Queerness for me has become and then been loneliness. There is one time a year – at Pride – when I feel part of something bigger.
As we get older, more of us find the person we want to spend our time with. Whether that’s a few years or a lifetime, that plays itself out.
I can relate to being with men. I’ve known romance with them. I can appreciate their good qualities because of having an amazing dad and the good ones I’ve been with.
But this stops somewhere. The lifetime I picture for myself is with a wife. I can’t participate in planning lives with men. There are things that come with this life that none of my people understand right now. A proposal will be a conversation of who does it, whether we both wear rings, and it will be on my mind that not every woman like me has the privilege of having the right to marry her fiance. I will have to save thousands of dollars to have a child. We will decide who carries the baby. We will have to inject ourselves or the other with medication for 21 days or more. One of us will not see ourselves reflected in the face of the child. A conversation of this child’s relationship with the donor will take place. And then it will take place again and again. One of us will be labeled as “mother” on the birth certificate and the other will be labeled as “parent”. This child will grow up knowing their family unit looks a little different than most of their friends’.
Showing affection in public is calculated. It may potentially never not be.
Each year, I’m scared no one will come to Pride with me. It is the only event I look forward to every year.
I am alone in my admiration of two women walking by me holding hands. Seeing queer love aging is a rare and special thing – unapologetically themselves in times that were more unforgiving than now. A way of being I have fought to embody.
Working to accept who you are and choosing to bring people into your tornado makes you crave participation and explicit membership in the community.
Interpersonally, I don’t have anyone who intimately understands my experience of being gay. I don’t have someone to confide in when I’m not sure whether a girl wants to be my friend or more than that. Romance between women looks very different from romance between a man and a woman. Break ups feel like my world is ending because they weren’t just my partner, they were my connection to queerness. They were the person i experienced love with, and queer love is radical. This bonds people in ways not easy to put into words.
I am endlessly thankful for the sense of pride I feel in being queer. I know there is a home for me in a multitude of places outside of these walls. I know I can find love, unity, respect, explicit acceptance, and home with other queer people. Right now, that just feels so far away. It is a strange thing – to both belong and to be isolated.