On Our Nation's 234th Birthday, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness Still Elude the LGBTQA Community

First, America, Happy Birthday! It's true what they say, time really does fly. 234 years young and you don't look a day over 150. I am so proud to be an American -- in fact I well up with tears if I sit and just think about the extraordinary blessing it is to be so privileged. I remember as a child getting goose bumps as I sat on my parents lap and watched the American Legion fireworks display. I would quietly witness the dusk sky melt from orange to dark blue, smell the gun-powder from the "bombs bursting in air" and listen to the sound of the emcee's booming voice proudly shouting "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"...that memory is the heart of what America means to me.

I believe that with the blessing of being an American also comes a duty for me to work to further civil liberties from which such happiness flows. Over the past month, I have been traveling around America, celebrating LGBTQA Pride Month or Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Questioning, and Allies -- those that identify as heterosexual, but act as strong advocates of the community. Our Allies sometimes get left out of the acronym, but they play a vital role in the movement towards equality. While at these Pride Month events I raised money for local charities by signing copies of the June 2010 issue of PLAYGIRL Magazine, in which I "drop my labels," both literally, and politically. The PLAYGIRL project provided a forum for me to challenge prevailing concepts of sexuality, race and ethnicity, to explore artistically, and, as a political science student at The New School in New York, just what dropping our labels might look like. As I say in the PLAYGIRL Magazine interview (yes -- there is an interview!) I believe labels further stereotype and categorize us as separate from one another, when I believe our "sameness" to one another clearly trumps our "differences."

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