#comingout
-
There is a difference between living straight and living queer. That difference follows us everywhere even when no one speaks of it. Straight people rarely notice because the world already belongs to them. They see themselves reflected on every screen, in every commercial, on every billboard, in every book. Their stories are told without question.…
-
To be a gay father raising three children in the nineties was to live in quiet. Only the closest people to me knew the truth, because protecting my children mattered more than my own openness. I came out at twenty-nine, but even then it was carefully measured, told only to those who needed to know.…
-
I have been saying this for a year and as I see things ramp up it becomes even more serious. Right now I am looking at the United States from the outside and what I see is alarming. The censorship you are experiencing is indescribable. It is happening in a slow boil and that makes…
-
There may come a time when the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans are pushed so far backwards that silence is no longer an option. When that day arrives it will not be corporate policy changes or legal filings that shake the political landscape. It will be people. Ordinary citizens who have lived quietly with extraordinary truths.…
-
When I was raising my three children as a single gay father in a small Midwestern town, I had to hide being gay. It wasn’t something I ever wanted to do, it was something I had to do. I had come out at 29 to the people in my life who truly mattered, but to…
-
We were in Key West for their Pride celebration when we got news of the Pulse massacre. I remember exactly where I was and how it felt when I first heard about what had happened. The contrast between the night before and the morning after still stays with me. It was like something shifted —…
-
My father was a loving and accepting man. I watched him grow and evolve over the years—his beliefs shifting as he learned, as he listened, as life opened his eyes in new ways. He never clung to an idea simply because it was familiar. Instead, he allowed himself to question, to reconsider, to change. When…
-
History isn’t just a collection of dusty stories—it’s a battlefield where queer voices have always fought for their right to be heard. Today, in the United States, forces are trying to shove these voices back into the closet: banning books, erasing queer history, and silencing those who dare to remember and resist. Imagine the blazing…
-
I’ve spent much of my life thinking about silence—not the quiet of a library, but the kind that erases people. Growing up gay in the 1960s meant navigating a world determined to mold me into something I wasn’t. My interests in films like Valley of the Dolls or West Side Story were dismissed as unserious,…
-
These two things, pictured in the above photo, seem to set the far right off more than anything else right now. Both are facts. One is rooted in science, the other in history. Both are straightforward in the truths they reveal. So why do these two things bother them so much? Out of all the…