Under today’s good-vibes-only toxic positivity of emotional perfectionism where everything is amazing, a blessing, delightful, exciting, and an opportunity, the magic of gay pride curdles and-abracadamnbruh!-suddenly this self-awareness that gave such dimension to queer life bends and bows towards a flattening force.
But what was last year’s Pride? This year’s? If parenthood and artistry and career and taste can evolve over the years, then why not queerness? For all the huffing and puffing about diversity and range and spectrum, the life cycle of a queer person is fairly limited: you’re closeted, then you come out, then you’re proud. I call it the SGI, a less-nerdy (perhaps more-nerdy!) way of describing the Samwise Gamgee Inflection born out of his Lord of the Rings line: “If I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest from home I’ve ever been.” Every day is leg day when you spend it stepping farther from the closet than you ever have before.īut brokenness is afoot with gay pride. None of those thresholds have names and yet all of them carry significant psychological and emotional weight.
#Fucking beautiful gay men making love full
Life is full of so many similar moments: the moment you’ve lived in The Big City longer than you lived in your hometown the moment your marriage lasts longer than your dating life the moment you’ve worked longer at your job than at any previous job.
Every coming sunrise is the dawn of the longest I’ve ever been out. What makes that special this year is it crosses a threshold: I came out on January 10, 2001-7,832 days into my life-and so now every day adds to the majority of my life as an out gay man.
Today, June 21, 2022-the longest, most sun-filled day of the year, of course-I have been out for 7,832 days.