Valentine’s Day Readers’ Stories
Editor’s note: This is one of five stories written by our readers, in honor of Valentine’s Day.
I remember being a junior in high school, goofing around in my front yard, and suddenly being hit with a realization: “I’m gay.”
It really did happen like that. I was just hanging out, minding my own business, when my brain decided to get with the program and listen to what my heart and my groin had been telling it, finally getting the chutzpah to tell me, “Hey you’re gay, you know. That’s what all this has been about. The lusting after boys, the not digging girls, the weird attraction you feel for Coach McCullough — Yeah, you’re gay. Just, you know,… so you know.”
I remember wondering for at least a few years after that weird little moment exactly how that was going to work. Because from what I had been taught and what I understood, “gay” and “marriage” didn’t really fit together. (I grew up in south Louisiana, so I have all that Cajun Catholic baggage to carry around.) I could be gay, I could be married, but I wasn’t ever going to be those two things at the same time.
I eventually wised up on that account, but the substance of it — the substance of being with someone who felt like they could really be my husband — eluded me for a really long time, through a six-year relationship that was like marriage only in the fact that we never had sex and a two-year relationship that self-destructed in embarrassment, pain and a whole lot of resentment. I had boyfriends, but I never felt like I had a husband.
And then I met Marc. And he’s fantastic — sexy, funny, smart, political, likes the same dumb pop culture things I do, puts up with my weirdness, looks hot in a bowtie, thinks I’m talented, is talented himself, is honest and faithful and good. That most of all… he is a
good man. A good southern man with a laugh that kills me every time. And there is, in him, the seed of something I think I’ve been waiting for my whole life. He has become someone I can see as my husband, the guy I want to take this journey with, the guy I want to have with me through whatever’s heading my way.
I feel so lucky to be living in a time when I can get this sappy and sentimental in public (we forget too often, I think, that our openness, our public lives are a fledgling flower, it was only a few decades ago that things like this would have impossible to speak in
public), and I feel so lucky to be living through this time with Marc. Because so much LGBT history — so many fighters and advocates and survivors and victims and silent warriors — have made our relationship possible. This sappy set of paragraphs was built on the
blood and sweat of millions of LGBT people I’ll never meet, know, or even hear of.
And Marc and I get to pave a portion of the road for whoever is behind us.
On Valentine’s Day, I’ll be celebrating the love I feel for my boyfriend, Marc. And in that celebration, I’ll be expressing my gratitude for this movement, awe at what we’ve survived and love — so much love — for the people who are fighting for us today. Every day we love without shame or fear or reservation, we accomplish that.
I love that. Don’t you?
Cody Daigle