Who would have thought that “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story” would have predicted gay marriage?

That is exactly what it has done.

Bruce had brought Linda to his studio. She’d been pushing him to explore his idea of a martial arts chain … a place where he could teach and others – any others – could learn. The bigoted experiences he’d had with Americans in general had taught him that he couldn’t trust them so much as she thought he could.

Her perseverance had pushed him to do what he could do, and to do what he wanted to do. It would not be the last time, but there had to be a first time.

He took her to his studio. “This was your idea!” he said enthusiastically to her. “My idea?” she asked him incredulously and with more than a little doubt. “To live in an industrial slum?”

This was no Four Seasons studio, make no mistake. The floor was concrete and the place itself was not the most hospitable ever created. It was his studio, however, and that was what mattered. “When I came over in the boat I knew this was a land of ideas. Here, an idea can make a man anything he wants to be. You drop a pebble in water and what happens? You get ripples. And before long the ripples spread until the whole pond is covered.” And with that he handed her a pebble and said, simply, “Drop it.”

She dropped it and it fell with a soft clatter. There were no ripples in the concrete, but many would come in America. “It has started,” he said as she looked at him that day and saw a man equally confident and crazy.

Bruce Lee would go on to star in several martial arts films in addition to teaching hundreds of students and introducing the world to the art of Jeet Kune Do, the art of fighting without fighting. He would pave the way not only for such current actors as Jet Li and Jackie Chan but Chuck Norris, who got his big break starring opposite Lee in Return of the Dragon (also known as Way of the Dragon).

So what connection does Bruce Lee have to gay marriage?

Quite simply, he spent years toiling in obscurity before he was recognized. The gay rights movement, too, has spent years toiling with little success.

It is now coming into its recognition. Now cities in several states (Oregon, New York, California and New Mexico) have begun issuing marriage licenses to gay couples, and with varying degrees of success. While current efforts are underway to amend the constitution to bar gay marriage, efforts are also underway to amend the Massachusetts state constitution to reflect the legality therein of gay marriage.

Bruce Lee’s efforts were not initially welcomed by much of anyone. Americans didn’t like the idea of a Chinese action movie star and some Chinese immigrants to America didn’t like the idea of an American Chinese man teaching the “secrets of the East” to foreigners. His success, in fact, was realized more by those who were more welcome in the industry after he broke in than it was by the man who died in 1973 shortly before his big break occurred. In terms of mainstream acceptance as people and actors, rather than merely pure action stars, success has only come in the past fifteen years; considering that the movement started in America (after many decades in Asia where the focus was more on balance and dance than on acting) in the 60s, and the gay rights movement is most easily identifiable as starting with the Stonewall riot in 1969, with considerable interest and power generated since the mid 80s.

America has come to a place where an action star can also have character apart from merely “I will speak with an accent and kick you”. America has also come to a place where our action stars need not be identifiably Asian, as Jean-Claude van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenegger have shown us. Now America is coming, slowly, to a place where not only do we not need to have any gay character in media be flaming but that sexuality is something that we do not always denigrate or seek to stereotype.

And, more slowly, America is coming to a place where gay people are accepted not with an asterisk, not as “I’ll accept you even though you’re gay” or “I’ll just ignore your sexuality, and you better be grateful”, but as people with rights, with hearts, with personalities … as ordinary people.

New Paltz, New York. San Francisco, California. Sandoval County, New Mexico. Portland, Oregon. Massachusetts legislature.

It has started.