Afternoon Greg: Dustin Lance Black stays on front lines for LGBT equality and unexpectedly makes my day

Good afternoon everyone.

I’m back in LA and blogging from Mudspot Cafe where the lightning fast WiFi is such a treat after struggling all morning to keep a connection at home.

Thank you for your patience as I continue to try and get back into the swing of things and blog at full speed. I’m learning that the sudden death of a close friend can really kick your ass in ways you cannot anticipate.

Tough time.

But I’ll share something with you that I had not planned to share: On Monday, I was walking to 20-20 Video in West Hollywood to return some DVDs. I was lost in thought and felt very sad as I tried to form my friend’s eulogy in my head.

Just before I walked into the store, I heard someone saying “Greg! Greg!” I stopped and did not recognize the person in a baseball cap walking toward me. But once he took off the sunglasses, I saw that it was Dustin Lance Black. He wanted to thank me for my post: Dustin Lance Black at Lifeworks event: “It took a turn of luck to discover I had someone I could look up to, and a turn of luck to save my life.”

Lance explained that he had just been talking to his mom and that reading my coverage had helped her to feel better about the publicity surrounding the posting on the Internet of private sexual photos of Lance and an ex-boyfriend. I felt strongly then and now that the photos should in no way take away from what this extraordinary man is doing for LGBT equality.

We chatted a bit and hugged each other and for the first time since my friend Walt’s death a week earlier, I felt a rush of happiness – happy that my work had made a difference.

So while I helped Lance, he helped me too and it seems like fate that we would bump into each other that day.

Anyway, I’m so glad to see that Lance is speaking out this week on President Barack Obama’s decision to extend benefits to Federal employees who are in a same-sex relationship. Lance appeared with former Clinton adviser Richard Socarides on Anderson Ciooper’s CNN show Wednesday night

Yes, the country has a lot of problems right now but Lance points out that there is never a convenient time for civil rights. During the eight years of peace and prosperity of the Clinton administration, what we got was DADT and DOMA.

“We do deserve full and equal rights at this time, at this moment we deserve it,” he said. “There is never a convenient time to give full and equal civil rights in this country, that is not the history of this country.”