The Edwards campaign has just released a list of prominent queers who have jumped on his bandwagon. Smart move.

It shows an awareness that we're nothing as a people if not good sheep -- or, rather, emotional teenagers ever in search of being in with the in-crowd. This is born of the near-primal pain we collectively feel from not having a chance at that as our real selves in those years and those that followed. We carry a huge aching hole of being not only not fitting in but being outcasts -- a hole that we are too often unaware of trying to fill by latching on to the popular candidate or the latest trend in anything -- pretending that that makes the oppression disappear. It is the baseline Gestalt of LGBT existence. The Edwards campaign is sharp to have figured this out and capitalized on it.

The list, by the way, is full of gay people who have had a bad history of having appallingly low standards for political candidates, confusing platitudes for practical substance, and, predictably, getting screwed by their champions by and by.