When I was in high school we lived in Johnson County, Kansas. It’s a friendly place to raise your kids. It’s got excellent schools, pretty little neighborhoods, plenty of big businesses nearby. I was an awkward nerdy boy. Academically gifted but a bit socially stunted. My peers saw me as a bit childish and moody, and my preference for music and theater over athletics marked me out as odd. I went away to college and then the big city and then came out as queer and all of a sudden I seem to have found my social footing. A tale as old as time.
The thing about living in the monoculture is that you’re constantly choosing between making your own life difficult or cutting off the parts of yourself that create friction. Growing up I did a lot of work to explain away certain parts of myself rather than have to defend to them the people around me. It then took almost as much work on the other side to unwind my thoughts about myself and learn to share my authentic self without flinching.
Now it’s been a long time and I come back to KC as a visitor. I have some friends who live in the area still, and it’s conveniently close to my adoptive home of Chicago. It’s nice to catch up, see the way that everyone’s grown, including me. But I am reminded at times of how stifling that feeling was.
I went to Mass this weekend in the church we used to go to when I was a kid. It was the site of some formative moments of my youth. It’s the church where I made my confirmation, and also the church I stopped going to because I didn’t feel like queer people could be welcome there. Sitting in the pews again I was struck by how everyone looked the same, the same as they always had. All the men in khakis, all the women in skirts and heels. And then me, sitting next to my good friend who allowed himself to be supportively dragged along (Joe, if you read this, thanks), looking like a three dollar bill.
It’s October and I like watching football. I don’t so much like sitting through a relentless advertising campaign about how people like me, people who are queer, are some kind of dangerous and confusing mistake. That allowing me to show my face in public is just too big of a risk to our nation’s children. Or maybe it’s military readiness I’m threatening now. My penchant for nail polish has kneecapped the fatherland in so many ways I can’t even keep track of them. Its tires me out, and there’s no satisfying response because to engage the debate accepts the premise that your existence is debatable. That we can decide that it’d be better for everyone else if we simply did not have people like you around.
I have this somewhat self serving idea that all I can do is show up. That my best retort is to show up to 9 AM Mass with my baritone voice and my bubblegum pink sweater. I hope that just by being seen there, as my unguardedly authentic self, I make the argument that it is better to be who you feel called to be than it is to hide it for everyone else’s comfort.