Stacy Barneveld-Taylor and Petra Barneveld-Taylor
Foreword by Dustin Lance Black
Academy Award, Best Original Screenplay, Milk, 2009
Writer: J. Edgar, 2011; 8 the Play, 2013
ABC TV mini-series creator: When We Rise, 2017
Growing up in a conservative, Mormon, military home in San Antonio, Texas, some would say the deck was stacked against me. I knew I was gay from around six years old and was certain that meant I was going to hell. If anyone ever found out, I’d be shunned by my peers and bring great shame to my family. In a massive turn of luck, my mom fell in love with an Army soldier who had orders to ship out to California. We packed up our yellow Malibu Classic and headed West. It was there I first heard the true story of Harvey Milk, an openly gay leader who won at the ballot box by extinguishing fear with hope. Hearing his story literally saved my life.
As a filmmaker working behind the scenes in Hollywood, I could be openly gay and mostly avoid homophobia. So when my screenplay for Milk won the Academy Award, I followed my forefathers’ and foremothers’ examples and shared my own story on the Oscar’s massive stage in hopes of sending yet another message of hope to LGBTQ viewers who had been shunned, marginalized, turned out by their families, or condemned by their churches. I ended my speech that night with a wish of my own—that perhaps one day I’d fall in love and get married, too. After half a decade of work as an activist and organizer fighting for marriage equality, I am now engaged to a professional athlete with even greater passion and discipline (not to mention abs) than I will ever have, and we live happily in London together today. My dream has come true. But even with marriage equality won in the US, our larger, global dreams of LGBTQ equality for all are still far from realized.
For too long our stories have been robbed from us, buried in fear and shame. Until recently, we would have been labeled mentally ill or criminal for even claiming our stories as our own. In many countries that is still the case. So diving back into an excavation of our long buried LGBTQ history with ABC’s miniseries, When We Rise, I gathered a group of diverse artists to help tell more of our stories in an even more inclusive fashion. But even this effort only scratches the surface. Far more light must be shed on who we are and where we come from. It is our combined histories, efforts, and stories that help define us as a people, pull us out of isolation, bring us together in community, and inspire us to rise up by reminding us that we have risen before, fought back before, faced backlash before, and won. Sharing our stories and our histories is not an exercise in nostalgia. Our history laid manifest is the foundation of our power.
Tom Daley, British Olympic diver and his fiancé, Dustin Lance Black, in London, UK
This book, Pride & Joy: LGBTQ Artists, Icons and Everyday Heroes, by longtime LGBTQ activist Kathleen Archambeau, empowers queer youth to do more than survive, but to thrive, whatever the challenges, whatever the losses, whatever the risks, wherever you find yourself. It encourages LGBTQ citizens of the world to live open, happy, fulfilling, strong and successful lives, and utilizes the power of true stories to demonstrate that a brighter, freer future is possible even in what feel like impossible circumstances. The stories told in this book are not simply reflections. Combined and shared, they have the power to help us recognize and fortify our own tremendous strength.
I don’t want LGBTQ youth coming out to their parents to experience what I did when my liberal, native San Franciscan, Irish-American Catholic mother responded, “I’d love all my children— even if they were murderers, drug addicts, or prostitutes.” She sincerely thought she was being broad-minded, to which I replied, “Do you realize, Mom, that you’re comparing being gay to being criminal, mentally ill, or dissolute?” Redemption came that next Mother’s Day when she asked for the book, Love, Ellen: A Mother Daughter Journey, by Betty DeGeneres, instead of flowers. Identifying with a celebrity mother reconciled my mother to the fact that her firstborn was a lesbian and it wasn’t the end of the world. I don’t want LGBTQ young professionals to experience what I did as a closeted lesbian in a corporation where it was literally dangerous to come out in the early 1980s. In one of my Persuasive Speaking classes at a Silicon Valley high-technology company, one of my students, an educated male American engineer, delivered a speech justifying murder for only five crimes, one of which was homosexuality. At another tech company, I was outed by a former friend and colleague and subsequently fired by a “cracker” CEO. A labor lawyer advised that I had no recourse since I was not out and couldn’t prove that this was a targeted “layoff.” The next corporate job, I was out to my department, but not to the salespeople I was training around the world. When the secretary outed me to the entire building at corporate headquarters, I had recourse with my boss and HR because I was out and was, subsequently, promoted, and the secretary moved to another building with a stern warning. One night during Pride week in San Francisco’s Castro District, I was walking with my partner and a group of teenagers taunted us, threatening to attack us when, fortunately, a phalanx of gay men from a nearby bar came out and surrounded us, protecting us from what was sure to become yet another hate crime. When I first met my Kiwi wife, she was not a citizen and we couldn’t marry in the US. This caused us to make all kinds of jujitsu moves; from becoming Civil Union partners in New Zealand to carrying Power of Attorney papers everywhere we went to paying extraordinary taxes and tax preparation fees because we could not marry. That was not that long ago: Marriage Equality was just won in the US Supreme Court on June 26, 2015.
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) found that 53 percent of Americans are still closeted at work (“The Cost of the Closet and The Rewards of Inclusion,” HRC, 5/7/14). Within the US, twenty states still have no legal protections against employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, and four other states have no legal protections except for state employees. Only twenty states offer full employment protection based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Since the Human Rights Campaign has assessed corporations through its Corporate Equality Index (CEI), 92 percent of the Fortune 500 prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and 199 scored 100 percent, while 327 of the Fortune 500 scored 91 percent or higher