#ProudToLove

It is the eve of my first Pride, and I've got this weird peace and focus in my gut. I may have been spent as much time online "being part" of the LGBT community as I could've possibly been since I came out, but it's only been recently that I've actually been able to realize what it means for me to be gay, to be queer, to understand my past and my personality through that light.

There was never a time when I was consciously ashamed to come out as "bi" or "gay" or "lesbian" or "queer" or whatever the hell it is I'm currently identifying as. Once there was a label, I was never ashamed, because I had a label, because I was proud that I could make a rational argument and be consistent, stick to it. But being proud to love... well, that's put me through more of a ringer.

For practical intents and purposes, it's valid to say that I figured out that I loved when I was 12. Lots of shit happened when I was 12. That and 13 were the most terrible years of my life. Sometimes the love and the hate get mixed up, because emotion is complicated, but I think it's supposed to be that way.

My circumstances didn't really let me be proud to love the people I loved. Where a lot of people seem to have realized they were in love with someone and then knew they were gay, for me, it's that I moved away from my friends at 12 years old after I had hit that time in puberty where you start to think like a teenager and they really hadn't yet. For me, that meant that I felt betrayed by the fact that they didn't keep contact with me, and they only kinda missed me for a bit. I developed a weird kind of homesickness for one of my old close friends in particular, and that's the first time I called myself "gay" - an insult bearing overtones that I had inappropriate, creepy affections for someone of the same sex.

I had no idea what it meant, but I knew that if sappy songs like "Thousand Miles" were getting stuck in my head because I missed her so much, and if I wanted to hug her bad enough that I had multiple dreams about it, and if I wanted to touch her face when she slept next to me during a sleepover, it must mean that I was 1) losing it 2) disturbed 3) obsessive and freaky and gross.

I'd say in diary entry after diary entry and prayer after prayer that I loved her - but didn't have a crush, of course, because, well, "haha." And when I'd done my half-year sentence of crying every other night over her and gotten more or less over it, I fell in love with someone new - and much harder this time. Again, I loved her, and every song I heard on the radio seemed to apply to my affections for her (in the typical 13-year-old crush kind of way), but of course, I didn't love her THAT much. Forget about it being a crush or not... Just the fact that I might love her that much would be creepy.

Part of me is glad that consent is that firmly drilled into my psyche, but my visceral instinct to hate myself when I love someone "too much" has caused me a lot of pain. Getting rejected by that person (three years after I'd repressed the "creepy" love from my consciousness) for failing to respect her boundaries was the most excruciating thing I have ever experienced, because it connected so deeply to this entrenched fear and hatred of mine. "Loving too deeply is not acceptable. Caring about someone too much is disgusting and intolerable and... " Evidently, three years after that, it's still something I care about.

In the YouTube videos that have popped up this past Pride week, everyone says that Pride really gained meaning for them when they found someone they loved. That's complicated for me on a personal level, because a number of the people I have loved most deeply have been close friends that didn't love me back as much as I wanted them to and a boyfriend whose heteronormativity both actively and passively squelched some of the best, deepest parts of my personality and the way I love. (Not that I wasn't exceedingly proud of the relationship at the time. I was - enough that I kind of facepalm about a lot of it now.) But I've decided to take the opportunity to be a little introspective and vulnerable and redeem these ideas to myself.

First, that has meant seriously considering to myself whether I ever figured out how to be proud of my "excessive" love for this girl. It's a first love, so it's hard to be objective. When I think of the parts of my love I'm proud of, they've only ever included the parts we were on equal terms about. My love for her - my deep, deep dedication; my insatiable curiosity about her; my desire for closeness; the most embarrassing, irrepressible secret desires for physical and sexual intimacy with her - has never been something I've been remotely proud of. Because these things were painfully unrequited, I could never forgive myself for being so vile, so disgusting, so out of line. I've often wondered whether I'll ever be able to, whether I'll ever be proud.

I won't lie to myself again - it's evidently going to take longer than a few years to move on. But meanwhile, I will say this:

I am proud of my dedication.
I am proud that I wanted so earnestly to respect the person I loved that I put myself through pain rather than hurt her more.
I am proud of every time I painstakingly withheld information from her because I wanted to protect her and not because I didn't want to get hurt.
I am proud of every time I shared information with her I probably shouldn't've because she was so sweet to me as I tried to deal with a reality neither of us wanted.
I am proud of every freaking letter and every freaking gift I keep finding hidden around my room that I never gave her, out of respect.
I am proud of her for almost never acting awkward toward me and for being able to love me beyond the differences in our love for each other, for proving to me why I loved her even as I wanted to hate.
I am proud of the way I was able to give myself so fully to someone, that I was willing to be dynamic enough to risk pain for something that really, really was worthwhile.
I'm proud that I believed that "love's not just a story, that rescue is real, that life is precious." I'm proud that I was so profoundly human at such a young age.
I'm proud of myself for trusting in that relationship enough that I completely broke when it did.
I am proud of the beauty I learned to see in the world, the culture I came close to that I never would've otherwise, the way her love for me and my love for her changed our lives for the (unquestionably) better.

Secondly, once I've made my way through a few tears and some angsty retrospection, I need to recognize that a majority of my love for the queer community does not stem from my love for her or for my ex-boyfriend or anyone I had feelings for in the past. I love being LGBT because I have seen people be ALIVE in ways I have never been able to outside of this community. Because I feel more alive than I ever do when I am around queer people, and I still haven't quite figured out why. There is this inexplicable freedom that comes with the package that I just want to hand out to everyone I meet in little packages of rainbow cellophane. It's probably because we all come from places of such deep fear and loneliness, but once queer people find each other, it is such a release, such an explosion of rainbows and fireworks.

I love being queer because watching a girl fall in love with me and being able to learn from my own version of the same thing so that it was a beautiful, not painful/awkward, experience is something I was only able to do because of what I learned from being LGBT.

I love being queer because I have seen friends grow into gender expressions I never would've imagined on them until they happened, and every time that happens, I'm floored by the beauty and strength of their personalities.

I love being queer because it's what demystified sex to me, what opened up gender expression and identification to me, what freed me from cycles of guilt and repression and irrational obligations that made no sense to me, even at the time.

I love being queer because it opens the world to me, and the way this community is coming together all across the country and world to celebrate themselves and what makes them unique and what matters most deeply to them is one of the most awesome things I've been part of.

I love being queer because it helps me see what can be improved in the straight way of doing things.

I love being queer because it frees me from so many expectations I would've felt pressure to conform to if I were straight, even if I don't even currently have a girlfriend.

I love being queer because I've always loved rainbows.

I love being queer because, honestly, queer people are just so physically gorgeous to me.

I love being queer - particularly lesbian - because something about the way we are seems to make our culture (or at least the parts I interact with) so genuine and human, so honest with each other, so compassionate, so much more conscious of other privilege structures than other communities I've been part of, so committed to improving the lives of others. The honesty in particular is something I never get tired of, because it means that I can love and become active and committed and curious without fearing that I'm going to overstep boundaries every time I ask a question.

I love being queer because it makes me proud to put a name and a community and an association and a history to the place I fit in society. I am proud to love myself and the way I fit into that community, because it describes me, and it fits, and I've been increasingly excited by how well it fits without fail for almost three years. I can't wait to see my family at Pride tomorrow. I may be in my room and in my biological family's house, but there's another group of people I also call home.