Thursday, July 30, 2009

Honored as Bridge Builders

Hello again everyone! We had a great time last week and thank you all for your good wishes and encouraging words. I know I need to get busy blogging again.


When I logged in the other day I discovered that Wendy from Burning Or Building Bridges In The Community? had chosen to award me with her Bridge Builder Award that is for "a blogger or web writer who, in their connections with others, really has a heart for building bridges between all different types of people. Someone who leaves you with a little more hope, humor, humility, happiness.
"

She also let me know there are two rules for this award: The first rule is to write 3 ways you build bridges between yourself and others. The second is to nominate 3 of your favorite blogs/writers for this award. The nominating part is easy of course, I read three writers that do the above four things very well:

SisterFriends Together SisterFriends Together is an outreach ministry of Grace Unfolding Ministries, and was created to provide a safe and welcoming online faith community for lesbian, bisexual, questioning and transgender women. It’s a place where women can share fears and ask questions in their journey to reconcile and integrate their sexuality and faith.

Jude, (geekgirl) our inexhaustible ally from LGBT Latest Science and who also has the LGBT Lessons for Straight People Category at Jaysays. She is also responsible for turning our allies blue on Twitter!

And Hugh, another straight ally from Meet Adam and Steve, because we should all be as enthusiastic about our full equal rights as he is!

I guess two of the ways I try to offer hope and reach out to build bridges between different types of people is of course this blog and the Blogging For Truth site.

While we tend to talk about many different things on T & L After 40, it's main mission is to share the coming out process later in life, how you must be sure you can handle things, that you must be ready, that it is scary, and that yes, friends will be lost, that your family relations will be strained.

When first coming out, most sites made it sound like if you just follow some formula everything will be OK, here are the steps now go for it, but it isn't easy at all. It is scary, We know it because it was scary for us too, still is sometimes, but as scary as it can be, it is really so much better to no longer live the lie. I think it would have been nice if someone had been there to tell me how really hard it is, though it wouldn't have stopped me. I would have just been better prepared. We try to be as honest about it as possible to help others be better prepared as well. The private network Late In Life Lesbians is an offshoot of this blog to further help each other in our daily lives.

Blogging for Truth's mission is to get as many facts out to counter the lies that the Anti-Gay Industry has spent the last 30-40 years spreading to the general public. Lies that have seeped into every aspect of our lives, from books, news, movies and even into our own subconscious. Through that site I hope to fight not only public perception, but our own internalized belief system that is not based on truth. Since becoming an activist for our rights, I sometimes wonder who it is harder to convince that we are not freaks, but simply human beings in every sense of that word, the public at large, or our own community.

The third way is something I have tried to do most of my life, though not so much online but in everyday interactions with people. That has been my lifelong fight against bigotry in all forms, especially between ethnic groups. My grandmother, Louise Shaw, was biracial who hid her African American heritage all her life. (Yes, I do see the irony in the way I hid my sexuality.) She lived a very hard lie though she was one of the most amazing women ever to have graced this earth, the self hatred based on lies and fear, never allowed her to fully enjoy her truly amazing life because she always feared discovery. One of the greatest accomplishments of genetic research in my opinion has been the realization at last, that there is no such thing as different races, only different shades of skin color. We as human beings are 99% the same, the other 1% accounts for our individuality and the diseases we may have, the more we learn the truth of what this means, maybe someday, hate based on lies anyway, will disappear from the earth.

Thank you Wendy for this award, and thank you for always building bridges yourself.
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