Coming to Terms

My story.

I grew up with a Catholic mother and a military father very much of the mentality of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Even the dog goes to church once a year to get blessed. Needless to say, you just "don't say gay" in their house. If you do, you've opened a Pandora's box of stubborn ignorance and prejudice.

 

I grew up mostly in Southern California, a fairly forward part of the country in terms of human rights, but not in fiscal responsibility or reasonable home insurance rates. I theorize that's where rich gay people go for retirement.

 

I currently reside and possibly shall forevermore, in Arkansas. Deep south: fried everything, guns, FDODS (First Day Of Deer Season) holiday pay, small towns who hate city folk, getting married young, getting pregnant younger and saying "ya'll" at least twice per sentence lest you sound snobby. Aside from the holiday pay, I've seen it all. And I belong here. The south needs people like myself to make it think. I don't mind brewing controversy for fun or correcting mispronounced words and bad grammar, but more than that, I need the gay community here.

 

I'm a founding member of a small, yet successful southern Arkansas Gay-Straight Alliance. We even had T-shirts one year. Most of us are not loud or proud, but we are here and queer, and we take it day by day, knowing that while few of us truly suffer the bashing and bullying more common to those in urban areas, our society looks at us sideways like a cat, waiting for us to mess up enough to be made an example of. We watch faculty and students alike squirm during our event-planning. Our advertising campaigns include late-night sidewalk chalking sessions in ninja motif. We make Christmas and Valentine's Day cards for a nearby retirement home. We've won the Christmas window painting contest a couple times. And we are all perfect, confused, scared human beings who rely on each other.

 

I was an ally since High School, when I decided that God didn't make people a certain way just to toss them aside, and I never dreamed that my involvement would go so far. And then I graduated college, still having only a small idea of my classically catholic stunted sexuality. Apparently I'm just picky enough that my taste for women went unnoticed for a couple decades before I met a shy, beautiful lesbian goddess that I couldn't stop thinking about. Scared people ruin good things. Scared people experiencing same-sex attraction for the first time REALLY ruin good things.

 

I'm still getting used to it; my openness to attraction to humans and not just one gender or sex. If I can help it, my family will never know. Some of my friends do, some of them don't. Coworkers probably suspect, but never really ask. I leave rainbow items lying around and carry on with my life as usual. Society cannot change me; I won't let it. I purposely work for a company whose non-discrimination policy covers sexual orientation and sexual identity, just watching my society sideways like a cat, waiting for it to mess up enough to be made an example of.

Reviews

[Knight in Armor]

This is one of those pieces where it's hard to analyze it without getting emotional. I'll give it a shot, though: the best part of the piece, in my humble opinion, is the symmetry of society watching members of a GSA to see if they make a mistake, then the speaker watching society to see when it makes mistakes. This highlights the theme of members of the LGBT community also being members of the human community.