It’s October! Time to Write Stories about LGBTQ History!
I Was a Gay Bear Sash Queen and Closeted Teacher During the AIDS Crisis
Fleeting fame and lessons learned
Queer history is important because for so many generations there was no history recorded. Yet, we gays have always been here. Sometimes relegated to the shadows. Sometimes persecuted and killed. Often sidelined in various societies, and told we were practicing “the love that has no name.”
I have a sixty-two-year span of LGBTQ history to relate. I could not do so in a thousand-plus word piece for this challenge. However, I would like to relate a special year in that span. Nineteen-ninety-seven.
In 1997 I had been “out” for almost two years. I had left a traditional marriage, accepted the fact that I was gay, and my wife and I had divorced so that she could pursue happiness and so that I could discover my true self. This was not easy, by any means, and there was a lot of anger and angst to go around.
However, in 1996 I had seen a growing trend in Southern California called simply “The Bears”. BEAR guys were the ones who had traditionally been off in the shadows of gay bars and within their gay community sidelined due to their physical appearance.
