QUOTE
By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page WE06
MELISSA ETHERIDGE insists it was pure coincidence that she and actress Tammy Lynn Michaels got married just one day after then-Gov. Gray Davis signed into law California's Domestic Partners Rights and Responsibilities Act.
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With President Bush promoting a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, and legislatures and courts in California, Massachusetts and New York all addressing the issue, it's become one of the year's most dominant news stories.
\"It's amazing,\" says Etheridge, who calls gay and lesbian marriage a civil rights issue, but does not compare it with the civil rights struggle of black Americans. \"That was something you can't hide,\" she notes. \"You can hide your sexuality. You can make a choice to live this way and not tell anybody, which makes it easy to hide. It becomes an invisible thing, and it wasn't until San Francisco and the media covering these lines and lines of people [waiting to get married] that you finally put a face on it. And I think that changed a lot of people's hearts.\"
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The new album also features one of Etheridge's most overtly political songs: \"Tuesday Morning\" is about Mark Bingham, one of the four heroes on Flight 93, the jet that crashed in a Pennsylvania field after its passengers fought back against the terrorists who had hijacked it on Sept. 11, 2001. Bingham, a strapping rugby player, was gay, a fact often played down in subsequent media coverage.
\"You cannot change this / You cannot erase this / You can't pretend it's not the truth,\" Etheridge sings with conviction. \"Can you live with yourself in the land of the free / And make him any less a hero than the other three?\"
\"Nine-eleven happened, and I absorbed all that as an artist and knew that a big change had happened and that somehow I would be able to spit out something from that experience,\" Etheridge explains. \"I remember one of the first People magazines [after 9/11] and they had a whole thing on Flight 93, and it had the four heroes, including Todd Beamer and his pregnant wife and that sad, sad story. And it also had Mark Bingham, rugby player, big gay guy, how his lover drove him to the airport. And I thought, 'We've had this horrible national tragedy, but it will open our eyes to see that, hey, our 10 percent of the country is affected, too, and look, we're even one of the heroes.'
\"And then I watched that story get left behind in the TV movie -- they didn't have him be gay, and they didn't talk about it in the book. And then I saw [government officials] would not recognize the same-sex partnerships of any of the homosexual victims of the World Trade Center or Pentagon, yet they gave benefits to the families of illegal immigrants who were working at the World Trade Center. I just thought, 'Here's where they're drawing the line,' and I did start to get frustrated and enraged.\"
The original version of the song was much angrier, Etheridge reports. \"I wish I had kept one of the verses in now. . . . Long before I thought we were going to war with Iraq, I wrote a verse about 'don't ask, don't tell' and I was saying, 'If you send us off to war / And you don't ask and we don't tell as you send us off to hell / Then who are you going to contact when you send our bodies home?' It was a real heavy thing about gays in the military, about dying over there completely invisible.\"
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Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page WE06
MELISSA ETHERIDGE insists it was pure coincidence that she and actress Tammy Lynn Michaels got married just one day after then-Gov. Gray Davis signed into law California's Domestic Partners Rights and Responsibilities Act.
....
With President Bush promoting a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, and legislatures and courts in California, Massachusetts and New York all addressing the issue, it's become one of the year's most dominant news stories.
\"It's amazing,\" says Etheridge, who calls gay and lesbian marriage a civil rights issue, but does not compare it with the civil rights struggle of black Americans. \"That was something you can't hide,\" she notes. \"You can hide your sexuality. You can make a choice to live this way and not tell anybody, which makes it easy to hide. It becomes an invisible thing, and it wasn't until San Francisco and the media covering these lines and lines of people [waiting to get married] that you finally put a face on it. And I think that changed a lot of people's hearts.\"
....
The new album also features one of Etheridge's most overtly political songs: \"Tuesday Morning\" is about Mark Bingham, one of the four heroes on Flight 93, the jet that crashed in a Pennsylvania field after its passengers fought back against the terrorists who had hijacked it on Sept. 11, 2001. Bingham, a strapping rugby player, was gay, a fact often played down in subsequent media coverage.
\"You cannot change this / You cannot erase this / You can't pretend it's not the truth,\" Etheridge sings with conviction. \"Can you live with yourself in the land of the free / And make him any less a hero than the other three?\"
\"Nine-eleven happened, and I absorbed all that as an artist and knew that a big change had happened and that somehow I would be able to spit out something from that experience,\" Etheridge explains. \"I remember one of the first People magazines [after 9/11] and they had a whole thing on Flight 93, and it had the four heroes, including Todd Beamer and his pregnant wife and that sad, sad story. And it also had Mark Bingham, rugby player, big gay guy, how his lover drove him to the airport. And I thought, 'We've had this horrible national tragedy, but it will open our eyes to see that, hey, our 10 percent of the country is affected, too, and look, we're even one of the heroes.'
\"And then I watched that story get left behind in the TV movie -- they didn't have him be gay, and they didn't talk about it in the book. And then I saw [government officials] would not recognize the same-sex partnerships of any of the homosexual victims of the World Trade Center or Pentagon, yet they gave benefits to the families of illegal immigrants who were working at the World Trade Center. I just thought, 'Here's where they're drawing the line,' and I did start to get frustrated and enraged.\"
The original version of the song was much angrier, Etheridge reports. \"I wish I had kept one of the verses in now. . . . Long before I thought we were going to war with Iraq, I wrote a verse about 'don't ask, don't tell' and I was saying, 'If you send us off to war / And you don't ask and we don't tell as you send us off to hell / Then who are you going to contact when you send our bodies home?' It was a real heavy thing about gays in the military, about dying over there completely invisible.\"
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