Queer on the Road in America

   I came out as a gay man to my parents and siblings in 1975. I was eighteen. We lived in a suburb of San Francisco, and "Gay Liberation"--the push for freedom from oppression by Baby Boom-era gays and lesbians--was in the air. I had come to feel, after four difficult years of private struggle, that it would be best to live truthfully. This did not make me noble. It was simply a case of enlightened self-interest: I wanted to be free of the pernicious psychological divisions of what came to be called "the closet."
   My family mostly embraced me. (A few questions, quite understandably, were asked). In this I was fortunate. Later, as an inveterate natural interviewer of everyone I met (not for nothing did I eventually become a journalist), I heard horrific stories of young queer people forced from their homes. I have never been a parent, but I cannot imagine expelling a child from the family womb for any reason, including being true to whom she is.
   Others were not so sanguine about my dawning truth; a few friendships broke under the weight of it. But then, are late adolescence and early young adulthood easy for anyone? I know I found them difficult, especially regarding sexual orientation. For every tentative step toward freedom, there were sometimes two backward into the "safety" of denial. At college, for example, I held a rather public position on campus, and never felt I could square it with being gay. So I hid, or at least didn't deal with, my sexuality in what could have been the perfect time and place to do so.

   In early 1983, shortly after turning twenty-six, I moved into San Francisco, the obvious place for a young gay man from the Bay Area--or from just about anywhere in America, at that time.
   Sadly, many of the brave and festive souls of the "Gay Lib" era began succumbing to AIDS, then in its baleful infancy. Even with the shadow of that terrible illness hovering, however, I found a community of like-minded souls and more or less completed my coming-out process.
  When one is of an orientation largely reviled by great swaths of one's country, one tends to hunker down with those of similar ilk. Much time is spent in trying to understand one's place in the immediate and broader world. There are considerations of physical safety and questions of societal acceptance vs. ostracism, never mind the usual life lessons of getting into (and out of) relationships, sustaining friendships, holding jobs and paying bills.
   If it seems to some that LGBT people think an awful lot about their "identity," well, there's a reason for it, at least at the outset: it's tough to know who you are, and where and how you belong, when half or more of the world says you shouldn't exist.

   After eighteen more or less happy years in San Francisco, I moved, in the early aughts, to a town of twenty-eight thousand souls on the Peninsula, a half-hour south of the city. For the first time in my adult life, I did not live in the so-called "gay ghetto"--in my case, San Francisco's Castro district. (I never actually lived in that neighborhood, but I spent plenty of time there.)
   I was by then in my early forties. Living in a largely heterosexual world renewed the challenge of feeling comfortable with my sexual orientation. "Coming out" is an ongoing process. This is especially true when heterosexuals assume that you're one of them, largely because some of them don't readily conceptualize people as being any other way.
   As it happened, living in that area shifted my perspective. The people who mattered to me accepted me fully (just as I accepted them). In time, I realized I'd become a man in the world who happened to be gay, not a gay man who happened to live in the world (or didn't, because he had stayed in the "ghetto"). Arguably, a maturing process happens for some queer people: one eventually moves out from the safety and support of like-minded folk in order to exist in and enjoy the larger world.
   For me, the sea change came when I saw, to my surprise, that my fears of ostracism had ossified into tightly-held grievances. You don't understand--that was my underlying approach to the world. I was chagrined to note that it fostered an unconscious delusion: the pain I'd endured entitled me to behave noxiously.
   I came to see that I'd never be free as long as lived in the seemingly protective castle of resentment. Castles look like fortresses--but so do prisons. I had to dissolve the castle walls: release perceived injustices, forgive past injuries (mine and others'). In that way lay true liberation.
 
   But the coming-out and life-review processes are never quite finished. Recently, my partner, Tim, and I moved from that small Peninsula town to an area of nearly fifty-three thousand people in Florida, an hour south of St. Petersburg. We drove Tim's car cross-country, zooming along Interstate 10 through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and into Florida.
   It was a different America that the one we knew in the Bay Area. Yes, we had been a couple in a small Peninsula town with no discernible gay presence. But that was in the Bay Area, which, although more conservative than its reputation would suggest, is nevertheless still fairly progressive. "Live and let live" is the motto there, even if it's now whispered more than shouted (or sung).
   Along Interstate 10, by contrast, billboards touted the Bible as "the One True Word." Others asked where we planned to spend Eternity. (My answer: right here on Earth, in that stupid, grinding Houston traffic snarl that cost us at least an hour of travel time one day.) Jacked-up trucks flew Confederate flags. We were passing through the land of "religious liberty," where some store owners and/or employees want to refuse service to LGBT people based on "religious beliefs." This was not necessarily a land naturally hospitable to queer people, a thought never far from my mind.
   For this reason, I felt it best that we stick to chain hotels along the main highway. After all, we were renting rooms with one King-sized bed. I even considered renting rooms with two Queen-sized beds, implying to nosy hotel staff that Tim and I are "just friends." But I then realized that those rooms would need closets large enough to hide us and our cowardice. (It surprised us, furthermore, to learn that two-Queen-bed rooms cost more than single-bed ones. In the land of chain hotels, being in a couple is both soul-sustaining and fiscally prudent.)
   Anyway, I figured that nobody in a globally-branded hotel chain was going to pull the "religious liberty" excuse to ignore us--at least not if the chain didn't want an international viral incident, which no corporation does. I figured right. We were left to our own devices, for which I was grateful. I'm not sure this would have been the case had we detoured from the main highway into the back country in some of these spots, but time pressures prevented us from doing that kind of exploring, anyway.

   Perhaps, in the end, I made too big a deal of my inchoate terrors. Perhaps fear blinded me to the truth that most Americans, not just Bay Areans, are live-and-let-live types, the current degraded civic discourse notwithstanding. (A few noxious people do not a country make.)
   I don't know. My recent experiences simply brought home that the ancient scars of oppression never fully heal. It is a balm to be among one's own kind; it is yet more disenthralling to face the old fears in order to walk freely in the world.
   Even if in it's the world of, like, a Holiday Inn or something.