotta call Ethan tomorrow and ask him) , but we’re coming back! Of course, I’ll post here as soon as I have more. Don’t miss it…it’s gonna be good!

So, it looks like I’ll be working again by the end of the week…finally.

Y’know, as much as I hate looking for work, it seems like most of what I do is somehow connected, however peripherally, to finding paid work of one variety or another. Of course, I’d do my show regardless of whether or not I ever had a hope of working in radio professionally, but I’d be a liar if I said that the revamp of the live show didn’t have something to do with making what I do more professionally marketable.

Yeah, I’m being a writer, but I’m being a writer who still really wants to do radio…it’s the best I can do.

Just some more stuff to talk about…

Get it here. 

The return of the live show…Republicans and bathrooms…more.

Get it here. 

Today, while driving home from a shopping trip, a truck driver passed me going the other way, and honked his horn. After ten years of living fulltime as a woman, you’d probably think I’d be pretty desensitized to such things, and, for the most part, you’d be right. Even so, I still can’t help but feel just a little validated when this kind of thing happens. It’s not because I’m so thrilled that men find me attractive speeding down the highway at sixty miles an hour, but rather, for all the crudeness in the way it’s expressed, it’s a form of acceptance in my chosen gender that can sometimes elude me in other aspects of my life.

Some would argue that deriving even a minor sense of validation from such a blatant sexual objectification of women is anti-feminist and unworthy of any woman who defines herself as progressive or feminist,  but one’s instinctive, core emotions are rarely influenced to any real degree by such intellectually thought out social and political identities and philosophies. Indeed, for me it’s probably as much about the fact that as a forty-five year old transwoman I’m still able to inspire those truckers to honk their horns as anything else.

When you get right down to it, how many of us, regardless of sexuality or gender identity, can really say they don’t like being thought of as sexy and desirable, even when it comes from people we’d never actually consider attractive ourselves? Is it really shallow, self-centered, or anti-feminist to enjoy being thought of as pretty or handsome? Must that kind of attention always come from those we have that same kind of interest in ourselves in order to be considered valid? Personally, I don’t think so. Sure, I’d much rather see that sentiment expressed by a sexy soft butch, but I will admit that as a single woman living in suburbia, it’s nice to know I’m still considered attractive by anyone, no matter who it is.

When I first came out a decade ago, before the hormones had worked their magic, it meant a lot more. Back then, male attention helped to assuage my insecurities about my appearance and the validity of the female identity I’d only recently formally accepted as my own. I took it more as a real validation because I got none at all from women. Even today, if my MySpace inbox is any gauge, the vast majority of letters I get expressing sexual and romantic interest come from men. Of course, I tend to discount most of these as they seem to almost exclusively come from men who can’t express themselves very well in English nor seem to understand the proper use of a paragraph. The picture I use there is certainly one of my better ones, but it’s kind of difficult to take such interest seriously when virtually none of these men seem to have bothered to have read even the very first sentence of my profile, which contains the word “lesbian”. In all honesty, I’m not really sure if they just like my picture and just haven’t bothered reading my profile once they’ve seen it, or if perhaps they’re that kind of guy who consider themselves such incredibly handsome specimens of manhood that no woman, not even a lesbian, could possibly resist their masculine charms, and they’ll be the guy who can turn me straight. Despite all that, I can’t help but draw hope from the fact that if so many men find me attractive enough to write to me and say so, maybe, just maybe, some women will as well.

Truth be told, that trucker went by too fast for me to be certain if it was a man or a woman. Chances are, it was a guy, but I know there are lesbian and tranny truckers out there, so I guess I can keep telling myself that anything’s possible.

Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

So many of my friends are married, partnered, or in committed relationships of some sort that it makes it all the harder not to feel depressed about being single, not having a romantic relationship of my own, nor even just the occasional one night stand now and then. Not that I’ll ever stop looking, but after just one fairly brief long-distance relationship since I began living as a woman more than ten years ago, I sometimes wonder if the great romantic moments of my life have long since passed me by.

The Catch-22 I find myself struggling with is that as much as I want to be considered and related to as a woman in all aspects of my life, the more likely that it might become that I was about to develop an intimate relationship with another woman, the more important it would be to me to honest with her about my pre-operative transsexual status and thereby possibly define myself to her as someone other than she might be able to relate to intimately as a fellow female. Unless she’s bi or still sees me as a woman despite my current genital configuration, it’ll most likely put a quick and final end to any possibility of pursuing anything more than a purely platonic friendship with her, if even that. It hasn’t gotten to even that point in years, but if it ever does again, I know my sexual morals will compel me to risk destroying any potential intimate relationship I might have by telling any woman who might be attracted enough to consider going to bed with me that I’m biologically not the woman she probably expects me to be.

What’s the answer? Other than hoping to get lucky and find a woman who’s interested in me romantically despite my pre-op genitalia, I really have no idea. It was tough enough to find that special woman when I was still living as a guy, it’s often harder still for non-trans gays and lesbians to find that right person, and for girls like me, it’s apparently almost impossible. Short of hopping on a plane and taking a completely unaffordable vacation in San Francisco, I don’t even have any idea of where to look.

As much as I love being a woman, in some ways being a pre-operative transsexual woman really sucks.

…and not just our own.

I’d promised Bil Browning, the founder and editor of The Bilerico Project, that I’d post something a few days ago, but I never quite got around to it. I did have a good excuse, though. Not only that, but the reason I wasn’t able to post then gave me a great idea for something to post on today.

My grandmother, 94 years young, was taken to the hospital because she’d had some heart palpitations. Of course, with someone as elderly as Grandma, such events are taken quite seriously. You just never know. So, my Mom and I went into Brooklyn to see her, and were relieved to find her with her usual feisty attitude in full bloom. We’re still waiting for the results of some tests, but we were certainly encouraged to hear that the technician who performed her echocardiogram told her that her heart appeared as strong as ever and told her “Happy 100th birthday.”. Needless to say, even though we still don’t have all the answers, we went home feeling much better.

It occurs to me that while we frequently document and honor our own community history, many of us fail to remember that the story really begins long before gay or transgender civil rights were considered goals that could be credibly advocated for, even before the very labels we popularly define ourselves with today were coined, much incorporated into popular usage.

My grandparents were the first generation of either side of my family born in the United States. My great-grandmother, my grandfather’s mother, immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1910. She was put on a ship at the age of ten by Russian Jewish parents who wanted her to escape the persecution of the Kossacks.

My grandparents were a young married couple during the Depression Era, and my grandfather and his brother, my Uncle Paul, worked in the shoe industry. One of Brooklyn’s first shoe industry unions was formed by my grandfather and a group of men who worked in the industry in the basement of the Brooklyn brownstone where my grandparents lived most of their married lives and raised their family.

As is usually the case with unions, these working men wanted good jobs, good lives, and fair wages for themselves and their families, and they banded together to work toward making it happen. It was a time when hiring blacks for such jobs was often still considered inconceivable, when simply being known as a Jew could put an end to one’s career goals. When my Uncle Paul came back from World War II, he and my grandfather opened their own store, a family shoe store that’s still around today, over sixty years later, and still family-run, by my cousin Richard (my Mom and Grandmother still call him Dickie, but being from the third US-born generation of our family, I’ll do him the favor of calling him by his preferred, given name) since Uncle Paul recently passed on at the age of eighty-four.

They came from an era that seems distant and far removed from so much of what we know as modern America. When Uncle Paul died, the local newspaper carried letters from people who’d not only been fitted for their own first pairs of shoes in his store, but who had carried on that tradition by bringing their own children to him for their first pairs. They wrote of Futter Brothers Shoes as being a safe place for them growing up, where local kids could always come in and ask to use the phone to call home, and remembered my uncle as the kind of man who understood his responsibility to the community of Millburn, New Jersey as a local merchant not only to provide high-quality goods at a fair price, but also as a man who gave back to that community by being there as a safe haven and a responsible adult presence in the heart of the community that kept him in business.

Recently, my Mom and I went to the store for our own shoes, as we always have, and found the place all but empty of customers. It seems that a lot of the customers who used to be the mainstay of the store’s business now buy a lot of their shoes at the big-name discount stores. The store, now called Futter Shoes, seems more and more an anachronism these days. Grandma is one of the last of our family’s first generation born in this country, a generation that grew up with not a sense of entitlement but with the belief that the American dream was within their grasp if they worked hard and followed the rules.

It’s all so different in some ways, but in others perhaps not as much as we tend to think. Those of my generation, born during the era of John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam war, and later generations seem to often forget that there haven’t always been legally-protected civil rights for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, much less sexual and gender minorities. These protections, which now seem so intrinsic to American law as to be virtually invisible to some of us, had to be fought for and won, not only in Washington, DC, but also in American society and culture. Real acceptance of these minority groups didn’t happen overnight, not even once those rights were formally protected in the body of our country’s laws. It wasn’t only legal, political acceptance of their basic equality and treatment in the laws of our country which needed to achieved, but also their social acceptance as equals in the greater community that is America.

As it happened back then, we too are winning, slowly, but arguably considerably more quickly than those who have fought these kinds of battles before us. Once ENDA and the hate crimes bill become law, it will be a major milestone, but by no means the end of our struggle. Just as racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination continue to exist and perhaps even still flourish in some quarters today despite being declared illegal under the law in those aspects of American life constitutionally within its purview, so too will we face the same reality once our own rights become protected under federal law.

And yet, we can now look back at our history, remember how it was for our parents, grandparents, and great-parents, and take heart, knowing that we have a brighter future ahead of us. When we take a longer view of history, we begin to understand that, as Grandma likes to tell me when I start spouting off to her about LGBT civil rights advocacy, these things take time. As right as I know she is when she says it, though, I like to respond by saying that I just hope I’m not as old as she is before it happens. One thing I’m happy that we both seem to agree on is that it seems less and less likely all the time that I will be.

It’s easy to be angry, and it’s important to be. Anger inspires activism, and activism inspires change for the better. Anger and dissatisfaction with the the present are essential parts of effective activism, but so too are hope, diligence, and a never-fading belief that tomorrow will be a better day for all of us. As we draw ever closer to achieving our social and political goals, let’s make sure we never forget the most important lesson we’ve been taught by those who’ve gone before us, those who persevered, survived, and succeeded through greater trials than many of us have ever experienced or perhaps even imagined:

Anger is a powerful and necessary catalyst in changing the present, but it’s hope, faith, and hard work which truly endure and will most reliably lead us toward a better and lasting future.