Pride Reflections

So far, I’ve been quiet during this Pride month in contemplation. Pride is something that took me years to be able to understand and embrace. The below offers a quick look at that journey and why it was complicated for me. This is not exhaustive but is a good cross-section of life growing up. This also briefly touches on the oppression experienced by many in rural America and how it can become internalized to the point of almost detaching from your true self.

I grew up in a small farming community in Northeast Missouri with a population of around 2,500 people at the time. I graduated high school with what I always recall as around 45 but was actually 58 (I counted in my yearbook for this one). The town was very conservative, with many agricultural-based businesses. Most of my class was out “sick” on the opening day of deer season (rifle) with the teachers asking them how big their buck was on the next day they attended school without any contempt in their voice for the child have missing school on the day or days prior. A large number of my classmates were Catholic, which when I attended school meant that we all went to the public school for kindergarten and then the kids that went to the parochial school broke off from us until the 8th Grade and rejoined us to finish high school. Another church affiliation in the area with a large following was Baptist, with the local churches belonging to the Southern Baptist Convention. I myself grew up as a member of the First Baptist Church until around the age of eight when my family, who was not well-to-do got tired of the latest pastor focusing so much on money and tithing. So, we broke from family tradition, and the church that my father, his father, and his father before him had grown up in, and stopped into the local United Methodist Church on a whim one Sunday Morning. We liked the pastor and differences so much that it became our church home. It was a definite departure from the previous fire and brimstone sermons we’d heard on Sunday’s past.

Throughout school I was different, and not only did I know this, I also was told this in many comments, jeers, and actions by others. I had gone through a few girlfriends by eighth grade, only to start questioning what I was attracted to. Could the other kids be right? By my junior year of high school, I had leaned toward thinking I was Bisexual because I hadn’t come to terms with my own sexuality fully yet. I told a person that I thought was a friend and she told her sister, which then told some other people, resulting in what I had mentioned around 9 A.M. making the rounds to the entire school by lunch. The incessant teasing just got worse and the handful of people I counted as friends that I did have quickly fell away.

I graduated, moved away briefly, then came back for a bit. During this time, I met up with a man that I had first met in a combined vocational technical training center that served multiple area schools. He would eventually become my husband, but during this brief time back I learned that I needed to accept myself for who I am, a gay man. It took many years after that to fully come to terms with my own sexuality, but sometime around the age of 25 I was able to do so after moving to a larger city. After this we were also able to adopt, which also came with some uncertainties, but we were able to get it done. We became the first single hearing adoption case in Boone County, Missouri and paved the way for other same-sex couples to complete adoptions in the same year.

After being married for a few years, and together for over a decade, my husband and I learned that we are what most people term as polyamorous and took on a third. Our boyfriend has now lived with us for over five years and shares the ups and downs of life with us.

I am thankful that I have my career at a company that allows me to be my whole self at work and values diversity and equity. My safety in the workplace is not something I have to worry about.

Sadly, the same safety does not extend into the world outside of the walls of the box that is conference calls, e-mails, messages, and presentations. I say this because while my employer protects me, the state that I live in and the government above it and others does not in many areas of life for an LGBTQ+ person. I can be fine in one town and move to another where it is legal to discriminate against me, or I can take a vacation to another state and find out after a major accident that they can bar me from seeing my boyfriend or husband because the hospital doesn’t recognize me as family. In some cases, it could even potentially be unsafe for my niece to share her excitement about something the family has done together with us because of what has been dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” laws in various states. In some areas it can be risky just to hug, hold hands or show other kinds of affection because of what has been deemed “immoral” in the recent rash of so-called “morality” laws.

I personally view Pride as a celebration of how far we've come, and a perspective of how far we have yet to go. This shows both and reminds us of that. We still have issues here in the US, such as state-by-state regulations and laws that govern expression and until the LGBTQ+ community is on a level playing field in everyday life (and afterlife due to laws governing the transfer of assets and such) Pride will continue to be both a celebration and a protest. Then it can shift to a celebration and time of remembrance of hardships that whatever generation is blessed with equality and equity no longer needs to face.