In many places You can marry and be kicked out by landlord when Your Partner Moves in
J. Edgar” screenwriter Dustin Lance Black takes the stage at the benefit and brings the problem of gay protections on the states.
What comes after marriage for the LGBTQ rights movement?
Dustin Lance Black has dedicated much of his work to addressing this question, both in and out of Hollywood. It’s part of the reason he joined Emmy-nominated “Orange is The New Black” star Laverne Cox and Jason Collins, the first openly gay NBA player, Wednesday at Chicago House’s sixth annual speaker series luncheon on “Gender, Race and Economic Diversity: A Discussion of Inclusivity and Equality beyond Marriage.”
For Black, it’s a topic informed both by his achievements as an out, gay director and award-winning screenwriter of “Milk,” “Big Love” and J. Edgar,” and his Southern, Mormon upbringing.
“Families are important to me and a lot of young people growing up in the South, and right now for a young LBGT person in the South, in order to live as a first-class citizen in the U.S. and not a second-class citizen, they have to move. They have to leave, they have to go to the coasts,” he told RedEye ahead of Wednesday’s event. “For some young people that sounds great, but for many that means leaving their family, leaving their friends, leaving the world that they love, and that’s not right.”
Black pointed out how the lack of housing and employment protections in many states creates a strange legal incongruity: A couple’s same-sex marriage might be recognized in some states, but, “if they take their wedding pictures and put them up at work, they can be legally fired.”
Black also has advocated for the U.S. to grant asylum to LGBTQ people abroad, in countries like Uganda or Russia that have restrictive, anti-gay laws, with “Uprising of Love,” a performance series borne of the controversy surrounding the Sochi Olympics and Russia’s anti-gay policies.
Closer to home, Black would like to see more LGBT representation in TV writers’ rooms, especially as more shows add more LGBT characters and take on topics of gender representation and sexuality.
“In order to have these stories and characters ring true and be as specific and real as heterosexual folks, you need to have more LGBT writers and writers in diversity in those rooms,” he said. “God bless all the white, male writers who have been in the rooms over the decades, but they really won’t have the experience to write some of those characters accurately.”
But for better or worse, marriage equality has turned into wedding fever in many places, Black said, and he isn’t immune.
“A lot of people keep asking me all the time if I’m going to get married. I don’t know yet, but I’d like to,” he said. “I grew up Mormon, man, I’m not actively Mormon now, but you can’t take the Utah out of the boy.”
As for the people in the U.S. who would like to see marriage equality laws repealed, Black said he’d just like to soothe their worries.
“I feel like I just want to give them a big hug and say, ‘Hey, we don’t want to break anything,’” he said. “We’re just going to sell a lot more ice sculptures and wedding cakes, and it’s going to be all right.”
Black would like to have children someday, he said, and after that happens he is envisioning his family taking a big road trip together—one where his family’s rights would be recognized wherever he chooses to go.
“If you do a cross-country trip with your kids and your spouse, as you cross state lines you go from married to not married, married, not married, equal, not equal,” he said. “It’s very interesting in terms of how you’re protected and perceived in this country. It’s like driving across a checkerboard, and that would have to change.”
rcromidas@tribune.com | @rachelcromidas
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