Dear Stephen,

I hope you will not mind my editing your letter down to one point. I am answering it this week because it is timely and dovetails nicely with what I'll be saying in the South Florida Blade this week under (hopefully) the headline Court and Thwart - The New Politics of Gay.

As a "mercenary" state employee who wrote speeches and press releases for Democratic, Republican and independent administrations (including a governor and some commissioners who ended up in jail), and as someone who worked in the Vatican Ceremonies Office, I've learned that the increase of the time a large bureaucracy spends selling itself equals the decrease in the amount of truth that bureaucracy is selling.

If by now you cannot see that President Obama is not really an advocate for the gay community, I think you are naïve.

It is becoming obvious to me that if the gay community really wants change, it will have to become spectacularly inconvenient.

Staying home and grousing about broken promises made by the supposed "candidate of change" won't help. Going to Washington and marching politely behind police barricades won't help. Giving our money to political parties or advocacy groups won't help.

The time has come for some howling and some flexing of revolutionary muscle. It is time to become terrifically disruptive.

I am convinced that until we discontinue our docile subscription to services and agencies that deliberately treat us as second-class, we will continue to be abused.

We need to get back to clogging up the machinery of government through offensive and intrusive demonstrating. We need to start sabotaging the ordinary traffic and congress of the marketplace. We need to become as irritating as a blister on a toe whose owner will say "This is ruining my vacation". We need to infiltrate the ordinary schedule of church and municipal events, and cause some mayhem therein. We need to become an intolerable nuisance. We need to make clear the fact that our mistreatment is immediately unacceptable, and that a promised remedy somewhere on a back burner will not placate us.

Working for bureaucracies taught me that limited resources mean you choose which clients to satisfy based on net effect rather than personal convictions. At this point, I don't believe President Obama will protect my rights because he respects me or thinks I am his equal. I am convinced otherwise. I want him to protect my rights because if he doesn't, everyone else's daily life will become seriously upset by an LGBT uprising carried out locally, but on a grand scale. A pox on all until the just ones tell the haters to shut up.

I'm sorry to have to feel this way, Stephen, but I'd still be living in a British colony if somewhere along the line the fathers of our country had not gotten to the point I am describing. What I am advocating is really a venerable, American and time-honored patriotic reaction to oppressive and non-representative government.

We have sent the timid and the polite ahead of us carrying our diplomatic message of dismay. Those couriers have been patronized and essentially beheaded. While I am not endorsing personal violence, I am heartily advocating the turning off of the faucets that dispense the two sine qua nons of any successful bureaucracy: cooperation and money. While I do not think we are at the point of beating our ploughshares into swords, I do think we ought to use their metal to make tacks for the sidewalks and nails for the roads.

Fasten your seatbelt, Stephen. The time of words is over. Like Hobbits leaving the Shire, we are in for some alarming adventures.

I am an older man. I did my protesting (mostly anti-war) in the 1960s and 70s. I chained myself to some government doors and I recall using spray paint for something other than furniture refinishing. Now I relax on the beach, but for this cause, I'll find my shoes, get dressed and act up. Besides, I've always wanted to spend some time in jail to find out if all those hot stories are true. Prison: my final bureaucracy.