Thank you Torie. I want to thank CAPE and all the members of the Board and the dinner committee for this honor. The work that you are doing is vital to American democracy, to the lives of California's gay and lesbian citizens, and to the lives of those Californians who are young and those yet to be born who will one day realize that they are gay or lesbian. You are a young organization with a brave vision. I wish you well.

Ever since I was a child I held dear my identification as an American. In those days America was doing brave things. Our young people were swept up and engaged. We were sending men to the moon when it was a ridiculous proposition. Neil Armstrong was 38 when he set foot on the moon. Robert Kennedy — 39 years old — was talking about love and compassion, down on his knees with the little kids — dirt all over their faces in the poor coal mining towns of Appalachia — where there were no votes to be had. Martin Luther King — 33 years old — had the audacity to believe that one young black man could turn the tide of history. It was a time of heroes. It was a time when we were attempting not plausible things, but wild dreams — things that were utterly impossible. We were naive enough to believe that our dreams could come true. We are not naive enough anymore. We were on the cusp of it all. We stood, for a brief shining moment, for the same things that Superman stood for. No wonder children were excited. They don't seem as excited about the idea of America anymore. When I go to Disneyland I always drag my friends in to see, “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln,” and the place is empty. It’s sad to me. When my parents took me there back in the 70s the place was jam-packed. It was an e-ticket.

As a teenager, I wanted to be President of the United States. And then I realized, when I was 20, that I was gay. And not only did I feel that I had no right to be President, but worse, I felt I had lost my right to my American identification. I felt degenerate, and, like most of us, I was left alone with that grief and that confusion. Grief at the loss of my America and my whole life plan. I was an outsider in my own country.

Robert Kennedy said something important about what it means to be an American:

“Each of us — from the wealthiest to the starving children I have seen in this country — their stomachs bloated by starvation — we all share one precious possession, and that is the name, American. It is not easy to know what that means, but in part, to be an American means to have been an outcast and a stranger. To have come to the exiles country. And to know that he who denies the outcast and the stranger still amongst us, he also denies America”

Tonight, I know, that is not who a person chooses to love that earns or takes away the right to call oneself an American — it is what ideals one chooses to embrace or to discard that determines our right to that precious possession, and that he who denies the young lesbian 10th grader her right to a safe and supportive education, he also denies America. That he who denied Matthew Shepard his right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, he also denies America. That he who denies a young high school student of his dream to become President of the United States, simply because he is gay — he also denies America. And he who denies America ought to re-think his principles and ideals, or he ought to move to another country where the constitution says that certain people are more equal than others.

There are 23 million people in sub-Saharan Africa with AIDS tonight. Some 40 million people will die there within the next twenty years without a vaccine. These people are outcasts and strangers too. And the American vision of freedom extends to them as well. But it seems that our leaders, on both sides of the aisle, have succumbed to a withered skeleton of America's meaning — one that values self-involvement over reaching out a hand. A vision that ends at our borders instead of one that has no end. A vision mired in the uninspired margins of management issues — the nuances of prescription drug plans and tax cuts — rather than shining over the great sea of need that exists for the impoverished and the dispossessed around the globe.

What has distinguished the gay and lesbian community over the last twenty years is the way that we have stood for the American dream in the age of AIDS. We have said bring us your emaciated, your lesioned, your dying. We must stand up for ourselves, yes, when anyone would deny us our heritage, or speak of us inappropriately. We must demand special rights — the same special rights enjoyed by every other American. But we have also to be careful not to fall into the trap of self-involvement that is at the very root of what the right wing stands for. We must be defined, not by our concern for ourselves, but by our concern for others. We must bring the same passion to the AIDS epidemic in Africa that we brought to the AID epidemic in our backyards. We must demonstrate to America that our AIDS organizing was not an act of self-involvement, but a common and decent expression of human kindness, and one that has no bounds and knows no borders. This is the most powerful way for us to be counted. This is the way to get the children excited again. To stand for brave and impossible things, that have no apparent bearing on our own lives. We must get down on our knees with the children of Africa. And with the poor children of America.

I am talking about a radical departure from marginalizing ourselves by standing only in the narrowness of our own issues, to expanding ourselves, like Martin Luther King did when he spoke out against the Viet Nam War, expanding ourselves to include any enemy that threatens the true meaning of America. We must enlarge ourselves. It is for that kind of heroism that the youth of America are hungry. Leadership, that speaks once again to the bold ideals upon which this nation was founded. This is the way to set an American example. This is a strategy they are not expecting from us. And that's because it is not born of strategic thinking, but rather, of common human decency. If we stand for that, surely, common human decency will one day be returned to us.

Thank you.