I was raised in an outer suburb of Louisville, Kentucky in Bullitt County – part of an area known as the Bible Belt where socially conservative evangelical Protestantism dominates the culture – during the 1970′s when the American religious right with their extremely anti-gay ideology began their political ascent. Upon high school graduation, I fled north to the liberal sanctuary Oberlin College and graduated with a Bachelor of Music from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.
It was during my matriculation to Oberlin that I first experienced what it was like to feel safe as a gay person. I remember sitting with other freshmen students as we were asked who among us were gay, not as a sign of derision but as one of welcome. At Oberlin I confronted my internalized homophobia – the fear, shame and self-hatred I hadn’t been able to defend against (though I had tried mightily) during my youth in Kentucky. Without a doubt, at Oberlin, surrounded by wonderful progressive people, I began to understand my inextricable place in the unfolding LGBT Civil Rights Equality Movement.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that a lot of great media focused on the fight for LGBT equality goes undiscovered. Thus, in 2008 and 2009, I began curating Gay Rights Media.
Find me online via PatrickYaeger.com.
"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself." ~Harvey Fierstein
"Burst down those closet doors once and for all, and stand up and start to fight." ~Harvey Milk
"Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood. This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spread all too easily to victimize the next minority group. || We have a lot more work to do in our common struggle against bigotry and discrimination. I say "common struggle" because I believe very strongly that all forms of bigotry and discrimination are equally wrong and should be opposed by right-thinking Americans everywhere. Freedom from discrimination based on sexual orientation is surely a fundamental human right in any great democracy, as much as freedom from racial, religious, gender, or ethnic discrimination." ~Coretta Scott King
"When someone asks me, "are gay rights civil rights?" my answer is always, "Of course, they are." Civil rights are positive legal prerogatives: the right to equal treatment before the law. These are the rights shared by everyone. There is no one in the United States who does not, or should not, enjoy or share in enjoying these rights. Gay and lesbian rights are not special rights in any way. It isn't "special" to be free from discrimination. It is an ordinary, universal entitlement of citizenship." ~Julian Bond
"The job of the gay community is not to deal with extremists who would castigate us or put us on an island and drop an H-bomb on us. The fact of the matter is that there is a small percentage of people in America who understand the true nature of the homosexual community. There is another small percentage who will never understand us. Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America, legislatively, morally, and psychologically, such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly manifest that hate. That's our job today: to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest antigay sentiment." ~Bayard Rustin
Influences: Harvey Milk, Larry Kramer, Gene Robinson, Mel White, Matthew Shephard, Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Siddhartha Gautama.
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