My 2021 Pride Wish; To Those Who are Not Straight

I gave this Tedx talk in 2017, Developing Emotive Agility One Difficult Conversation at a Time, 7 years after I came out to my parents as gay.

I had previously been married to a guy from Brazil when I was 24 — a decision that was rushed by our different borders, in addition to all the other reasons romantic decisions are rushed like they are a matter of life or death in your early 20s. We quickly divorced.

The fact that I am the only child of a bishop of a Catholic church, meant to me that to maintain any relationship with my parents whilst I defied their beliefs I constantly needed to explain myself to them in their own context.

Looking back, I was visibly nervous and not at ease, as I usually am while giving a professional talk. I had never shared the personal details of my story so publically and as I attempted to manage my anxiety, I over-prepared.

At the time of this talk, I was in a long-term, monogamous relationship with the woman I intended to spend the rest of my life with. To communicate my identity to anyone who needs an external description of what it entails, the word is gay. Our relationship is gay. I am gay. The community we entered, simply by being two women in love, was gay.

Words are so helpful….And, words are also so constricting.

Why didn’t I come out as a lesbian?

If anyone referred to me as a lesbian it didn’t bother me, but using it to describe myself didn’t feel right. To this day I don’t know why. But perhaps I felt most identified with men because growing up the only gay people I knew were men. I didn’t have one lesbian role model in real life, but gay men, I had. Living happy healthy lives, at that! And the term “gay” seemed to include women, so I claimed it.

Why didn’t I come out as bi?

Nothing about that felt right to me. First of all, it felt like a betrayal because it felt that it implied a choice. And that would thwart my need for approval from my parents if they thought I could choose to love a man instead.

Secondly, saying I was bi felt to me like telling people that my self was divided into two; That somehow I needed to have two people in order to feel whole, or to have two genders to be satisfied.

Of course, that case most certainly exists for plenty of people, but that was false and for me, and stating the truth was THE most important part of coming out.

Thirdly, (I’m not proud of this now) but I judged people who used the term bi. I suspected that some of them were actually gay but they were using it as a protective blanket from the backlash, relentless discrimination, and furry that coming out as gay can often bring. In the Catholic world that informed my experience, there was no room for nuance. There was no space for the grey area that being open to both genders but being monogamous with one would imply. Therefore, MY truth had to be all or nothing.

Lastly, to me bi was not an option because it ran too high a risk of confusing and emboldening the homophobics; It could fuel their argument that same-sex relationships were wrong “because they were a choice” and that risked the potential to destroy decades of work for gay rights to be considered human rights.

To come out as gay was one of the hardest things I ever did. One of the teachings my upbringing had taught me is that one’s worth is measured in how many hard things you do. The fact that I felt I needed to explain myself to my parents at all was a core need for parental approval. This is natural for every child to have towards caregivers…And BLESSED are those who never need to unlearn that need in order to thrive!

My personal victory in my coming out story was that in this conversation with my father in 2010, I was able to deliver my truth while maintaining love and confidence as I spoke to him, in spite of his reaction. I didn’t get angry, I didn’t take it back to make him feel better, and my worst fear didn’t come true: I didn’t apologize.

Many people who watched this talk said they were left hanging about what happened next and what my father said. Well, his reaction was terrible. My parents were hurtful and did all the things you would hope they wouldn’t do. But I didn’t talk about that in this talk — because this talk is not about my parents.

This story was worth telling for the first time 7 years after the fact because that coming out conversation was the first time I had ever spoken my truth without an attachment to the consequences. And, I prepared for it using Emotive Agility, my academic passion & life’s work. This pivot point catapulted me into a whole new phase of my life, and I started filling up with an enormous sense of freedom that I began to feel for the very first time.

Now it’s 2021, I’m no longer in a gay relationship. At the time I gave this talk, my relationship was somewhat literally burning to the ground. I was on the brink of doing the next hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. Admitting that what was once there was no longer viable, choosing by myself and moving alone to the other side of the country and beginning again with another sense of freedom.

Exactly one year later after the day I gave this Tedx talk, I found my forever love. At first, I had trouble recognizing myself in every photo with him because my smile held so much deep joy that it created creases around my mouth and eyes that I had never seen. He is the most amazing being and our love is perfectly matched.

Are my parents thrilled that I’m married to a straight cis-gendered male, even though we eloped?

You betcha.

Do they feel I’ve found my way after a wayward spell?

I cringe to say it — without a doubt.

My victory now is that their approval doesn’t feel GOOD. I’ve evolved to follow my own truth so that their approval no longer matters to me.

In fact, it doesn’t feel like anything at all. I bought myself that freedom at 27 when I came out to them as gay.

As a woman madly in love and in a monogamous heterosexual relationship for the rest of my life, I still live in a world that is divided into two categories: “Straight” & “Not Straight.”

So if you meet me today, you probably would not know that I’m part of that second category of LGBTQIA+ humans, unless I give you a word to identify myself other than “straight.”

And once again, words are so helpful….And, words are also so constricting.

The label bi still feels wrong to me. I do feel comfortable saying I’m ambisexual, just as some are ambidextrous, but when I use that word people instantly suggest other labels I could use instead. It’s not incredibly important anyway because unless they’ve watched this Tedx talk, nobody really asks…

Except, it IS incredibly important. Labels are awfully annoying because they rarely fit, but by using one, I make myself visible.

The lack of visibility of people who are “Not Straight” is still an issue, either because they actively are hiding it out of fear, or because they are straight until proven gay. Being visible is worth it for me if there’s even a chance that I could be the example I never had. I would have suffered less; perhaps I would have suffered better. So, I must persist in choosing and using an identifying label; even though it’s a teensy-tiny piece of amunition in support of the gargantuan fight for the human right to love.

It took me a quarter of a century to be able to speak my truth. My hope this Pride is that we can continue to roll that timeline back earlier for every generation until one day we’re born and labels are irrelevant and being “visible” is irrelevant because love is prioritized over convention.

Coming out to my parents 11 years ago, freed me to speak what’s true for me in all future phases of my own wild quest I call my life.

Now, I’ll leave you with one truth that I’ve always known and will never be afraid to say, forever, and ever, amen:

You cannot CHOOSE to love.

You can choose to marry. You can choose to divorce. You can choose to have sex. But you can never choose to love.

And for your love, you don’t ever deserve to be shamed, judged, or deprived, for it is your human right.