Gay Love Is Tragic

Or What My Parents Taught Me About Queer Love

WARNING: This post contains references to abuse, domestic violence, homophobia, and transphobia. Reader discretion advised.

I don’t quite remember the first time gayness came up, but I do remember when I was told The Story. My mother and I were changing her sheets and I was all of 15, awkward and quiet, abused and subdued. It was a bright day, the sun cutting through the summer clouds like a sword from heaven, illuminating the backyard as I looked out her window. 

“I had a gay friend in high school,” she said, out of the blue and I blinked at that, wondering where it was going. Usually whenever my parents brought up anything “political,” it turned into a visceral rant that I wanted no part of. Even then, as a Christian, homeschooled teen, I didn’t understand the rage or the hate that permeated throughout our house like an unwelcome guest. If Jesus was love, didn’t that mean that we should love? 

But my family’s love was always twisted, sick as it bloomed, the root of trauma, grief, and abuse rotting everything to the core. I braced myself for the inevitable animosity. 

“He’s a famous artist now,” she explained, smoothing a corner. “I think he lives in San Francisco with his partner.” 

“Oh,” I said, baffled. 

“He had a crush on a straight boy in high school. We went to youth group together.”

That made me cringe a little. I hated youth group. It was constant bullying but for some reason, I still went because it was better than being in this suffocating house. 

“Then the boy died in a motorcycle crash right out of high school,” she said, relaying the information as if it was a light-hearted twist in a romcom and not a horrific tragedy. “David was so upset.” 

We finished the sheets and I couldn’t let my distress show on my face. Showing any emotion besides “joy” and “happiness” was too dangerous in that place. I was constantly schooling my features and downplaying how I felt. 

And I felt so sad for David. 

“That’s terrible,” I finally said as I headed for the door. 

“Yeah,” my mom said distantly. “It is.” 

And that was the end of that conversation. 

A year later, I was working at the local Jimmy John’s since my parents wanted to instill a “good work ethic” and made all of their children work once they reached working age. It was a place of rampant dysfunction, poor labor practices, and, on one occasion, porn that my manager had left out for us to find. But I never complained. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to have my small sense of freedom taken from me and I actually had made friends outside of equally dysfunctional homeschooler families. In particular, I grew close with my queer coworkers. 

For the first time in a very long time, I developed a sharp crush on someone. Lee was genderfluid and the first person I thought about kissing with any seriousness. We meshed like vanilla ice cream and apple pie—sweet in the hot summer heat, inevitable, loyal, and not quite complete without the other. We texted with each other when we weren’t seeing one another and he asked questions about my family, even came over to my house and met everyone. 

And he could tell something was deeply wrong. Just like I could. 

It was so refreshing that I wanted to be around him all the time and went out of my way to make excuses to do so. 

My parents told me my gay friends could come over as long as no one held hands. It would “corrupt” my younger siblings. I repeated this to Lee, baffled by the constraints yet feeling obligated to convey them. When he said he wasn’t sure that he felt safe to be over at my house anymore, I didn’t understand it. They were just rules, just words, my parents wouldn’t actually hurt anyone besides each other and their children…would they? 

He came over less after that and in retrospect, I don’t blame him. He could tell my parents were bad news and I felt like he was one of the only people that could. Everyone at church and bible study praised my parent’s marriage and their parenting because we were all so “well-behaved.” 

But they didn’t see that the posters on the walls covered up the punch holes or the broken dishes that were thrown or the words that cut like knives, trying to cull the sin. 

I shouldn’t have been surprised that when I finally came out as gay, six years into a cis-passing het-passing relationship, it wasn’t well-received. Not by my parents and not by some of my still Christian siblings. It’s still painful to think about. The following year, I broke up with my fiancé and came out as trans. That seemed to wreck everything for a while. For them, at least. For me, it taught me that they wouldn’t use my pronouns or respect anything I had to say, as if being trans made me a creature of dysfunction and horror, as if I was simply diseased. 

I often think of that story my mother told me out of the blue. I think of the many times during my teen years I was told that bisexuals are perverse or trans people sick or gay men less manly. Some of my siblings still believe those things and that makes relationships complicated. I think about how a lot of people think gay love is tragic, whether it’s opinions I’ve heard or something I’ve seen in the media. 

But that’s not what’s tragic. What’s tragic is if I had stayed in the closet and married. What’s tragic is if I had continued to shove down my transness and kept trying—with utter failure—to love my body as it was. 

What’s tragic is living as someone you’re not and I honestly see this more frequently in cisgender, heterosexual people than the queers. 

It’s by staying in an unhealthy relationship or at an abusive job or binge drinking on the holidays because there’s so much unsaid between family members that you can’t cope. 

It’s by buying a gift for someone you hate because you want to be accepted. 

It’s by doing that thing you know will drive you up the wall but you “must” because, otherwise, what will people say?

Gay love is not the tragedy. Being unauthentic is. Being on HRT and in my very loving queer relationship, I am more myself than I have ever been. I am more free than that depressed, abused 15 year-old could have ever imagined possible. 

Gay love is hope and freedom.