| From This Week In Texas Equality
Although an emergency response team arrived quickly enough to extricate Fleming’s limp but living body from the house and take her to a nearby hospital, Strong wasn’t able to see her when she arrived shortly after. Because she was “just Kate’s partner”—the exact words used by of one of the nurses on staff at the hospital that night—Strong had to scramble to get permission from Fleming’s sister in Alexandria, Va., in order to see her before she passed away just hours later. “I was in an utter panic state at the time," Strong remembers. “The first thing that went through my mind was, ‘I want to deck this person’. But then I thought, ‘They could bar me from seeing her completely’. So I had to be nice, even though I wanted to rip the walls down to get to her." Looking back, Strong admits she and Fleming should have done more to prepare for such a catastrophe. “Unfortunately, when you spend ten years of your life with someone, you become blind to the fact that you don’t have any rights," she says. “I also think living in Seattle lulled us into feeling a false sense of security,” Strong adds. “It’s so populated with gays and lesbians that we never would have imagined someone would give us a hard time if something happened to either one of us." Although Strong could hardly have been called an activist before Fleming’s tragic death, that’s exactly what she has become after the fact. “I’d lost everything,” she says. “I’d lost my partner, I’d lost my home—I had nothing to lose. So I thought, ‘What can I do’?" It didn’t take her long to find an answer. Less than a month later, Strong testified before the state Senate on a bill that would provide same-sex couples and unmarried seniors some of the rights of married couples. “I thought it would be a way to acknowledge Kate and acknowledge the relationship we had,” Strong says. “It also was a way for me to scream and say, ‘No! Enough is enough! The thought of this happening to anyone else is horrifying to me." “Little did I know it would help me as much as it did,” she adds. “It helped me heal. It made me feel like I could do something." Although Washington Governor
Christine Gregoire signed the Domestic Partnership Bill into law in late April, Strong acknowledges her work is far from over. “This is not gay marriage!” she says. “It’s just a start. All this bill does is afford us some decency in a time when we desperately need it." For gays and lesbians—living in the state of Washington and elsewhere—to achieve full marriage equality, Strong suggests, gays and lesbians have to “get their act together. Right now it appears that we’re okay with being second-class citizens, and I don’t know how we get past that.” Strong knows more than most, however, that people are capable of change, especially in moments of need. “I was not like this prior to this happening,” she says of her own transformation. “I used to be in a two-hundred-person choir, but I dropped out because I had to stand up in front of a crowd.” Today, Strong is back on stage and in front of crowds as a volunteer for
Equal Rights Washington and hopes her story will spur others to join her in the future. “I don’t consider what I’m doing courageous,” she says. “Anyone has a voice, if they choose to use it.” |
