Pride

A few years ago, I found myself completely lost. In the process of coming out of the closet after thirty years of living a mostly straight life, I promised myself that I wouldn’t become one of those “happy and proud to be gay” gays; in other words, I saw no reason to march in a parade just because I happened to like girls instead of boys. My pride came from finally being able to quiet the voices of fear and doubt in my head so that I could hear what my own voice was telling me. In so doing, every day became a miniature victory parade as I marched through my life with new eyes and a better understanding of myself.

But it was lonely, and that was where I was lost. My straight friends were so supportive and made it so easy for me to just be me, but I also knew they could never quite understand what I was going through. And, never having had a shortage of gay men around me, I also had them, and they were wonderful. But what I really needed was a lesbian to talk to and I suddenly became acutely aware that I didn’t know any of those. So here I was, newly out in a big city that I’d had almost no social life in anyway, with no same-sex dating experience to speak of, the stigma of a recently ended straight marriage to deal with, no lesbian friends, and a strong desire to jump into the dating scene without being too . . . you know . . . GAY about it.

In an act of late night desperation, I posted what would be the first of many ads on Craigslist in the hopes of finding a nice girl to have dinner with – or, to be honest, at least to fuck. I decided to leave out the details of just having ejected myself from the closet; I would be honest if asked, but I really just wanted to see how conversations would go before revealing myself as the baby dyke that I was.

As fate would have it, one of the first responses I got was from a woman about my age who was just SO HAPPY TO BE GAY!!! (Insert hearts and rainbows here.) She quickly told me about how much she loved being gay, her life living with her twin sister (also gay, incidentally), and her work on the local Pride committee. Alarms went off in my head. But I wasn’t in a position to judge, so I responded to her.

The very next email contained the question I knew would come eventually – “So how long have you been out?” Needless to say, neither of us was what the other was looking for and we never met.

Three years have passed since then, but I’m still thinking about her. I’ve learned a lot since then. I wish we hadn’t judged each other so quickly – I could have learned a lot about being an out and proud lesbian from her.

In the last three years, I’ve come to learn what it means to be proud to be gay, for to be gay is to throw convention in society’s face and walk away from what is considered “normal life.” Being gay often means turning our backs on the only life we’ve ever known – and that often includes our natural families. It means, in the US and a great many countries around the world, sacrificing civil rights and protections in exchange for accepting ourselves as we are. In some places, it means putting our lives on the line just so we don’t have to lie about our very identities every moment of every day. To be proud to be gay is a privilege we earn from the hell we go through in trying to simply achieve ourselves. Being proud to be gay is a privilege some find too difficult to earn because the price is too high.

It was too high for thirteen-year-old Seth Walsh of Tehachapi, California, who killed himself in September after enduring years of teasing and bullying in the school yard.

The price of pride was too high for nineteen-year-old Rutgers University student Tyler Climenti, who suffered through having his most intimate moments exposed on the Internet by people who should be behind bars, but are instead acting like victims because of their portrayal in the media.

Nineteen-year-old Zach Harrington found the price of pride too high after listening to his neighbors decry the immoral, predatory nature of the homosexual life choice in an hours-long town hall meeting in which the committee was voting on whether or not to acknowledge GLBT History Month in their town of Norman, Oklahoma.

Fifteen-year-old Billy Lucas, 13yo Asher Brown, 19yo Raymond Chase, 19yo Aiyisha Hassan, 15yo Justin Aaberg, and 17yo Cody Barker – to name only those whose names have crossed my path most recently – all found the price of gay pride too high because they’d heard one too many times from all the wrong people how horrible gay people are.

A friend of mine recently said to me that those kids would have been picked on even if they weren’t gay – gay is just what people are talking about now; the topic du jour, as it were. That may be so – kids will mercilessly pick on anyone who’s different. But the fact is that these kids were all openly gay, and even if they weren’t, being bullied because a boy doesn’t fit into the heteronormative assumption of what a boy acts like doesn’t make it any better. It all boils down to the same thing: People who don’t fit into my idea of “normal” deserve to be punished for their very existence.

The names and ages of these kids have been running like a ticker tape through my mind. We have a very serious national problem on our hands that’s causing children – CHILDREN – to take their own lives. While I’ve never had any moral issue with suicide personally, it’s a travesty that children who have never had the chance to see that life can be so much more and so much better than it is are cutting their own lives short. Until now, the idea of children as young as thirteen committing suicide seemed like an outlandish thing, something I remember kids in my high school bragging that they’d tried to make themselves look morosely cool. But that isn’t what this is. Children and young adults who haven’t had the chance to really experience life are falling prey to the children of ignorant and fearful homophobes who don’t realize that their offhanded comments about immoral, hedonistic gays mumbled at the evening news are, to the ears of their young children, permission to suck the very lives out of their peers who are “different.”

These nine names – Cody, Aiyisha, Tyler, Asher, Seth, Billy, Zach, Raymond, and Justin – break my heart. These nine names remind me once again that no matter how difficult it was for me to finally come out, I earned the right to be proud to be gay, to be proud of finally accepting who and what I am. These kids were convinced by their peers that they weren’t good enough to earn that privilege, and sadly ended their lives. Put in this light, Craigslist Girl from three years ago is a hero who I judged far too quickly for totally selfish reasons. I hope she never stops being happy to be gay, and more importantly, I’m glad I’ve finally seen my way to helping her spread the message that it’s not only okay to be gay, it’s something to be proud of.