my eyes seem to be misting up more than usual the past few days. last night, sat in the audience of the brit awards, i got watery-eyed several times… surrounding myself with the best of british music, feeling part of it all, cheering on jamelia and booing the reality teevee wankers and understanding the nuances between uk garage and uk r’n'b and us r’n'b and us hip-hop. it just felt really good to part of something so fresh and amazing and [relatively] radical as the uk music scene. even if i was sat at home on my couch.

it could just be a usual case of suicide tuesday, but sat there i felt joy laughing at the darkness and raising an eyebrow at daniel beddingfield‘s win and watching justin big-up lemar and cringe as busted destroyed another .popstarz anthem. as i continue my months of unemployment/soul-searching/plotting-and-scheming/drinking, it’s becoming so obviously obvious that london is my home, and will be home for a while. this i know.

tears of joy have been popping up each and every time i read about the gay weddings in san francisco. what a pleasant shocker—the new mayor gavin newsom, 2 weeks into office, ignores governator arnie and bush co.‘s conservative bible-thumping agenda, and begins issuing marriage licenses to [as of midday wednesday] some 3,000 same-sex couples. there are so many ways to look at this event, and the significance of these past few days:

• many of the couples who drove cross-country [or further], queued up for hours and hours [or longer], were… well… plain. chubby 50yo lesbians wearing american flag sweatshirts. 35yo office workers with bad supercuts haircuts. couples that had been together for 11 years. or 28 years. with a kid. or 2 dogs. or 2 kids and a kitty. please, please, please explain to me how validating these couples’ relationships [with a marriage certificate, some tax benefits and a few other bits of legalese] will destroy the sanctity of marriage or promote homosexuality? it doesn’t—all it does is improve their lives, their families’ livs, and doesn’t affect you one. single. bit.

  and, don’t you dare start quoting the bible, cuz i’ll smack you right back for sowing a field with mixed seed or eating rabbit or wearing cotton/poly blends or working on saturday.

• that a civil servant like mayor newsom would have the cojones to circumvent and challenge california state law so dramatically is shocking, considering the patriotic/scaredycat attitude which seems to be overwhelming the bush co. nation-state. this, combined with the astounding massachusetts ruling are the first few pushes towards true equality.

  equality, like they have in the netherlands and canada, for chrissakes. it’s momentum. unstoppable momentum. bigotry around sexuality is going to seem as inhumane and barbaric as sexism and racism, it’s just a question of who stands up, when, and fixes the preposterous situation.

• hearing about the dozens of volunteers who helped perform the ceremonies, who gave up their weekends, who brought over food, who made signs of support, who threw rose petals, who played chamber music, it all just warms my heart. hearing about street parties in my old neighborhood the castro, of jewelry stores running out of rings and champagne flying of the shelves, connects this week with other victories like the age of consent and the sodomy ruling and section 17 and the stonewall riots.

it looks like this year’s american presidential debates and election will bring it all out into the open. let’s talk about why civil partnerships [separate-but-equal] won’t cut it. let’s clarify that marriage is a governmental institution, not a religious one. let’s quote the bible. let’s talk about how horrible an idea it would be to permanently amend the constitution. let’s bring up, again, for the millionth time that gays are child molesters [most child molesters are straight men] or how homosexualit is not a disease, nor is it contagious. or how maybe, just maybe, instilling in young children that being gay is acceptable, and that, yes, you can live happily ever after with a boy or a girl, how instilling this in children will prevent suicides and horrible bullying and horrible adolescences.

i have a dream. a dream that one day, this won’t fucking be a defining characteristic of people’s personalities, that it won’t be a monkey on 10% 20% of the population’s back, and that modern america won’t be dragged around like a brain-dead pet monkey on a leash by a brain-dead bible-thumping hypocrite like dubya. phew!

or maybe i’ll just ignore america, listen to my brit-pop and my brit-rock and my uk-garage and celebrate living in a place like london, where things smell a helluva lot more intelligent.

sure, the uk may have its conservative areas, but it’s nowhere near as bad as those states colored red on the last presedential election’s map. remember matthew limon. remember matthew shepherd. think about fred phelps. no thanks—even in wales they like will young, even in scotland they watch graham norton, and even in finsbury park, when i walk home at 425am, the roving bands of teenage hoodlums, when they yell hey, puffta!, they mean it affectionately.