Dear semper augustus posted this to his blog.
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Open Sexuality
Posted protected on 2006.04.12 at 09:44
I find I do not express my sexuality openly, through clothes, speech, or in my hot-button issues, as most others, who identify the way I do, do. While some of this comes from my natural reticence to display sexuality amongst strangers, I find it mostly comes from a strong sense of my identity. I refuse to let my sexuality be a primary-characteristic!

I find that other touchstones serve better when it coes to discovering who someone is. Do they like hugs? What books do they read? What is their overall aesthetic sense trying to create in their lives? What are their choices of friends? What do they do with their free-time? To proclaim sexuality as a primary-characteristic of one's public identity, I find, is a poor indicator of who one is.

The question them remains, why would one do this, as so many do?

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IN RESPONSE

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I'm a faggot and a queer. I prefer those terms to gay because they are less apologetic. My sexuality is as important as any other descriptor about me. You're voicing the same opinion as many of my closeted at work friends.


My dignity demands that I be accorded the same respect that any straight boy would get. Should I not mention JM the most important person in my life for fear of reprisal? Excuse me if I don't play Uncle Tom to the hetero majority.

Have you ever been persecuted for the sake of who you are? Most of our faggot brethren have been. Life is much easier coming from a liberal house in the suburbs. Ponder for a while what it must be like to be a gay man from a poor minority background that rejects him, to be scorned by your family for who you love and by the majority for who you love and your complexion.

Why should one do this? You ask and I will awnser.

Because it has been denied us for so long. Look up the sodomy laws, recall the pink triangle, take a long deep breath and see the persecution that is heaped upon gay men the world over. In over 60 percent of the countries of the world it is illegal to engage in male/male sex. Look to the eighties when Legionaires Disease got swifter attention then HIV. While young men died by the thousands and tens of thouands and bigots bearing crosses prclaimed that God had finally struck down the sodomites.

BECAUSE WE CAN BE QUEER.

Not just hiding in the shadows and furtively feeling for signs of others like us but open, honest, and proud.

I know men who did not have the capacity to be open. I know a man who buried his partner of 40 years last year. He sat opposite his partners family in church and in the entirety of the funeral no one mentioned him. 40 years of devotion and love shat on because the family were assholes, the priest didn't dare speak out, ad my friend saw no reason to make his sexuality be a primary characteristic of his public persona. They lived on 17th street and never were part of the gay community they lived there before 17th street was gay. David still has never been to a pride parade and is 72, it has passed under his window for twenty years. We just got him to go to Dignity recently and as I understand it it was the third time in his life that he had been to a gay event, the other two were in France in the 60's.

Silence denies us our place in history, it denies our communities ever knowing us, and it denies us as actual human beings relegating us to the level of animals in hiding.

That is why this one proclaims my sexuality as the primary characteristic of my public identity. I will not be silenced.