Forgive Us (AIDS Memorial)

Forgive the rambling nature of this post. I wrote it from my heart so it's a bit more raw. I want it to be raw and nothing else. It feels honest. 

Being gay feels like hypocrisy.

Like fucking hypocrisy.

Nice, straight folk telling me how I’m supposed to be me, how I am supposed to live.

Nice, straight, Christian folk who don’t take the time to listen to my story. To any one of our stories.

Stories matter. Somehow, though, they’ve been ignored. Stories are being ignored by the one sub-culture which, one would think, would emphasize and appreciate the stories of others.

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I realized I was gay in an age of immense and growing privilege for gay and lesbian and bisexual folk (still working for full societal inclusion of transgender men and women). I realized I was gay almost 30 plus years after the AIDS epidemic ravished the American gay community. And the men, who survived it, were affected by this plague, and who live today are living among teens that are coming out. I know they’re proud of how far we’ve come. I know they hurt. Still, part of me can’t help but feel like my generation of LGBTQ kids is as negligent as the average teenager of our predecessors. We come out and are proud of our identities as we should be. But we fail to realize that it’s taken 600,000 plus deaths to get where we are today. It’s taken us years and pain. And we’re still dying by our own hands.

Being gay feels like taking responsibility for the past and the future.

Being gay feels like death which forever lays at our doorstep.

Being gay feels like guilt.

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To Christians, please listen. Please, for the love of God. Stop hurting us by your ignorance. “Forgive us for we know not what we do.”

To the men who’ve gone before me, forgive me and my generation who are forgetting you. Forgetting to look to you and learn from you. “Forgive us for we know not what we do.”

To the men who’ve died, forgive us and know your deaths have not been in vain. You’ve helped us to be able to say being gay feels like justice. “Forgive us for we know not what we do.”

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Being gay feels like pain and guilt and death ever near and freedom. But it cost us the lives of so many beautiful men.

Lord have mercy.