You’re Fucking Welcome

There’s so much in this life I’m not allowed to talk about.

I know people who read this are probably calling bullshit. I write constantly. I find topics out of thin fucking air. I post multiple times a day when the words are flowing. But there are entire corridors of my life I keep sealed shut because opening them would hurt people who don’t deserve the fallout.

So I bite my fucking tongue.

When I first came out, I wasn’t fully out. I was honest with a select handful of people while pretending through normal daily interactions. Performing straight. Compartmentalizing. Surviving.

My ex-wife and I once owned a house in Denver. We rented out the mother-in-law apartment in the basement to one of her friends, a gay man who had seen the worst of mankind.

His name was Michael.

Michael was gay when the risks were fucking high. When walking down the street “too gay” could get you attacked. When drunk men could claim they’d been “hit on” and panicked, and courts allowed that defense. When “faggot” was common vocabulary. When employers didn’t bother hiding why they fired you.

That was the soil Pride grew out of. Not rainbow parades. Not corporate sponsorships.

Fear. Survival. Numbers.

And while all of that social violence was happening, AIDS entered the scene. It hit straight people too, but it disproportionately tore through the queer community. Michael was part of that first wave. He was diagnosed when doctors treated it like a death sentence with a countdown attached.

He defied them. He survived decades longer than anyone expected.

He lived through the stigma, the funerals, the isolation, the whispers, the friends disappearing one by one.

He didn’t hide.

He was one of the first openly gay men I ever truly knew. And he was one of only three people I was out to about my transgender identity back then, something I kept completely fucking buried everywhere else.

And I probably annoyed the ever-loving shit out of him.

Because while he faced the world honestly, in real danger, I got to pretend. I got to perform straight. I got to exist in camouflage. I got to act normal while quietly deciding that “the queers” were something separate from me in daily public life.

Years later, after reconnecting through social media, I learned that my hypocrisy had frustrated him. That he had vented about it. That he had, at times, even considered outing me.

At the time, that would have felt like betrayal.

Now? I fucking get it.

Because coming out back then wasn’t branding. It wasn’t aesthetic. It wasn’t applause and visibility culture.

It was risk.

Even when I finally came out years later, it wasn’t easy. The hatred still hung in the air like humidity. “Passing” became the goal, this twisted idea that in order to make society more comfortable with your transness, you should aspire to look completely like one of the two approved boxes.

As if survival required aesthetic approval.

There was a time during my transition that I was scared to cross parking lots and enter stores. I would sit frozen in my car, trying to build the courage to walk inside and buy groceries.

I’ve been followed through stores by men disturbed enough to not let it go. I’ve had strangers lift my skirt in public to “check.” I’ve been groped by people trying to “find out.” I’ve been followed through parking lots by men angry that I had the audacity to exist. I’ve been surrounded by seven men who insisted I must be in the wrong place because it wasn’t Pride week.

I’ve been forced onto my knees by men who stole my power for their own gratification.

This is why I carry a pistol now. Because I chose to never be a victim again.

And these are the memories that surface when I see someone who is clearly queer pretending to be straight for comfort. These are the memories that explain the redness in Michael’s eyes when I used to hide.

He paid for visibility. I borrowed it.

Michael and countless others left a scarred trail so that today could be easier.

Life today is easier for queer people. People coming out today don’t have to fear what we feared. They don’t have to fear being fired simply for existing. They don’t have to fear being beaten in parking lots. They don’t have to fear courts siding with their attackers. They don’t have to fear being run out of town.

They mostly fear rejection. And, that’s different.

So when I see loud performative allyship from people who never risked a damn thing, yeah, something stirs in me. When I see Pride treated like seasonal décor, something stirs in me.

Because Pride wasn’t born out of comfort. It was born out of survival.

So when you see older queer people with something haunted in their eyes, understand that it’s their actual journey informing that look. The safety you feel today was purchased. Not metaphorically. Actually.

And Michael? Thank you.

Thank you for living openly when it was dangerous. Thank you for surviving when doctors said you wouldn’t. Thank you for forging a path that made it possible for people like me to eventually stop pretending.

If life today is easier, and it is, it’s because men like you absorbed the blows first.

And because some of us refused to disappear when it was our turn.

You’re fucking welcome.