What I Love About Being Gay

you have fantastic legs

My legs. No legs were harmed in the writing of this essay.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about being gay. And little else. One might say I’m queer in theory because I only see my queerness in my mind. I’ve known I’m gay for an eternity, it seems. It has always been in my mind, in my awareness. In the beginning, I didn’t know what to call it and I didn’t know others thought it was bad. Puberty changed that, but for the most part, my childhood was straightwashed. The first time someone called me a fag, I just looked at him blankly and asked, “What’s that?” He declined to answer. It is an odd thing to feel something so powerfully, so clearly but not know what to call it.

There is a long lived notion in Christendom that the truth will set you free (John 8:32). That, friends, is a lie, for whatever system of ideas you label as “the Truth” becomes the constraints through which you see the world. It is less a lens and more a set of mental shackles and the world you see is limited to the pinhole they provide. Instead, freedom lies in self knowledge, an ever-changing, evolving sense of self that is relevant to the world in which we live. We are not disembodied minds, we are beings in a world and that world sets parameters and boundaries to which we either conform, or against which we rebel.

It was a compassionate moment that would not have occurred if I was not in…