A few of the more memorable words I learned growing up as a devout Mormon boy were: unholy, unnatural, unworthy. Then there was that really long word they used in church, “Homosexuality is sin. Next to the crime of murder comes the sin of sexual impurity.” I was five when I first heard it. How exciting! A new word: HO-MO-SEX-U-AL-ITY.

Stack on growing up in the U.S. military in Texas, and I picked up faggot, cocksucker, gaywad, homo, fairy, homophile, pansy, turd-burglar, fruit, and fart knocker. The military ones were always my favorites.

Then one Sunday, like a parrot in a pet store, one of those choice expressions slipped through my teeth and landed with a thud in a group of fine Christian women. The ensuing lecture was quite the revelation for a five-year-old. Who knew anybody stuck any part of himself inside anyone or anything! How thrilling! Was this Zion? Not by a long shot. From the tone of her voice and the look on her face, I quickly figured out the “homo” club wasn’t the place for the cool kids.

A year later, when I looked at that boy down the street and my heart started to race, and I stopped breathing through my nose, then stopped breathing altogether, and I thought about kissing him (among other things), that was the moment I knew for sure all those wicked words were about me. I was right down there with the murderers and rapists—all three feet four inches of me, at six years old.

At that same instant, without knowing it, I also became a pawn in a game of political power wrangling that is still shedding blood from D.C. to Sacramento, from El Paso to Altoona. There was no registration form, no box to check. It was the ’80s—I was born gay, so I was born fully uniformed, forced into the middle of a brutal political war.

It started years earlier, in a land called Florida on June 7, 1977. News cameras gathered, and a nation waited for a well-quaffed, well-spoken, all-American beauty pageant runner-up mom to take her stage. No, not Sarah Palin claiming she can “cure gays.” This was Anita Bryant. Like Sarah, she was winning, attractive, and well-spoken. That night, this orange juice spokeswoman gave birth to the Religious Right: “Tonight the laws of God and the cultural values of man have been vindicated. The people of Dade County, the normal majority, have said enough, enough, enough.”

Anita Bryant and her Save the Children campaign struck down the first laws in the country protecting gay people from discrimination. To many, she was a national hero. Politicians from both sides of the aisle jumped in with their own anti-gay quotes. This issue was fresh, exciting, and the voters were turning out for it. What had been a social movement up until this point, the gay movement, was now under attack politically.

It didn’t take long to realize the political nature of my simple coming-of-age moment. Campaigns were being won and lost based on that word: homosexual. Presidents would win elections by pitting homosexuals against homophobes. Political careers were cut short through revelations of this or that state senator’s homosexuality. And in my own hometown of San Antonio, Texas, the grown-ups told us it was illegal to be a homosexual. I could be put in jail for my big secret. All those police and politicians out there were fighting about me. I was a political hot button.

Gay Warfare

So a few gay victories, some major defeats, and at least a couple decades later, I tune into the Democratic National Convention to see what’s on the progressive agenda in 2008.

Back in 1972, Jim Foster, an openly gay man, was invited to speak on national television at the DNC. He began, “We do not come to you pleading your understanding or begging your tolerance; we come to you affirming our pride in our lifestyle, affirming the validity to seek and maintain meaningful emotional relationships, and affirming our right to participate in the life of this country on an equal basis with every citizen.” But that was before Anita Bryant.

Thirty-six years later, what did I hear? Not much. Obama stumbled over a single sentence about “our gay brothers and sisters” and hospital visitation rights. Not exactly a bold new move for civil rights. Are the Democrats afraid of what happened in 2004? The year so many Dems claim the Gay Marriage issue “cost the Democrats the White House”? It sure sounded like it to me.

And then there was the Republican National Convention. Sarah Palin, John McCain. Flashy, divisive, patriotic speeches, and did you hear what they said about gay people? No? That’s because they said nothing. At first I thought, Perhaps the Republicans are also afraid of the gay variable. In 2006 they tried their anti-gay thing again and it backfired, bringing out more Democrat homophobes than Republican ones and did themselves more harm than good as they lost the Senate and the House.

But a deeper fear has settled in. The Republican leadership is up to something far more ingenious. They’ve found a sure fire way to kill the gay movement: they’ll just make us all—disappear. They’ll make us invisible. Reagan did it in the ’80s with six years of silence about the AIDS crisis because it was only killing the gays, right?

You see, one of the biggest challenges of the gay community has always been visibility. Unlike the black movement and the women’s movement, gays and lesbians are not always immediately identifiable. People still go their entire careers without coming out to their co-workers, not to mention their grocery clerks or their neighbors.

The entire concept of coming out and the more aggressive tactic of “outing” was devised and pushed for by leaders like Harvey Milk back in 1978 as a way to counter this visibility problem. If people don’t know who they are hurting, they don’t mind discriminating against them. If they don’t know you are their brother or their sister or their neighbor or boss or secretary, the issues don’t become real to them. Watching these two conventions, I got a sinking feeling that gay and lesbian issues have been put behind closed doors, closeted. Like a low-budget science-fiction flick, I felt myself slowly vanishing, and for gay and lesbian people invisibility equals death.

Thirty years after Anita sparked her anti-gay political movement, some progress has been made, but I am still “less than” a heterosexual when it comes to my civil rights. If I fall in love with someone in a foreign country, I can’t marry him and bring him home. I can’t be “out” in the military. There are inheritance rights issues, pension rights, hospital visitation rights, employment and housing discrimination issues, and on and on. The message to gay and lesbian youth coming out today is that they are still inferior. They are still “less than.”

I was one of the lucky ones. When I was 13, my new U.S. Army stepdad was transferred to California, and I discovered San Francisco. Most aren’t so fortunate. Today, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force reports that a third of all gay youth attempt suicide. That is four times higher than the rate for straight youth. And if a kid does survive, 26 percent are told to leave home when they come out. It’s estimated that 20 percent to 40 percent of the 1.6 million homeless youth in America today identify as gay or lesbian.

Drafting Screenwriters

So here’s my point. We are screenwriters, not politicians, so I’m not asking you to write letters to Obama or McCain telling them to put the gay movement back on the agenda—although, it would be quite nice if you did. And I’m not asking you to pick up a sign and march in a gay parade or protest anti-gay legislation. What I’m saying is, in my experience, just being gay or lesbian is already political enough. Coming out of the closet, out of invisibility, is already a brave, powerful political statement. So one of the most potent political actions you as a writer can take to help your gay and lesbian brothers and sisters is to write gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender characters into your film and television scripts. Make us visible.

I know it’s not always that simple. As a writer, I recall one of my darkest days was when my showrunner came into the writers’ room and told the staff that the head of the network had laid down the law: no gay characters or storylines. This wasn’t 20 years ago on a conservative network. This was two years ago on a network widely considered one of the most open-minded. To me, this wasn’t just a personal attack against gays and lesbians; whether this executive knew it or not, he was making a bigoted political stand.

I say, if 10 percent of this world is gay as a three-dollar bill, let reality be your guide, and give me one out of every 10 characters. That’s fair, right? Unless of course your film is set in New York, Los Angeles, or Miami—then how about 20 percent (and San Francisco, make it 50/50).

As for a politically correct demand for only positive portrayals of gay people, well, as nice as it would be for these new characters to not all be soft, flamboyant stereotypes, if that’s all you’ve got, I’ll take it. Say what you will about us. Just like all you HE-TE-RO-SEX-U-ALS out there, we too are deeply flawed. Don’t pull punches. My old friends out in Texas need to know that we’re just as screwy and human as they are. What’s most important to me is that we incorporate gay and lesbian characters into our scripts in a quantity that reflects our true presence in society. We’re everywhere, even in the most surprising places. Don’t make us invisible.

You see, by 1978 Anita Bryant had successfully swept the nation with her anti-gay propositions. The Right’s big new goal was to conquer California. State Senator John Briggs put Prop. 6 on the ballot. All gay public school employees would be fired if it passed. Thirty years ago this November, gay and lesbian Californians made a last stand. At great personal risk, they came out of their closets. They told their friends, family, and neighbors. They came up from invisibility, and against all odds defeated this anti-gay proposition.

Now, 30 years later, California must once again choose whether to write inequality into its constitution. If passed, Prop. 8 would overturn the State Supreme Court’s decision and ban gay marriage. The struggle isn’t over. We need visibility to win these battles. Sadly, it looks like we’re not going to get it from either political party in the near future, so I’m asking for a little help from my brothers and sisters in the WGA.

Some of my writer friends tell me, “Get into politics if you want to make a real difference—we’re just making movies here.” But let me tell you: That gay character I’m hoping you’ll write into your next romantic comedy, or action film, or slasher flick… that kid out there in San Antonio, Texas, tonight who just learned the meaning of the word ho-mo-sex-u-al-ity and is crying himself to sleep, he’s going to see your film or TV show, and it might just help him feel a little less alone in this struggle. He might even get the feeling there are millions of people out there just like him. And please don’t take this lightly just because of how damn trite it sounds: If you throw in a gay character or two, you might not just be making movies anymore—you might be saving that young kid’s life. True story.

Dustin Lance Black wrote the forthcoming feature Milk, recently completed his third season as a writer/co-producer on HBO’s Big Love series, and is currently adapting Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.