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The Importance of Being Visible
As we celebrate Pride 2019 and the 50th Anniversary of Stonewall, the importance of being visible advocates and allies for our communities matters now more than ever.
As you can probably imagine, growing up in rural Southeastern Oklahoma in the 1980’s — even with an amazing, loving family — I lacked any strong gay male role models. I vividly remember stories, jokes, asides, and exclamations from my childhood that established a strong sense of other, of difference, of wrong, bad, lesser-than nature that was to be associated with being LGBTQ+. “That’s gay,” childhood friends would say when something made them uncomfortable. “That guy? Oh, he’s queer,” a classmate said with dripping disdain during school lunch hour. “If I had a gay son, I’d take him out back and shoot him.” These were all things I heard from friends, others boys at school, friends of my parents, or others in public — even around church — during those formative years. Years before I ever had an inkling that I might be gay, I understood very well that being gay was seen as abnormal and very wrong in the eyes of most of my little world in Southeastern Oklahoma.
By the time I was a teenager and began to recognize some of those thoughts and feelings during a rush of new hormones, I wasn’t even…
