All Shades of the Rainbow

I was afraid of being a “gay writer”.

My childhood was at a bit of a cultural turning point, where being something other than straight started to not be as villified or derided. But that wasn't an immediate switch, and being gay was extremely rare.

As a kid, I had exactly one openly gay teacher, my first elementary school music teacher who had a fondness for Disney, musicals, and theater more broadly. He admittedly left a mixed impression on me for various reasons, and I don't think he was a fan of me or my brother. But besides him, I had no openly gay adults around me (which was partly precipitated by being in the military bubble, which outright banned it until long after I was out of those confines).

Given that the only gay or queer characters and people I saw in media and in real life hewed to a particularly narrow stereotype, that made things fun. I passed as straight (or not overtly queer), but being only exposed to those particularly stereotyped gay characters (if any at all), didn't help my self-image.

That commuted to how those people were talked about and who I saw. I was in the sciences, and there were very few openly queer scientists that I knew of. For the ye people who were gay, that was always a seemingly necessary part of their description. “Gay writer”, “gay artist”, “gay actor”…that was seemingly treated as an immutable part of who they were, and I didn't want to be defined exclusively by that. It felt like a label that marginalized and “othered” them, like their work was somehow lessened by that.

I admittedly didn't really have a choice in coming out, thanks to my brother outing me to everyone he could. But in hindsight, coming out was something that was a good thing. Nobody ever treated me differently after they found out (at least openly), and I like to hope that me being nothing like the stereotype of the era was a positive thing.

I won't deny that I was lucky. But it might have been helped by my coming out/outing happening in my second year of college, after people got to know me. It was never something I led with, but people knowing was never an issue at all.

Still, I went back “in the closet” after undergraduate, and I only started to be more blatant about it after I got a boyfriend. He wasn't going to be a secret, and while that relationship didn't last for various reasons, it did give me more comfort and confidence that way.

Admittedly, the landscape looks different now, and being gay has always been part of how I write ever since I started trying to take it seriously. I like to explore that, being different from others and finding connections with your people. There are many ways to be gay and be visible, and I hope that my way helps someone out in some way.

I will say that it's heartening that it is easier to be gay now than it was until even recently. Acceptance isn't to be taken for granted, of course, and complacency is not the call in these times, but things are better than they were.

And, admittedly, being a “gay writer” no longer scares me like it once did.