An Inheritance of Pride

I decided not to hang our Pride flag this year. The level of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, legislation and violence going around this country right now put a fear in me I’ve never in my life experienced. What if some psychopath shoots up our house? My husband and I just moved my mother here on hospice. What if she gets hurt? I was 31 years old when I came out as gay. It was 2010, and the momentum towards equality was clearly building. Congress had just voted to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and a host of states were on their way to legalizing same-sex marriage. It was the safest time in history to come out, and I had little fear of being beat up or murdered. My main worry was my relationships with my family and my colleagues might suffer. But even that that proved needless. I came out to my parents over Sunday dinner. My father, an Episcopal priest with a Tipperary brogue, immediately invoked the Bible. “Well, it’s no secret that David and Johnathan were in a same-sex relationship. That’s King David!” he said, pounding the table with his knife and fork. He went on to list several admirable gays from history, literature, and Irish mythology, eventually ending his sermon by saying he loved me and was proud of me. “This is a cause for celebration!” he declared, raising his glass of wine. My mother was loving and supportive too, though less vociferously, while my sister seemed genuinely excited. “When can we go out dancing?” she asked. I shouldn’t have expected anything less from my family. My parents, both from Ireland, met in Gadsden, Alabama in 1962 when my father was appointed assistant pastor at St. James Catholic Church. My mother, then called Sister Marion Margherita, taught second grade at the parish school. Soon after my father arrived, he happened upon a Ku Klux Klan rally while driving through town. When he stopped at an intersection, a man in full regalia approached him with a donation bucket. “I’m sorry sir. But I am not in sympathy with your cause,” my father said, before rolling up his window and driving off.

Back Contact Posted by:admin - July 22, 2023, 12:31 p.m.