Growing up gay

Not one kid in my entire high school ever openly identified as being gay while I was a student there. This isn’t to say that all 500 of us were straight. Obviously, nobody felt comfortable coming out while they were still living in their parents’ house and confined to those gossip-filled beige hallways.

This may partially explain why I didn’t really have any gay friends until college.

Sixteen is now the national average for the age at which someone announces his or her homosexuality; people in the 1970s waited until they were 21.

Whenever people argue that gay couples shouldn’t get married, I think back to the night of May 16, 2004. I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts and walked over to City Hall just before midnight to join the crowd celebrating the first ever same-sex marriage in the United States. Watching people dancing in the streets, embracing one another, it was clear that I was witnessing a historical moment. The actual granting of civil rights was happening right before my eyes.

Do you know what happened the next day? The sun rose. Traffic buzzed. Society did not fall apart.

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