Politics begins at home.

In the late-1970s era of New Wave music, a singer named Lene Lovich wrote a song called "Home." It began, "Home is where the heart is / Home is so remote / Home is just emotion / Sticking in my throat / Let's go to your place / Let's go to your place." That song strikes me as the perfect metaphor for the relationship many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people have had to those complicated places we call home. Lovich had it right: GLBT people have very complex feelings about the many places we came from--our families of origin, the towns and communities in which we grew up, sometimes the countries we emigrated from--and these have often been difficult places for us to embrace. There is pain and struggle attached to their memory. Our attachment to home is complicated because homophobia for many of us began at home and in our hometowns--at the dinner table, on the neighborhood playground, in the school yard at recess, in our churches and synagogues.

For years we have said to each other, "Get me out of here--I cannot wait to leave. Let's go to your place." Millions of us moved away from our rural and small-town homes to urban centers. We made these cities our new homes, and we maintained an uneasy tie to the places of our birth and childhood memories, to the families and communities that could not contain our sexual identities despite their urgent efforts. Sometimes we made domestic, private home lives that provided havens. Our home was private, personal, about safety and comfort and beauty. The dirty world of gay politics was somewhere else--in Washington, D.C., in New York City, not on our block or in our suburban neighborhood or in our parents' houses.

I think this relationship to home began to change in the late 1980s with the second national march on Washington (held in 1987) and with the transformation AIDS made in many of our lives and in the construction of gay communities. The 1987 march and the AIDS epidemic energized millions of GLBT people who had never considered themselves activist or political. Hundreds of local and state organizations were formed after 1988; today's statewide political organizations really began to take shape in the early '90s. As more communities grew in small and midsize cities and our movement spread into every town and village, more and more GLBT people made the radical decision simply to be out where they lived. To be out at home.

Today, for many of us, home is where the heart is, and it is no longer remote. It is no longer about needing to avoid the emotion sticking in our throats. No longer about imagining home as a haven away from politics. It's about claiming the communities in which we live as our homes--about making this nation our homeland. And in a political sense it is about renewing our dedication to equal fights and social justice by increasing our organizing in the very many places in which we live--and especially in state legislatures.

Equality Begins at Home, the actions this month sponsored by the Federation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Statewide Political Organizations and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force [see story on page 41], is a political strategy arising out of this concept of home. It is important not just because it is the first time our movement has made a national effort to do something in every single state capital and every single U.S. territory. It is important because in the first month of 1999, more than 110 gay- and AIDS-related bills were introduced in 26 state legislatures. It is important because devolution of federal power creates enormous and exciting opportunities for GLBT policy work in state capitals. It is important because until now we have been small and weak and very ill-equipped to handle the work at the state level.

One of our lesbian foremothers, Eleanor Roosevelt, said, "For where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, and equal dignity." It is in the small places, close to home, that we will fight for and win our human dignity and freedom. It is in the small places and small towns of this country that queerness will come to be seen as valuable, as good, as human and therefore divine.