"If you say you are gay in public you will be shot in the head." My bittersweet anniversary.

[TygrBright]

39. Thank you so much. My uncle (and godfather) was a gay teacher.

He lived almost his entire life deep in the closet, coming out to only a few of the younger family members (my gay sister, among them) long after he retired.

He taught High School English literature. He loved Shakespeare. He had a wicked sense of humor and was a voracious reader. He had a significant other but they were never able to live together and eventually they were separated as aging threw them on the resources of family and communities that had no place for elderly same-gender couples.

I loved him dearly and to this day I can only hope that some essential part of him stayed free and eventually reunited with the one he loved. It still fills me with sorrow and rage to imagine what his life was like, having to be not-himself virtually every moment, and what it might have been like, had he been born 60 years later.

NEVER allow them to restore the bigoted, narrow, painful social and legal structures of homophobia to our culture.

Never. So many lives... lost and/or never lived at all.

Pride Month is coming soon. Let's make this one reverberate to the heights and depths of our species consciousness. Let love reign. Tell stories. Show scars. Celebrate progress. Demand more.

Every one of us.

LOUD

AND

PROUD!

appreciatively,
Bright