Patti Fink — The Mobilizer

Sep 13, 2013
Gay Media & Press Network

(GayWebSource.com – Gay Media & Press Network) – Posted by

“You can’t walk down the street and not trip over somebody who’s LGBT.” – Patti Fink

Patti Fink, the President of the Dallas Gay & Lesbian Alliance, has been involved in LGBT activism in Dallas for nearly 15 years. It’s actually how she found her partner, Erin Moore. The two met during meetings for the National Coming Out Project. By the way, we can boast that we had the largest chapter of the National Coming Out Project back in the day. Fink says our National Coming Out Day celebration was also the first.

“There are so many firsts that have happened here that have been pivotal to the entire movement,” said Fink.

That’s right, Big D’s got a lot to boast about for its LGBT community. Not all the activism happened on the east and west coasts.

Fink was born in Texas, but Dallas is the first big city she’s lived in. She moved here after graduating from Baylor University in Waco.

“There was quite a lot more freedom here than what I experienced anywhere else,” said Fink.

She doesn’t expect to leave Dallas, either. Despite the freedoms Fink found in North Texas, she also encountered discrimination. That’s something she’s working to eradicate.

“There’s so much that needs to be done. There’s so much that we have to do to get our equality recognized,” said Fink.

For instance, Fink and Moore consider themselves “life partners,” but they refuse to travel to marry.

“We want to get married in the state where we live,” said Fink

The couple fully expects to have that opportunity, especially after the Supreme Court’s opinion on the Defense of Marriage Act, handed down in June. That’s despite Texas’ voter-approved constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in 2005. Proposition 2, which states “Marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman,” passed with 76% of the vote.

Fink is still noticeably upset by that vote. She and her partner fought hard against Proposition 2, and she’s shocked more peopled didn’t.

“You can say, ‘Let’s not spend the money, let’s not try this, because we’re going to lose.’ Yeah, because we haven’t freakin’ done anything. We have to have a conversation with our neighbors, with our coworkers, with religious leaders. We need to have a conversation with public officials. We have to have the conversation somewhere, or we’re not going to win. We gotta start somewhere, and this is the perfect time to start,” said Fink. “What burned me up is the [Dallas] Voice did an article in 2005 after the Prop 2 loss. They quoted somebody as saying, ‘Well, I voted in my heart.’ I was like, ‘Fuck you whoever you are, and all of you like you. Fuck you. You’re the reason we lost.”

As an activist, Fink has a lot of goals. However, her biggest goal is the simplest, at least for you. It doesn’t take any big involvement. All she wants is for you to go out and vote.

“The one thing you owe us, as a community, if you’re part of us and you benefit from the things we’ve been getting you and establishing in terms of our whole movement, you have to get off your ass and vote,” said Fink.

Either way, she’ll still be fighting, mostly in the hopes of mobilizing the LGBT community to show what a difference it can make, politically.

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