Gay Pride #4: Sharing our Stories: Make them Personal

Thursday, June 27, 2013

I wrote a five part series and posted them on Facebook this year to commemorative Gay Pride and Gay History. Day 4. 

Day 4 of Pride Week, and my fourth day of sharing "dates" / historic milestones in the gay rights movement.

I’m attaching a link to great picture summary of 26 milestones in Gay History from Politico.com’s website I stumbled across yesterday. Good Stuff. Sharing history keeps us aware of our humanity. Being able to look back and see where we’ve been and where we can still go together is inspiring.

26 gay-right milestones 

But I want to switch gears today and talk about some more personal “dates” in my own gay history. That’s the beauty of facebook, you can talk about what airports you are in, what fancy food you are preparing and eating, share only the your best photos with your best looking friends, or you can be a bit more transparent and expose yourself to a broad group of friends, perhaps even offend a few from time to time…or perhaps help them see your own humanity and shift an opinion here or there. 

My sister always says, “I am way to open about my life to everyone,” so why should I stop today? And as Edith Windsor, the 83-year-old plaintiff in the DOMA case said: “As we increasingly came out, people saw that we didn't have horns. ... It just grew to where we were human beings like everybody else.” 

So here are some personal dates.

1961: I was born

1970s -1980s: I realized I might be wired “different” 

1980s – 2007: I tried to be “normal”

2007: I came out

Being normal was incredibly important to me. I tried. And well I have always been late to the party. I can’t say I marched in 84, or rallied in 92, or stood proud years ago. I silently watched, often scared that was me. I respect that in so many of my close gay friends. They made change and acceptance happen. I cared more about being normal.

And you know what, I finally realized I am. (Though some who 

have seen me dance and sing late at night might not think so, and well no doubt you can find a photo here on Facebook of such.) But the most important “dates” I have had recently and most worthy to share as milestones, are with my guy, my boyfriend, Darin. And other then that whole moment of attraction and how we are we are wired, that leads to other activities, which are not a whole lot of anyone’s business… I am realizing that I am normal. Just like my straight friends. I sometimes have a headache and just want to sleep, or I have an important meeting I need to be on task for, I sometimes just don’t want to talk until I have had my first cup of coffee or want to get to the gym early. 

It is frustrating to adjust my/our schedule for his daughter. Geez, I am so normal I am dating a guy with joint custody of 12-year-old daughter. I finally have something else to chat about with a bunch of my normal single girlfriends: dating men with children! But I think it is pretty normal to be proud of how committed he is to being a good parent.

I look forward to his phone calls, and get tired of hearing about his day at work. I enjoy cooking dinner, and look bewildered when he does not help clean up. We work around one of our homes and sometimes just run errands together, he takes forever when he is shopping and actually seems to do it more then even I ever thought was possible. I get amused when he needs to tell me how to do something or attempts to adjust my furniture placement, because my way is better and has worked for all these years just fine, which for some reason he doesn’t seem to grasp. We talk about where we’d like to travel and “what if’s.” He treats my dog, better than I do sometimes.

It all seems pretty normal to me, so I'm not sure what makes us that different. So in the end, I think we are just like every other couple out there. Taking it one day at a time trying to build a relationship. And that’s really the lesson about gay rights and same sex marriage. We really aren’t much different, we don’t do a whole lot of things different, we work, we worry about getting fat, we pay our taxes, we believe in a higher being and we just want to love someone who brings us some joy.

Being authentic is a gift we can all give to ourselves whether we are gay or straight. That’s what I am most proud about, took me a long time to get here, but as PRIDE approaches, I won’t hesitate celebrating my own stories and the milestones “dates” in my own personal gay history, and if in doing so, my own humanity, my normal life and my desire to be considered equal under the law shines through and shifts just one more person’s way of thinking, that’s a reason to celebrate PRIDE.