On being LGBTQI in an age of change

What is more elemental, after all, than the search and construction of your own loving family? For much of my life, it was a legal element of adulthood I never considered myself capable of reaching. I never dreamed it could be so close.

 

I was not the only one waiting, of course. Of the nearly hundreds of thousands of viewers on the SCOTUSBlog that day, there were my friends from my Catholic high school, Megan and Amanda, a young lesbian couple raising their two-year-old son in California. 

 

There were my friends in Iowa City, Vanessa and Natalie, planning for a child of their own. There were their family and friends, LGBTQI or not, radiating out from them in a satellite of hope and affection and support. (LGBTQI – A common abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersexed community.)

There were my friends here in Manila, their eyes on their tablets and laptops, waiting for news from one of the Philippines’ former colonizers. Spain had already fully legalized my manner of marriage – what step would America take? 

 

There was a simple, silent question behind my own anxious vigil for the news. Will I still have to be afraid? 

 

During my adolescence in the United States, I approached the most banal settings of civic life with a palpable measure of fear. One-on-one conferences with teachers and guidance counselors at my Catholic school. Dim, loud school dances, which required us to bring male dates. Job interviews at movie theaters, thrift stores, and university offices. Every single Catholic Mass. Walking with a date down a street at night. In line to vote. I spent most interactions wrung tight with a sense of fear. What do I stand to lose, if I choose to reveal myself? How will I be hurt?

 

As I grew more certain in my own dignity – a terribly slow, terribly painful, years-long, still-in-progress process – I grew simultaneously aware that I was being forced to do a level of work that my non-LGBTQI counterparts were not required to do. 

 

The word “oppression” is sometimes judged as an abstract, histrionic term. But oppression is real, and it works quietly, in a series of everyday gestures. As someone who does not identify as heterosexual, I have spent most of my days anticipating all manner of violence. 

 

Literal physical violence, political violence, emotional violence; the violence of rejection, the violence of silencing, the violence of the threat of violence. 

 

My adolescent sense of hyper-vigilance, the fearful calculations I still instinctively make during every new interaction, the despair I once felt, that I must have done something to deserve this daily pain – all of it exacts its own insidious emotional and physical toll. 

 

I feel it in my musculature, when my shoulders seize with anxiety; I am still paralyzed, occasionally, by terrible tension headaches. I have been told by more than one doctor that it is a medical imperative that I find a way to relax, not some idle, optional suggestion.

 

But I still do the daily work of reminding myself that I deserve better. 

 

I have had to invent my own sense of dignity. I have had to work against all of those ostensibly civic actors in American life meant to support me. The teacher who called me into her office in high school to tell me that my genitals were never meant to be compatible with women’s, that the thought was anathema to God and to everyone. 

 

The priest who told my congregation one Sunday never to apologize to homosexuals you reject. The youth group leader who told me that something had gone wrong in the way I was raised. The coworker who demanded that I explain exactly what was wrong with anti-gay laws, since anti-gay laws obviously made perfect sense. 

 

As I grew older, I grew stronger practicing that ironically Biblical kind of voice, when I encountered subtle and unsubtle forms of oppression. “Get behind me,” I’d imagine saying, with all the force I imagined Jesus had when he addressed a troublesome Peter. “You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God.”

 

It takes time to form this kind of conviction in self-love. It takes effort – conscious, daily, minute-by-minute effort. It takes the love of mentors and friends who know better. And it takes time. 

 

I encounter stories, even now, of self-concealing LGBTQI individuals, and I feel a visceral sense of empathy and a shadow of the shame that once overwhelmed me. I spent much of my teen years and early twenties overwhelmed. 

 

I believed for a long time that death, not change, was my only escape for my distress. When every appointment, new meeting, class, or interview feels like a potential threat, it can be hard to imagine normalcy at all, much less a future. It can be easier to imagine dying, and the relief that follows dying.

 

Privately, many of my LGBTQI friends and I admit to each other that we never imagined reaching the age of thirty. Much less love. Much less marriage. Much less legal marriage in the country where we were born.

 

I’m twenty-nine now. The determination of the Supreme Court of the United States is overdue, but welcome. In the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy, overturning the Defense of Marriage Act:

 

The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

 

Our efforts remain incomplete – nationwide, legalized, same-sex marriage in the United States is still to come. It is still legal, in too many parts of America, to fire or evict a person for being LGBTQI. There are still too many homeless LGBTQI teenagers violently forced out of their families. 

 

But the repeal of a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act – paving the way for gay marriages to be recognized in California – helps, in a significant way, to ease our fear. It helps us to anticipate our futures in love and family with the sense of safety and security we deserve. 

 

In the many homes I shared in the United States, my LGBTQI and heterosexual friends reacted. In Iowa City, where I attended graduate school, Vanessa and Natalie cried and laughed with relief in the state where they were wed years before. 

 

In California, my birthplace, where we were heartbroken at the anti-gay vote for Proposition 8 in 2008, Megan and Amanda hugged their little son and received happy, congratulatory calls and messages from Christian family members. Their child, they realized, would have no memory of a time before marriage equality in California. 

 

In New York City, where I made my professional life in publishing for six years, my friends gathered at Stonewall Inn in the West Village, where the modern American gay rights movement began with LGBTQI folks pushing back, literally, against oppressive police officers.

 

Here in Quezon City, where I live twelve to fifteen hours ahead of my American friends, I attended the University of the Philippines Pride March. 

 

I am not sure what will happen here, where the laws are still strangled by conservative Catholicism. I do not think the people of the Philippines will claim their full LGBTQI rights until they claim their full heterosexual rights. It is admittedly a cynical thought. 

 

But in a society where the family is the paramount unit, all couples deserve the right to conduct the elements of adult love – their relationships, their marriages, their divorces, their preparation for safe and nurtured children – without condemnation or legal obstacle. 

 

So we march.

 

At University of the Philippines on June 27, I liked how young so many of us were. There were teenagers and university students participating at an age when I was still so afraid. I liked that there were elderly men and women, too, grinning with drawn rainbows on their cheeks. 

 

I liked that there were two young women in wedding dresses, ready for each other. I liked that there were LGBTQI folks attending from every class of society. I liked the macho-seeming male athletes who grinned when marchers called to them, “Daddy! Group hug!”

 

I admit that I could still feel a trace of my old fear. With the celebration of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision so close, what would the backlash look like? Will they hurt us?

 

There were protestors, after all, holding the predictable, mean-spirited banners. They were fewer than ten, and their numbers did not grow, though many more joined the hundreds in the march. But how many Filipinos did the protestors represent?

 

An activist friend murmured to me that it was good for LGBTQI young people to see the protesters, the embodiment of the opposition. They remind all of us that our work in love is far from finished. 

 

A new gay male friend and I took a photo with one of the anti-gay protestors. “I hope you have a happy life,” my friend said to her, and the protestor replied, “Jesus saves you.”

 

Toward the end of the day, I sat on the hood of my friend Ging Cristobal’s slow-moving, lime-green, rainbow-bedecked, Volkswagen Beetle at the back of the march. It began to rain, so Ging’s wife handed me a giant rainbow umbrella, which I opened above me. I felt like the contented denizen of a Philippine pride parade’s lone float. Jeepney drivers and athletes and other marchers paused and smiled and took photos and cheered.

 

I face the same uncertainty many single folks my age face, wondering about love in my adulthood. I have no idea what will happen. I am here in the Philippines now, mixed-race, with toddling Tagalog, because I believe – perhaps foolishly, sometimes – that my presence has something to offer. Should I find the right person for me in Quezon City, I look forward to the day when I can remain at home here in my motherland, as accepted and protected as I have the right to be.

 

But if the time comes for me to return to my birthplace, I know now that I can return less afraid. And I can bring a loving someone with me. 

 

The relief I feel is incalculable. It cannot fit into one essay, or twenty. I will just sit with it, for now, and hope that the sense of change truly reaches my whole body, and the bodies of my friends. – GMA News