In her first ever blog for OUTinPerth, News and Online Editor Megan Smith reflects on her recent trip to America and the change that she believes is surely coming…

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For anyone who has left home for a long period of time, you can understand the complicated feelings that come from a return. It’s that sense, not so unlike déjà vu, that everything is the same, but different, that so much has changed and nothing at all. You pass places and catch up with people full of memories, and if you are a big sentimental softie like I am, you try not to get too nostalgic about it all.

However, on my most recent trip back to America this September and October, with election day looming, I could not help but reflect on how much has changed in the ten years since I left my small town of Chesterton, Indiana.

Ten years ago I was a 16-year-old Midwestern girl from a Mormon family (the same religion many gay activists are blaming for Proposition 8 passing in California). I had seen gay people on TV and in movies, but had never imagined they were actually out there somewhere living normal lives. In the world of my small town, gay people simply did not exist.

That changed, however, one day in my high school English class, when a student next to me noticed one of the posters our teacher had put on the wall. The poster said ‘Perhaps, history has set the record a little too straight’ and featured pictures of famous people, like Walt Whitman and Eleanor Roosevelt, who were believed to have been gay or bisexual. We, being the mature teenagers we were, mocked the poster and called our teacher’s sexuality into question. She was obviously ‘a dyke’ and her efforts to generate a discussion about diversity and acceptance fell on deaf ears. The next day, parents rang and complained to the principal, and the teacher was asked to take the poster down. She could have bent to the pressure and the whole thing would have ended there and surely been forgotten, but she did not take the easy path, she took a stand.

Her refusal to take down the poster quickly became a community-wide debate. The school board voted unanimously to take the poster down and the teacher was asked to take a leave of absence.

The news coverage of the debate attracted the attention of none other than Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, and one spring day, I drove to school and walked past Phelps and a group of protesters holding up ‘God Hates Fags’ signs. There was no counter protest, no Gay-Straight Student Alliance meeting to discuss how homophobic and absurd the picketers were. My classmates and I just walked quickly past the protest and into the school where the blinds were drawn.

Eventually the protestors left, the teacher returned (though not the controversial poster) and my small town returned to its quaint normalcy. But the event stuck with me, and ten years later, returning to that town with my girlfriend, the irony struck fear into my gut. I could not stop myself from remembering Fred Phelps and his henchmen a decade earlier and that my community, which confronted a teacher over a poster simply because it acknowledged the positive contributions of gay people in society, could not find a voice to confront hatemongers hurling homophobic slurs at their children.

As I walked with my partner down the main street of my town, nothing much seemed to have changed. It was the same buildings and faces, though slightly older, I recalled from a decade before. But something felt palpably different.

The change was a subtle and a slow one, a shift in the mindsets of the lifelong residents of ‘Main Street, USA’. And as those I had grown up with recognized me, they came over hugged me and my partner, invited us to stop in for a chat and told us to keep in better touch. Perhaps they were just being polite and began to speak about us in gossipy whispers as soon as we turned our back. But I believe it was something more, I believe that in the past decade, the fight for equal rights has begun to win over the hearts and minds of small town America.

A few weeks later, I had left America and was glued to a TV in Amsterdam, watching as the 2008 Presidential election came to its climax. Indiana, a state that has been convincingly conservative and the headquarters for the Ku Klux Klan for the entirety of my lifetime, was now referred to as a potential swing state.

On my trip to America, I saw first-hand the ‘No on Proposition 8’ rallies in San Francisco and passed through Connecticut just days after they legalized same-sex marriage, but it was only when I sat watching the state of Indiana change from red to blue and help a black man win the Presidency, that I realized it was more than just the urban gay ghettos calling for a change, it was all of America.

As Obama accepted the nomination for President of the United States and acknowledged America’s diversity –’It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America’ – I thought of the people in Chesterton, Indiana and the countless towns like it. They, I thought, are the people whose change of heart will write the future of the gay rights movement in America.

Change? ‘Yes we can!’

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