There's no place like it

With the exception of "love," it's possible that no word or idea has birthed more cliches than "home."
It's where we hang our hat. Where our hearts are. It's the place where, when we knock, they have to let us in. And, of course, there's no place like it.
There are so many "home" cliches, of course, because outside of love, home is the thing that we all need most. Whether it's a rented room in Detroit, a studio apartment in Ferndale or a three-story Bloomfield Hills manse, all people seem to need a place to call our own. A place where our favorite colors are on the walls, great Aunt Eleanor's brass bells from India in the corner revive our best memories of childhood, and this week's copy of Between The Lines and this month's Advocate are out on our living room table.
That, of course, is part of the call of home, as well as part of the reason we need it; home is the place we can be most truly ourselves, in all of our human and LGBT glory.
In addition to our expansive Home Guide, this week's issue of BTL offers many opportunities to think about home and what it means to us.
Because home is more than the four walls we live in. Home is our family, our community – and, one would hope, our country.
Happily, this week's issue has good news on all of these fronts.
In Marriage Briefs we bring you good news from four out of the five states that have had something happen on the marriage front in the past week. OK – granted, Colorado brings us mixed news in that anti-marriage forces have been cleared to gather signatures even as a domestic partner ballot proposal is being considered by the state's legislature. However, unlike Michigan, in Colorado the anti-marriage initiative would not overrule the domestic partner proposal. Besides – as recently as 2004, who would have predicted any good news on this front?
This change may be coming about because of the news we bring you in National Briefs about a recent Pew Research Center poll which shows that opposition to equal marriage rights has dropped 12 points in two years. In marriage as in so many things, it seems that the more the "religious wrong" does to oppress us, the more mainstream America comes around to our side. Keep up the good work Dobson, Phelps and Glenn.
National news isn't the only place where you'll find good news about home. On April 7, the Ruth Ellis Center will be hosting an open house for their new building. The drop-in center that is home to so many Detroit-area LGBTQ youth has grown from 900 to 10,000 square feet. Grace McClelland and the Ruth Ellis Center board have purchased the dream; now they just need our community's financial help to furnish it, so to speak, for our kids.
La Communidad will be hosting a gathering for gay and bisexual Latino men April 21-23 in Ann Arbor to help participants feel at home in their diverse cultural communities. "Love Makes A Family," an art exhibit that will tour the state with a stop at the Capitol in Lansing, celebrates the ways that families headed by LGBTs have made homes for each other, with each other. And the YMCA of Ann Arbor has teamed up with Rowan Education Network and the Ruth Ellis Center to provide the Center's kids with a brief home away from home – a Memorial Day weekend at camp.
Granted, it can be hard for LGBTs to feel at home in our larger community. But as we step out of the closet in increasing numbers, doors to potential homes that have been barred to us are starting to open. While Americans have been slow to open those doors for any minority, it is also true that our countrymen and women are, for the most part, way too open-hearted to leave us standing on those doorsteps clicking our heels forever.