The Courage of Being Queer
https://newrepublic.com/article/134289/courage-queer
When I first told this story to a friend in college, he said to me, “Well, it isn’t possible for everyone. It takes a lot of courage to be out.” I remember how much this surprised me.
This all came back to me as I read the reports coming out of Orlando on Sunday, after the attack on the LGBT club Pulse.
On any given day, I don’t feel particularly brave, and never have. I didn’t think it was brave to be alive and out at the time my friend said this to me. Life was just something that happened and kept happening each time I woke up and made coffee. And I am sure the 49 patrons who died at Pulse that night didn’t necessarily think of themselves as brave for being there. But they were.
My new friend said this to me when we were discussing our relationship, because we were in love. Once again, here was a man I loved, who was telling me he couldn’t be gay. Looking back, maybe in that context, “being gay” just means the will to live out your love and desire for men. The will to endure it in the face of violence, the disapproval of parents, expulsion from the home. The first story I ever heard in the news about a gay man was about the murder, in 1984, of Charlie Howard, who was thrown by his attackers from a bridge to his death. A certain violence has always followed me since coming out, whether I was in a bar where someone threw an M-80 at the door, or attacked in the street—it follows us all. The Pulse murders were the starkest reminder yet that we could be killed for being gay. But this knowledge is something I’ve learned to live with, as I’m sure everyone in that club also had.
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