queer

  • Nothing Else Should Matter

    Nothing Else Should Matter— Steven A. LaChance How did we learn to live like this,in a world that leans so easily toward hate? Where did it begin,this quiet beliefthat we are somehow betterthan the person standing beside us,to the right,to the left,close enough to touchbut kept at a distanceby nothing more than an idea. What…

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  • Inside Grace

    Inside Grace

    I’ve spent some time over this past week writing about the crucifixion and the resurrection. Not because I felt the need to explain them, and not because I think I have answers that anyone else doesn’t. I wrote because I had something to say, and because it is still rare to see a gay man…

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  • You Don’t Need Fixed

    You Don’t Need Fixed

    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…

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  • I Want You to Know Who I Am

    It was around 1998. I was dating a man who lived in Columbia, Missouri. He was a tennis player. A handsome man who looked a little like a young Robert Redford. I fell hard for those blue eyes and that chiseled jaw. At the time I was raising my three children on my own. On…

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  • The Performance of Survival

    School should be a safe place for all kids regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, or anything else that might make them different from others. That is the ideal people like to talk about. But the truth is that it is not and never really has been. Growing up, I understood something very clearly even…

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  • Coming Out

    Coming Out

    Here’s something I’ve learned over the years. Coming out is not a one time event. It is not just something gay people do. It is something we all do, over and over again, in different ways, throughout our lives. We just do not always call it that. Coming out is what happens when you finally…

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  • Paperwork Instead of Bullets

    Right now, the United States is using a practice that allows asylum seekers to be deported to third countries. That means people are not necessarily sent back to where they came from. They can be sent to any country willing to accept them. For LGBTQ+ refugees fleeing persecution, this has life or death consequences. People…

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  • I Did My Best

    I Did My Best

    These are thoughts from the quiet moments in the morning, from a night that was too long. Sometimes the quiet in the early morning gets loud enough that I finally let myself say it. Not out of frustration. Not as a defense. Just because it is true. I did my best. I was a very…

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  • Murder by Proxy

    Murder by Proxy

    Two gay men who were granted asylum are being sent back to Iran, a country where their sexual orientation places them in real and documented danger. This is not hypothetical. Everyone involved knows what awaits them. In Iran, being gay is illegal. It has been punished with prison, torture, and execution. These are not rumors…

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  • Did We?

    You know, they say every generation of LGBTQ+ people stands on the shoulders of the accomplishments of the one before it. That is true, at least in part. And yet lately, it can feel as if we have faltered some along the way. I catch myself in those darker hours of the night, when sleep…

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