“You’ve never heard of it?” Thompson asked in surprise. In the course of this conversation, he happened to mention Stonewall. Thompson drew an analogy to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, about an African-American who thought of himself as invisible to the white society around him.
Candidate Obama simply talking about the LGBT community signaled to them that they were being seen and heard. That was no longer the case for African Americans or women, but for the gay community, it remained true, at least in certain segments of society. Thompson explained that this kind of explicit recognition was important because there were still many people who thought legal rights for gays and lesbians wasn’t a legitimate conversation.
For instance, he was curious to know why it was so important to the gay community to be consistently mentioned by name. During the four-hour drive, Obama took the opportunity to ask Thompson some questions about the gay community that had been percolating in his mind during the campaign.
