It's not often I reflect on being gay...
I just don't make a huge issue of it. It's just one part of who I am. However, as another Pride season rolls around, I think it's time to reflect on how far I (and we as a community) have come.
I've battled a lot. A bigoted father who baptised me against my will, cancer, and coming out as a homosexual in the middle of Mississipi and Missouri, of all places. It wasn't exactly at the time I wanted to, my father having gone through my mail and discovered something that lead to his suspicion I was a homosexual. If I remember correctly, I'd ordered some sort of software that ran on a very old IBM PC that was nothing more than strip poker that revealed highly pixelated pictures of naked men. It was on a giant 5 1/4" floppy disk. Prior to that, in 1985, while I was living with my Dad in Mississippi, I made a secret donation to the AIDS Memorial Quilt Project. I remember taking a bus to the local post office, and purchasing a money order for my $25 donation. All highly secret from my father and step-mother. That was a ton of money for me back then. I mailed it off to the AIDS Quilt folks and prior to getting a reply including an informational mailer, I remember making sure to rush to the mail box daily to ensure I was the one who intercepted the mail. When it did come, I hid it far away, in the back of the closet (no pun intended).
Later on, when we moved to Missouri and I was forced out of the closet, I recall my dad telling me he was worried I might have given him AIDS because not a week before, I had licked my finger and wiped blood off his chin where he cut himself shaving. That was a very defining moment for me. Burned into my memory now as if it were yesterday. It was the following day I was forced out of his house never to return. I met some gay men in Springfield, the nearest large city, who took me to my first gay bar, in Joplin, Missouri. The place was non-descript, had no sign of any kind, black and red decoration on in the inside. You'd never know from without, what was going on within. I still recall how liberating it was. Not so liberating, was driving around parks in Springfield, late at night, flashing my headlights at other cars, in the hopes of attracting some human contact with another male soul.
Not long after, I moved to California and it was another world. 1992 L.A. was light years beyond Mississippi, 1984. And Toronto, 2009, is light-years beyond Los Angeles, 1992. It hasn't always been an easy trip. I've had it easier than some and rougher than others. It's helped to make me who I am today and I wouldn't trade that for anything, actually.
