I love being gay. I also need you to know that I have been editing myself again.
Not in the way I did when I was younger. It’s not the careful monitoring, the hiding, the performance of someone I wasn’t. This is quieter than that. It’s leaving things unsaid in conversations I disagree with. Nodding through moments I should push back on. Letting things pass, glances go by, because the alternative is making someone uncomfortable, and somewhere along the way I decided that was my job to prevent.
Parenthood did this. Or maybe I let it.
Here’s the thing I’ve been afraid to say out loud: I worry that people see my choices as performance. That the intentionality I bring to parenting, and all aspects of my life, the way I push back when forms only have a line for mom and dad, the way I won’t let questions about which one of my son’s parents is “real” slide, the way I am trying to raise a kid who understands that our family is not an asterisk, looks like I’m being different for the sake of being different.
I’m not.
I’m being direct because I’ve spent my whole life watching what happens when people like me are made invisible, and I’m not willing to do that to my son or to my family. That’s not contrarian. That’s just what it looks like to parent from a place you had to fight to get to, and are invested in living your truth so it’s a bit easier for the next generation.
Here’s where the editing comes from.
I don’t actually want to parent like a straight person. I can’t see the value in it. Being a gay parent means I don’t have to follow a checklist that never considered us in the first place — and that’s the part of this experience I love the most. But other parents are working from that script, and without even meaning to, they hand it to you. Adapt this. Fit here. Round off the edges that don’t match.
What I didn’t expect was the loneliness that comes from that. Not the tired kind every new parent gets. The specific kind that comes from being surrounded by people who love you and your kid and still feeling like you are explaining yourself in a language nobody quite speaks, or is trying to understand.
And it’s not just straight parents. Some of the loneliest moments have come from other gay families, people I assumed would just get it, who seem to have landed on: as long as we raise good humans, that’s enough. What I’ve started to notice is that choosing visibility, choosing to push back, choosing not to flatten yourself for someone else’s comfort, forces a reckoning for anyone who hasn’t fully made peace with their own right to take up space. Our family isn’t trying to be a mirror. But sometimes we are one anyway.
Last Pride I wrote about spending years feeling like the wrong kind of gay. Too quiet. Too nerdy. Too unsure of what kind of gay I was supposed to be. I wrote about finally unlearning that. About arriving somewhere that felt like mine.
What I didn’t know yet is that parenthood would hand me a new version of the same test. Not am I the right kind of gay, but am I the right kind of gay dad. Visible enough but not too loud. Proud but not political. Present but not pushy.
No matter how hard you try to be “normal,” you will never be seen as equal. You will just be palatable.
And I’ve been failing that test on purpose, I think.
So yes, I’m going to say something when the daycare’s form only has a line for mom and dad. Not to be difficult. Not to make the person at the desk feel bad, because I know it’s likely not their call. But because someone should be annoyed by it enough to say something before we have to fill it out. Because when someone later asks why Pride even exists, that person at the desk now has an answer they lived through instead of one they read about.
That’s not performing. That’s living out the future our ancestors dreamed of. And I owe them more than palatable.
Happy Pride.
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