COME OUT, COME OUT, WHATEVER YOU ARE

First, Happy Pride Month everyone. I applaud every single one of you and I love you all. I even love me. I haven’t always loved myself. I was born in the last century, nineteen-fifty to be exact. I am the oldest boy of eight children. I am the only homo in the lot. My six sisters all have children and my brother took care of ensuring the family name would live on. I’m a great uncle to his grand son. As I said, I’m seventy and I live alone.

Even as one of eight kids, I was alone, growing up gay in the 1950’s in a small mid-western town. The term gay had not been applied to homosexuals at that time. Gay simply meant happy, carefree. We didn’t have a rainbow flag to identify with. There were no visible role models for a young boy like me who dreamed about kissing young boys. At an early age I shied away from playing with other boys because every time I did, I sprouted a boner. The boys I played with were younger and didn’t know the words people used to describe boys like me. Pansy, poof, fairy, Nancy-boy, deviant, and of course, faggot. Even those younger boys stopped being fun once they learned that hateful lexicon.

So, I kept to myself most of the time. I began collecting bottle caps and miniature cars. I didn’t collect Matchbox cars, they were too expensive. With eight children to feed, there was seldom much money available for such frivolities. Mom gave me an allowance of fifty cents a week if I did all my chores. I bought the plastic cars that were just hollow representations of cars and trucks. I got them for a penny a piece at Woolworth’s Five ‘N’ Dime, a precursor of Walmart; everything was cheap. I played alone, a master of my universe, the cars arranged in dioramas of streets and the bottle caps represented the people on the sidewalks. I was their God. I made them witness the car crashes.

Before I realized I was me, Mom had three more babies. About every eighteen months I got to stay at Grandma’s house until Mom came home from the hospital with a new baby. I really loved staying there. I got to sleep in my uncle’s room. He was so grown up, he was a teenager. The first time we slept together, he was naked and I was in my flannel Howdy Doody footed PJs. I was enamored with his body, so tall and strong and thin. He had hair growing in his armpits and on his legs and even in his crotch. I dreamed about playing with him, but he did not like me, was not like me, I guessed. So, I dreamed about kissing him and holding him close. He never touched me in the way I wanted him to touch me. I know now it was because I was so young. Later in my life I realized he WAS like me. By that time, I called him (and his boyfriend) gay.

I managed to get through grade school without getting beat up for the way I was. But I fantasized about the older boys, especially the jocks who had grown hair on their chests and had male endowments that made me avoid the showers whenever possible because that boner thing wouldn’t go away.

For years, I had been collecting images of men in swimsuits and underwear, clipping them out of Sears and Roebuck, and J.C. Penny catalogs and stashing them under my mattress. Pouring over them helped me satisfy that boner problem. I kept looking for a model in my collection who looked like the boy in gym class or the lifeguard at the pool. In my mind, they all wanted to play with my body.

I was so alone. I thought I was the only one in the world who had these thoughts, those dreams. Many is the time in my youth that I thought about suicide. This old man, today, is grateful I had been a coward. I also know that there is a reason for that. I had something else to do in this life.

I had to be there in 1969 to witness, from Wisconsin, the Stonewall Riots in the Village, NYC, to be alive when people like me rose up and said, “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” I had to be there when Harvey Milk was shot, and his killer suffered almost zero consequences with a “twinkie” defense. I had to be there to witness the continuation of discrimination when the government allowed thousands of my brothers to die of AIDS before they even acknowledged it was not a “Gay Plague.” I had to be there when Cary Grant was outed by dying of AIDS. I had to be there when Matthew Sheppard was tied to a fence and beaten and left to die alone in a cold, Wyoming prairie. I had to be there when Richard Heaken was bludgeoned to death in the parking lot of a Gay Bar in Arizona. I had to be there to witness all those tragedies, to suffer survivors’ guilt at decades of loss and devastation. I had to be there then so that I can still be here now.

I am still here now to bear witness to the unbelievable, sustained hatred visited upon my gay brothers, my lesbian sisters, my trans friends, and my queer lovers. I had to endure all the trials and tribulations of growing up gay, facing discrimination and bigotry, homophobia and irrational religious damnation. I had to do all that I have done, see all that I have seen so I can be here today to tell you that you are special, creative, world changing and loved; to celebrate the miracles that you are. I love you all so much. I want you to know that the ability to give this much love, unconditionally to friends and foes alike is only possible when first you learn to love yourself.

I got to witness Ellen coming out and Ricky Martin and so many others. I get to celebrate proud gay athletes, and proud gay politicians, and even proud gay cops. I got to witness gay pride parades spring up in towns and cities all over the planet. I got to witness a gay bar opening in my hometown (It only took fifty years) I get to watch gay people in movies and on tv that aren’t deviants or stereotypes. I have to right today to marry the man of my dreams, wherever he may be. I get to officiate your gay weddings; I mean your marriages. I get to be proud of you, of me, of us. I get to love you.

I’ll see you at Pride again next year. You are a work in progress, the universe isn’t done with you. It will never be done with you. I didn't write this gem that I ran across on the interwebs, When someone says, “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”, tell them we are all HOMO sapiens, not HETERO sapiens. Be good to you.