To all our LGBTQ+ friends: happy coming out day! It's also coincidentally my 32nd birthday. National coming out day marks a march that happened on my first birthday, 1987. So I guess you could say Im the hipster patron saint of allies. I've been celebrating coming out today since before it was cool. ?

But seriously I was born in some interesting times. The wall came down, prince and bowie were killin it making the homophobes uncomfortable with their brilliantly incandescent androgeny. The civil rights movement for accepting sexual diversity has been raging all the while. I'm just on the older end of millenials where I got to experience an analog childhood and formative years before 9/11. I musta been among the last lucky few to grow up riding bikes around the neighborhood til dusk, playing in the woods and working a farm without wondering whats on youtube or twitter or where the next rare pokemon will spawn.

The advent of common home computing and broadband internet happened just as I was getting old enough to take advantage of vast amounts of culture and information access. Ive grown up speaking to machines as a second language; thinking globally, on forums such as this since I was 12, with as many friends outside my country as I have within it. I've watched in horror as the baby boomers undid every last bit of progress they made, took a giant shit on the planet and in our white house, and handed my generation the smoldering bag of fascist fecal matter. They're still fighting, too senile and bitter to step aside and let anyone else try to clean up their mess, but it won't be up to them for much longer. I just hope that a great enough percentage of my generation has learned from the big picture the way I was fortunately able to, rather than from our parents, so our kids don't have to go through this shit again in 30 years, under water.

For my birthday I beg of you all one thing, if you care about future generations at all: to vote the bigots and defenders of sex crimes out this November. Speak up for Women, People of Color, LGBTQ+, survivors of sexual assault and hate crimes, who every day still get no justice for the personal and systematic oppression they've been through. Im as cis whitebread as they come, but diversity is always a strength, not a weakness. Our quality of life as a people can only be as great as it is for the least fortunate among us. The angry, entitled, scared old men running the show will do anything and fight dirty because they know the future isn't theirs, and we can only take comfort in that. Keep marchin, fam.