On Saturday May 1st PFLAG honored Liza Minnelli at the Straight for Equality Awards Gala. Liza! (don’t you think her name should always be followed by an exclamation point?) was presented with the 2010 Straight for Equality in Entertainment Award, recognizing her lifelong role as a gay icon—oh sorry, I meant Straight Ally of the LGBT community.
Caroline Rhea emceed, running around the banquet room at the Marriott Marquis in her stockings, joking that if her Spanx blew she’d take out the first row with nylon shrapnel. She was the cutest, armed with self-deprecating humor and enough dick jokes to keep the bids high at the live auction, and I’m sure auction host "Amazing Race IV" winner Reichen Lehmkuhl’s chiseled jaw and perma tan didn’t hurt. Lehmkuhl’s jaw line is lost on me, but he won this lesbian’s heart when he got the entire audience to drink a toast in honor of his recently deceased cat.
Straight for Equality, in case you haven’t been keeping up, is a project of PFLAG National to encourage, educate, and empower straight allies to speak out for their LGBT friends and family. By bestowing honors on celebrities and businesses who make an effort to eradicate injustice around them PFLAG shows our straight allies how much of a difference their voices and efforts can make. It’s a brilliant idea; think about the people around you who harbor no prejudice, if all of them made an effort to say so and declare their support we could drown out the hateful rhetoric coming from the homophobes and the far right.
It’s not enough to be an ally, anyone who believes in equal rights
for all people is obligated to publicly fight injustice. Individuals who believe in social justice but don’t speak out because they fear backlash from their community are themselves part of the oppressed. Their right to espouse their own beliefs are curtailed by the same hatred that legislates gays and lesbians into second-class status. Think on that for a while.
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