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Now, I know this is a stereotype, but I've found that it's a mostly true one: Gay people know how to party.
Gay bars are generally the best places to shake one's groove thang, and those pride parades (like the '08 one in Cape Town, seen at right) are like a whole bunch of disco dance parties on wheels.
Here in the desert, supporters of gay marriage have often held rallies in Palm Springs to celebrate whenever things have gone their way in the courts. But today's news that same-sex marriage would again be allowed in California... next week... if a higher court doesn't intervene in the meantime... didn't seem to prompt much hootin' and hollerin' around California.
I was on Prop. 8 watch today at work, and I was monitoring our Sacramento TV station's live feed from San Francisco, thinking that I'd hear plenty of cheers, jeers or other such commotion whenever word of decision spread through the crowd outside City Hall.
But I swear, that crowd got more riled up about passing cars that were probably honking or waving at them than they seemed to be once word of the decision started to get around.
Speaking of, the news was broken to us at TDS in a most peculiar way this afternoon. Although I was watching the wires like a hawk and we had the TVs strategically set to the cable networks we thought most likely to put the news on the air first, I first caught word of the ruling in an e-mail from a source I had been talking with. And this was not a high-level gay rights advocate or organizer or anything, just a regular guy who was keeping an eye out for the ruling and heard about it from a local television station in Sacramento. (Sadly, 'twas not the Gannett station there that I sort of had my eye on.)
In any case, even as word rolled in about the (eventual, possible) lifting of the stay on the judge's ruling overturning Proposition 8, there was never much commotion on the SF livestream. By the time cable networks were cutting to that live shot, the crowd looked considerably thinner than it did just before noon as the anticipation was still in the midst of its final upswing.
Not too long after I noticed this and got the sense that no one in our area, from either side of the issue, was getting all that hot and/or bothered about a decision with another waiting period attached, I wrote this lede for my eventual print story:
A federal judge handed supporters of gay marriage another victory — and another asterisk — on Thursday.
And I only ended up tweaking it a little bit before filing the story hours later. To me, that summed up the day. Gay marriage supporters got another piece of good news, but it wasn't quite what they were hoping for. Those pushing for Prop. 8 to stay in effect got some discouraging news, but they've got another shot at reversing the decision. I figure that for people on both sides, the judge's ruling must've seemed like an order to just wait and see.