Steven LaChance Blog

I grew up in a time when you could turn on the news and hear people tell you, plainly, that if you were an LGBTQ+ young person, something about you was wrong. Not misunderstood. Not still figuring it out. Wrong. And it wasn’t quiet. It was said out loud, in living rooms, on television, in churches, like it was truth.

You had figures like Anita Bryant standing in front of cameras talking about protecting children while targeting them. You had Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority building a national message around the idea that some people needed to be corrected, contained, or changed. That wasn’t distant history. That was what people were hearing as it happened.

When you’re young, you don’t step back and analyze it. You hear it, and some part of you carries it. That’s what comes back to me now when I hear conversations suggesting it’s acceptable to try to change a young person, to treat who they are as something that needs to be fixed.

It doesn’t feel new. It feels familiar. And that is what concerns me.

Because I know what that sounds like to a kid sitting quietly somewhere, trying to understand themselves. It doesn’t sound like help. It doesn’t sound like care. It sounds like something is wrong with you, and we are going to try to make you into something else.

I worry about the ones who heard that yesterday and felt something shift inside them. The ones who started questioning themselves in a way they never should have had to. The ones who are wondering if maybe they are something that needs to be corrected.

They are not.

No ruling, no movement, no voice on a screen gets to define their worth. Those messages have existed before, and they were wrong then too.

If you are one of those kids reading this, hear me clearly. You are not something that needs to be fixed. You are not a mistake someone else gets to correct. You are a human being, exactly as you are. And that has always been enough.