As we end this month of GLBTQ Pride I continue to wonder if our movement has learned from its past, for I am troubled by the reluctance of many gays and lesbians to acknowledge their economic privilege and their desire to portray themselves as "just like everybody else." Unfortunately, this is a mindset that leaves out lots of people—in fact, it almost always takes the "B" and the "T" out of GLBT, let alone those who use the dreaded "Q" word to self-identify because they refuse to be constrained by narrow binary categories of "homosexual" and "heterosexual," "gay" or "lesbian." It is usually the case that when a movement for equality strives to assimilate into the mainstream and become like "everybody else," that "everybody" (and its companion word "normal") always seems to come down to those who are white and from the middle and upper classes. This seems to be true when one examines lesbian and gay history. For all of our liberal-speak, many of us continue to reap the benefits of privilege—by virtue of being white or male or economically comfortable or able to "pass" as straight. We forget that many of the pioneers of the gay liberation movement were working class dykes, people of color, and drag queens and kings—those who could not "pass," who got tired of abuse at the hands of the police and mistreatment by the structures and systems of heteronormative society. Nowadays we often regard them as "fringe" movements of the larger lesbian and gay community, but at the beginning they were at the forefront. Moreover, we who reap the benefits of their struggle have pushed their concerns to the margins in our quest for "civil rights"—for ourselves and those who look, act, and think like us. However, as Latina theologian Mayra Rivera points out, the people who inhabit crossroads, borderlands, and margins (los atravesados) are perhaps the best situated to construct a more inclusive ideology of liberation because they are further from the center and less prone to co-optation by the status quo ("God at the Crossroads," in the anthology Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire, 2004, p. 187).

Lesbian activist Carmen Vazquez agrees: "A lesbian and gay movement strategically focused on assimilation into the status quo leaves huge pieces of my soul in prison.... In a society that values economic profit above the individual and communal needs of its citizens, a queer ‘mainstreaming’ strategy leaves those of us who happen to be female, of color, working-class, or poor still knocking on the door of a freedom that can’t be realized without a conscious redistribution of wealth.... My full participation in a democratic society should not require that I wear a dress, act white, f*** a man, or remain mute in the face of the obscene redistribution of wealth upward that is leaving one U.S. working-class community after another feeling hopeless, alienated, and furious." ("Spirit and Passion," in the anthology Queerly Classed: Gay Men and Lesbians Write about Class, 1997, p. 132)

Vazquez is correct to bring the notion of the soul into the discussion of equality and societal rights, for those who are pushed away from both mainstream society and the gay and lesbian rights movement experience a shrinking of their souls, a diminution of their ability to realize that they too are created in the image and likeness of the Creator, that wise and mischievous Spirit who has put diversity in front of our faces whether we like it or not. Spirit is about passion and yearning. It is about the eroticism that is more than sexual release but is rather the inner satisfaction and sense of completion that comes from being in touch with all of our feelings and desires and refusing to consider them dirty or inappropriate. When we keep those who are different from us at arm’s length, we "other" them and imply that there is something wrong with them because they don’t measure up to some simple equation of normalcy that some unknown someone made up somewhere sometime ago. And, whether we realize it or not, that kind of othering shrinks all of our souls; our divine spirits dry up when we seek to confine them to human categories and culturally-constructed roles. When we place our own expectations on other people who are themselves unique creations of Spirit, we make them into commodities to be traded or thrown away at a whim. When we look out at the GLBTQ community of Rehoboth, do we see the "B" and the "T," the non-white, the working-class, the poor, and the other Others, or do we simply see the white and the privileged, the "decent" gays and lesbians who behave "appropriately" and may therefore be accorded certain rights by the majority? As we journey through summer 2007 and the accompanying parties, balls, festivals, dances, and soirees, let’s look around this beautiful town of ours and put aside our privilege for a moment to ask, "Who are we leaving out?"