This was not quite two years after the death of Matthew Shepard, the University of Wyoming student who was brutally murdered for being gay. We were barely two seasons into what was then a groundbreaking television series, “Will and Grace.” Spring 2000 was so long ago that network executives were still afraid to put an openly gay Ellen DeGeneres on television. That was the social climate then. And we were heading to D.C. to help change it.
Then two transgendered women boarded the bus.
I won’t repeat the jokes I whispered about them to my friend and some of the others nearby. I’ll just say their presence exposed me for the fraud I didn’t even know I was. It was the spring of 2000, and I — an openly gay man seeking LGBT equality — had just rendered the T silent without even noticing. One can only imagine what those women had to endure from people who didn’t consider themselves “progressive”.
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