This week’s Huddle is very interactive. You see, we are sooooo glad to be gay. No matter how many times in life people tell us we are wrong or sick or some other kind of negative thing, there are so many reasons we are happy to be here and queer and, ultimately, ourselves. So with this week’s Huddle topic-why we’re glad we’re gay -we want you to tell us why YOU are happy to be who you are, in the comments below and on Twitter using #gladimgay. We’ll join you!
(BTW, we are using “gay” as an all-encompassing term but feel free to use lesbian, bisexual, queer, etc. if it feels more right to you.)
Ali Davis: I’m certainly not going to mention the extended nonlinear sex and truckloads of orgasms, because right after I hit send (if I would ever even type such a thing) someone’s going to submit something right after that that’s so beautiful and full of meaning that everyone’s heart will glow pink with a lavender aura and then we’ll all go out and do LGBT service projects. So it’s definitely not those things. But those things might be the icing roses on my cake of reasons.
Dorothy Snarker: When I was in grade school, the coolest thing was to sit on the back of the bus on the ride home and make fun of the other kids. I wasn’t cool, but I wanted to be. One week, everyone in the back of the bus decided it was cool to call this one girl — who was awkward and scruffy and different in ways grade schoolers despise —names. The only one that stands out to me all these years later is “witch.” Don’t ask me why, I really can’t recall. But, remember, I wasn’t cool — I just wanted to be. So I called her witch with them one bus ride home. It was a mean and terrible thing to do. And I regret it to this day. But I wanted to be cool, and cruelty seemed the fastest way there.
Years later, when I began to realize my own difference, the urge to hide the “not one of us”-ness of my very existence grew to an unmanageable din. I won’t be cool, I won’t be liked. I’ll be the witch at the back of the bus.
But learning to accept and own and honor that very differentness that is inherent in every single gay person is the reason I am most glad to be gay. For those who fit effortlessly into the back-of-the-bus crowd, coming to the realization that coolness or sameness or whatever-ness you hold dear doesn’t really matter often comes more slowly — if at all.
Being gay has afforded me a front-row seat to what otherness means in America. (So has being a minority, being a woman, et al — as it does for anyone outside the descriptors of the pre-prescribed societal norms.) But what it really has done is make me a kinder, more open person. It has made me realize for all of our so-called differences we are actually all terribly the same. We are just tiny humans spinning around the sun on this crazy blue marble for a ridiculously short period of time. So, really, what’s the use of being cruel?
Being gay also means you get to kiss girls. Which is awesome. So there’s that, too.
Chloe: Because straight people are beyond basic and have no idea, which makes the banality of their romantic lives even funnier. Like oh, you’re having trouble understanding the opposite sex? A guy isn’t calling you? HOW ORIGINAL TELL ME MORE. Also, thanks to internet access, dudes seem to be getting creepy as fuck. Sometimes I just scroll through tinder fails or nice guys of OkCupid or even Reddit and just laugh softly to myself. Finally, DICK PICS. I am delighted to have escaped dick pics. I can’t even express my horror at dick pics. I am convinced that no straight woman has ever genuinely enjoyed getting a dick pic. From what I can tell, they’re all either a. similarly disgusted or b. LYING.
So yeah. That’s why I’m super glad to be gay. Immunity from the dick pic epidemic and an interesting love life.
Grace Chu: Boobs.
Dana Piccoli: There are many things that I love about being a lesbian, but one thing that I find thrilling is that we are always getting to discover new stories on television, books and film. For so very long, we weren’t represented, and that tide has turned tremendously in the last few years. Almost everyday, there is a new web series, play, character on a show that I inevitably fall in love with. I know that there is far less representation than we would like, but for now, it’s kind of amazing to watch the world change a little bit more each day for the better.
Elaine Atwell: When I first came out, one of the lines I used on incredulous family members who were convinced that my newfound orientation was nothing more than an attempt to rebel, was: “Do you really think I would choose to be this way? Don’t you think I’d be straight if I could?” It was a pretty effective rhetorical strategy, but it wasn’t long until I realized it wasn’t actually true.
I’m glad to be gay because, even before I realized it, it is how I am my truest self. There is no way I would make myself straight and erase my sense of community, with a lineage that goes back to the beginning of time. I wouldn’t want to love women less, even if I could, because the richness of that love is such an integral component of the richness of my character. I love the struggle, and I love the rewards, and I love that being gay allows you to pick out all the threads of our patriarchal society and start to make something new from scratch.
Also, and it really cannot be overstated: Boobs. Boobs are the fucking tops.
Heather Hogan: If you’ve ever been in a relationship with an abusive crazy person-legitimately those things; like if, say, one of your parents was a substance-abuser with an untreated personality disorder or something-you know the feeling of starting to wonder if you’re the crazy person. Because when an actual crazy person is beating the shit out of you while being convinced as a stone about how right they are and how wrong you are, it really starts to do a number on your brain. It’s only when you step outside of that relationship and start talking to other people who have stepped outside of similar relationships that you really begin to understand the depth of fuckedupness you were mired in.
The moment I realized I was gay, I stepped out of the abusive, toxic, crazy relationship I had with society’s entrenched misogyny and patriarchal ideals. Being gay, to me, isn’t the opposite of being straight; it’s a leap out of what’s normal and a journey through a whole big, bright, nuanced world of people who aren’t blind to their abusers anymore. Like, I felt crazy for wanting to dress like a boy all my life, and for forming these impossibly intense relationships with other girls, and absolutely starving for female TV and movie and comic book and video game characters that were as good as the male ones, and on and on.
You don’t have to be gay to have that kind of revelation and fight your way outside of the abusive relationship with our culture, of course. But understanding I was gay was what helped me realize I could do that. And living out here with the other wildlings, well, that’s my favorite thing about being gay.
Trish Bendix: I feel like I say “I’m so glad to be gay!” on a regular basis, about things as basic as “I’m so glad I can have sex and not worry about being pregnant!” But truthfully, having a relationship with a woman – the right woman – makes you feel so understood in a way that I can’t fathom with a man. Outside of romance, being a lesbian is also like being part of some united sisterhood that I never felt before I came out. It was something I was looking for but could never find, because I didn’t know yet. Now that I know, I will never stop being so, so happy to be as queer as a three dollar bill.
Lucy Hallowell: There’s a scene in A League of Their Own where Rosie O’Donnell’s character, Doris, is talking on the bus about how everyone always made her feel like there was something wrong with her, like she wasn’t a girl, because she could play. But being around a team full of girls who could play made her see that they were wrong. That’s how I feel about being gay. For a long time I would have given anything to have it be OK for me to be a girl who could play, who had short hair, who liked to bake, and knit, and stuff the boys on the hockey rink. But being gay has given me the space, the freedom to be that girl who can play, and knit you a scarf, and cook dinner, and fix bikes. Being gay has given me a space outside of all those fucked up, bullshit gender roles and I’m better for it and I damn well know my family and my kids are better for it too.
Valerie Anne: Once, in college, during a psychology lecture, the professor asked us to write down as many true statements that start with ‘I am’ as we could in two minutes. It seemed easy enough, but when we started reading back answers, I noticed other students had things like “I am free,” “I am a dancer,” “I am proud,” “I am a feminist,” “I am strong.” I looked back down at my list and it was just, “I am Valerie. I am a student. I am a daughter. I am a sister. I am a friend.” The other students had such a deeper understanding of themselves, and could define themselves on things they felt, communities they belonged to. They had words that meant something to them, that helped them know who they were.
Realizing I was gay and finding the community the LGBT internet has provided was just the beginning to figuring out so much more about myself. Having to be so introspective while coming out to myself opened my eyes to so many other parts of me. Now my list is so much longer, and has things on it that might have been true when I was 19, but I had no idea. Things like “I am passionate,” “I am relentlessly optimistic,” “I am a writer,” and most importantly, “I am happy.”
And I’m only able to see all of that, to say any of it, because I was first able to say, “I am gay.”
Bridget McManus: Because I get to be married to my wonderful wife. Trish always teases me for being obsessed with her but I kinda am. If I wasn’t gay is have to live my life single because my soulmate would be in female form.
Kimberly Hoffman: When I was an adolescent, my parents would take me abroad to visit family (mom’s a Brit) and see Europe. I was wildly shy and at the time, I was going from Kimmy to Kim. Everyone had known me as Kimmy. I was all about reinventing myself after being bullied through 6th grade, and I was making a few new friends at my new school, going to summer camp, and these vacations overseas opened my eyes to what I was attracted to. At home, girls ogled over boys wearing JNCO jeans and chain wallets who looked like they were trying out for The Offspring. We’d be in a museum in Paris and I would make eye contact with a girl, maybe my age, maybe older, who immediately made my heart race-I don’t know what it was, was it her face full of confidence laughing with her group of friends, or her pile of hair toppled all around as she slinked about, kissing another girl on the cheek and chasing each other out into the garden? Yeah, duh. It was magical and innocent and I felt like everywhere I looked, I was seeing images of what I so wanted though I didn’t know how to apply that or make sense of it or even embrace it as OK.
Lez be honest: No middle school boy was enchanting me like that.
I love that the heart just knows, dammit. That even when I was called a weirdo and stuck to myself and didn’t go on movie dates with boys who girls were kissing and gooning over, there was a truth in me that needed to be uncovered. And I wasn’t going to compromise or settle, though I completely held a big bag of denial for a long time and briefly dated androgynous long-haired dudes (hey, I’ll throw a line out for a Leonardo DiCaprio!) But you know. It’s simple: Being who you are and loving yourself is a mega dose of living life right. I love being a weirdo gay witch who pays gratitude in old museum passes where I once set eyes on my truth.
Erika Star: I can only remember one time in my life when I said in regards to my life, “Well that makes sense,” and it was when, unbeknownst to me, I came out at 24. My being gay is the only part of me that doesn’t feel confusing or like a big ol’ mess. It’s given me a sense of identity and stability. I mean, unless of course we’re talking about my dating, then I guess more specifically I’m just glad to be a single lesbian.
Jenna Lykes: When I first started figuring out that I was gay, I was actually kind of miserable. I was terrified at how people would react to me (that is, if I ever worked up the courage to come out), I was mad at myself for not being “normal” (thanks, internalized homophobia!)- it was just an overall shitty time. So, if you had asked me at age 17 why I was glad to be gay, I probably would’ve mumbled some sort of denial and turned up my Bright Eyes CD.
But NOW, I fucking love being queer. In just over a month, I get to marry my best friend and the love of my life! (Much crazy! Very awesome!) And over the years, I’ve actually managed to find a sense of belonging and contentment I never thought I’d have. So, I guess my reason is that being a part of the LGBTQ community (when we’re at our best) is basically like this gif:
Why are you glad to be gay?
