Maybe it’s just that time of year — by the time we leave work it’s already dark and cold, and it’s an effort to do anything after 8:00 p.m. Then again, maybe it’s that hundreds of thousands of acres around us have been incinerated along with all the critters that used to live there, thousands of people have been left without homes, and, in some cases, without loved ones.

Some days you just want to crawl back into bed.

As a community, we’ve had a lot of bad news lately. The President backed “Marriage Protection Week,” a fraction of California’s eligible voters recalled our very gay-friendly governor, Sen. Pete Knight is trying to reverse the great strides the GLBT community recently made with the passage of AB 205, the right wing is gearing up to pass a constitutional amendment forbidding gay couples to marry or have any of the rights that straight couples have (presumably that will not include the right to simply exist, although there’s no guarantee), and major religious factions are splintering and flinging lawsuits at one another because keeping gays and lesbians out of the church is more important to some people than the church itself.

Here in San Diego, we still have high schools that allow gay bashing — of students and teachers alike — where teachers are put on administrative leave when they report incidents, and students who are repeatedly victimized finally have to move to other schools in desperation. Meanwhile, those who do the harassing are never reprimanded (See “How GLBT-friendly are San Diego schools?,” page 38).

And if that wasn’t enough to give you pause, now many in our community have lost homes, property, pets and memories in the recent fires.

It all seems pretty grim.

There is no denying that the past few weeks have been horrible for many, yet there are glimpses of future promise.

Palm Springs has just made history by electing an openly gay, African-American mayor.

AB 205 did pass, and Gov. Gray Davis signed it into law. Granted, it doesn’t take effect until 2005 and there is a concerted effort to keep it from going into effect, but the fact that it passed at all is historically significant. And if we pay attention and vote when the time comes, there is at least a 50/50 chance that we’ll be able to keep it from being overturned by referendum.

At the same time, more and more polls are showing that a majority of Americans support civil unions — as long as they’re not called marriages. And there seems to be more acceptance of the GLBT community in general with each new generation, indicating that, if nothing else, homophobia will eventually fall out of fashion as more open-minded younger generations come into power and more conservative older ones die off.

Although we are definitely losing an ally with Gray Davis’s exit from office, Governor-elect Schwarzenegger did appoint a lesbian to his transition team — and with a little luck she won’t turn out to be a closeted Republican.

And in spite of some sanctimonious, reactionary members of the Grossmont Union High School Board who seem to think they can make GLBT students go away by pretending they don’t exist, even our school system is slowly but surely improving, with new gay/straight alliances forming and honest attempts to teach tolerance in some schools.

In the wake of the incredible destruction of the fires, the GLBT community has donated generously, giving more than $3,000 for Family Matters families who lost their homes and $3,000 for the San Diego Red Cross at just one four-hour event. And that doesn’t include the gifts of food, clothing, housing and personal necessities that have been donated. And in the middle of all the concern for immediate needs, our community contributed to the future as well, remembering ongoing needs and donating $3,000 for programs at The Center.

One way or another, the world always moves forward, in spite of those who would push it back. Social evolution is a natural process — very much like biological evolution. It doesn’t move at a steady, constant pace; sometimes it appears to stall entirely, sometimes entire species vanish, but the small steps (and great leaps) forward always continue.