Everyone’s saying “gay” right now, because of Florida’s alarming march toward utter intolerance.
All I know is being gay saved my life.
Now, that’s a declaration you don’t hear often. More, it’s that being gay was a burden, an unfair handicap, a religious/political/familial torment. All of which I honor. Everyone’s path is different.
Yet I know that my difference gave me the moxie to prevail, the savvy to overcome bullshit, the drive to succeed.
Mockery destroys some. It made me stronger. I’m unsure why. I didn’t come from a family so sure and steady. In fact, some of my family were the chief perpetrators...cousins who kicked me and called me ‘Fruit Loop”, an aunt, within my earshot, who mentioned more than once that I was effeminate…even parents who didn’t quite grasp why I refused to roughhouse with other boys, why I detested the outdoors and who would occasionally lock me out to “make some goddamn friends”.
What all of this did was harden a vein within me that, frankly, some might say left me a little chilly, detached. I do not count on others too awfully much. I remember the sting of betrayal. I do not suspect a kindness, but I am cautious. I avoid large groups, for it was those where the catcalls were the loudest: on the playground in PE, the schoolbus.
Yet I say it saved my life. And it did. It compelled me to look beyond the confines of the little Indiana town that could barely manage a yawn. I craved any mention of a big city. My self-imposed isolation allowed creativity to marinate. Once at college — a liberal school, Butler University, full of fraternities and sororities but also full of dance and theatre majors, musicians, writers — I could begin to shape my own future out of the modeling clay of advanced education. I suppose I was genetically fortunate; my infrastructure had some built-in vein of survival.
I understand well the dark chasm of hopeless depression you can fall into when stigmatized, shunned, silenced. I watched friends opt for sham marriages that ultimately brought shame and sadness on everyone in its radius. Others hit the bottle a little too often, or retreated into substance abuse. A few spent too much, stayed out too late, quarreled with friends with whom they had no real quarrel. Some thought embracing promiscuity was the best defiance, and it killed them. (Remember: I graduated from college in 1983.) I saw and watched and just put one foot in front of the other, in lockstep with my life partner (now husband) Greg. We danced around family and career landmines, sometimes not so courageously. More than once I was probably my own worst enemy, making hated rivals out of people who were just, like me, trying to compete. But mostly Greg and I kept a laser-like focus on the endgame, and that was happiness and fulfillment, comfort and joy.
Being gay saved my life.