On Gay History and Gay Guilt and Gay Spaces and Gay Generations and the Gay Identity

Over the last few years I’ve been ruminating on a number of ideas related to my experience with coming out, Gay history, identity and spaces. This story is the culmination of all that rumination. It’s a little bit long, and a little bit all over the place, but I hope that it will resonate with you, my beloved reader.

Coming out

Coming out was easy for me.

Well, that’s a lie.

But despite my conservative upbringing, the whole process amounted to a big nothing. Sure, it was hard at the time. Tears were shed. Voices were raised. I felt the weight of many disappointed looks over a period of several years as my coming out process unfolded to varying groups of friends, family, and coworkers.

I wasn’t disowned, humiliated, beaten, or killed for my sexual identity. It all started in 2003. I began to come to terms with it myself over the year or two before. It was confusing given the things my church had taught me. Things were scary for young gays coming out then. And things were scary for our friends and family too. It was just a few years after the murder of Matthew Shepard. HIV was still new-ish and difficult to treat. There were still few places where it was safe to be out. There wasn’t a lot of talk about any of this if you weren’t in the gay community.

In the years since first coming out, it’s been a fairly smooth ride for me. Probably the…