It gets better… with a whole lot of quantifiers (National Coming Out Day)

TW: too much to list, maybe everything

“It gets better,” some adult said to me.

I bristled at the words. What part and when? I wondered, at seventeen, as these words were spoken over me. I was a weirdo little closeted queer kid experiencing homelessness in a broken family. My mother had moved to Florida with my little sister while my brother and I stayed with my father in Tennessee in a motel. As a teenager, I was still reeling from Columbine and had no idea 9/11 was just around the corner. 

Now, I’m the grownup. I’m an out and proud queer non-monogamous heretic who is very much no longer homeless. Yet, wars still rage, schools are as unsafe as ever, and today is National Coming Out Day, the day when we are supposed to look down and say, “It gets better.”

Well, kids, both young and old, let me qualify the statement just a bit. Because, in all honesty, it’s one of the cliches that should always require qualifying, less it become the LGBTQ+ equivalent of, “I’ll be praying for you.”

I was sixteen years old, having a sleepover with one of my guy friends. He had come out to me a few months before. We were just about to pass out from our Slim Jim and Root Beer-induced comas when he said, “Can I touch you? You don’t even have to do anything for me; I just…” My heart was pounding out of my chest, and there was a yes stuck somewhere at the edge of my tongue, but that yes was tackled to the ground by all of the fear the adults in my life had gifted me. Growing up in the evangelical church, I was told that I would “get AIDS, die, and go to Hell.” Those fears won out that day.

I lived with those fears for a long, long time. I tried hard to fight against all of these contradictory emotions battling inside me. I loved everyone, I found all people attractive, and it seemed that my heart, which I was told was meant for only one person, seemed to beat in multiple directions. 

Like most religiously traumatized kids, I decided to win religion and join the ranks of clergy. It didn’t get better; it got much, much worse. 

Hiding from yourself is bad enough; hiding from your parents is difficult, but hiding in plain sight behind the pulpit is next level. 

I silently did what I could from inside the church to try and make things better. But I was still upholding the system. Then, one day, a young gay kid in Russia with blood trickling down his face came across my newsfeed. I knew that kid: he was everyone I ever knew. I could see everyone I loved in his eyes, and suddenly, I knew exactly what P+ssyRiot had been warning us about. 

So I quit my job.

I received threats. Phone calls came in the middle of the night telling me to end it all. If this was the better that all the adults were telling me was coming, well, they could have it because this was Hell on Earth. 

I fled in the middle of the night with my family: a pregnant Tashina and our two children packed into a minivan and went to hide out until the storm passed. I had no friends, and no family support, and I was absolutely lost. Who was I now that I had abandoned my religion? 

The other day, I was telling these stories before a live audience as I traveled the country as a dyslexic author defying all the odds. I’m doing everything the grownups told me I couldn’t do, and it’s beautiful. On that particular night, I looked up to see a room filled with a woman holding hands with both of her partners. A gay couple was smiling at me near the front row. There was a very happy grandmother crocheting toward the back as an ally. But in the middle of the crowd was a twelve-year-old little girl listening intently. During the Q&A, she was first to raise her hand because she wanted to share about the speech she wrote to fight the book ban they tried to pass at her school. 

So, kid, what they mean when they say that “it gets better” is that, in that moment, as I looked around that room, I was seeing the fruits of the labor. This moment was my better because I walked a hard path and left behind everything that I knew; I trod a trail others could follow. Now, I was looking them in the eyes and, in my own lifetime, was able to see folks who found the markers and made it safely here. 

Yet, as you raised your hand, you are living in the worst of it. You are fighting a battle trying to preserve these rights, which we have already begun to take for granted. They are trying to steal your books away and to tell your friends they would rather they conform or die. 

It took me twenty-three years before I saw better. In the middle bit, there were many tears and battles lost and friends who didn’t make it because they became casualties of the bottle, needle, or razor. I’ve buried more lovers than I care to remember, and I’m still haunted by the ghosts of the living who died to me a long time ago. 

I walked through Hell, but I came out.

Sweet child, I have no idea how long it will take for you to get to better. Lord knows, there is a big fight ahead, and unfortunately, it seems the grownups around you are far too fatigued from all the wars we’ve already fought. So I’m not going to lie to you; the phrase should be, “It gets better… eventually, many years from now, but you are going to have to be ready for one hell of a fight. You will watch as your loved ones don’t survive the fight. It will be painful, and you will have to face betrayal and lies and broken hearts, and you will swear to whatever god is listening that you will never love again. But you will. Then, one day, you will look in the mirror and wonder when you started to look so much like your father and give up on hiding all of these grays. You’ll step out on stage, somehow the one who survived, and you’ll tell the stories of all your friends who didn’t make it. You’ll take a bow with their specters, and as you look up, a kid like you will be in the audience. You’ll realize that you didn’t get out of the fight; you're a General Organa now.”

It gets better, but in the meantime, just hold on tight because it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Just look for the markers we left behind, and you’ll find the trail. You’ll find mine written backward. Robin’s look like Peter Pan and when you see a little rainbow those were left by LeVar and those carved animals were done by Steve and when you hear a song in the forest that is Fred telling you he’s proud of you just as you are and Carrie has gifted you the middle finger to hold high to anyone who says you can’t, and Maya reminds you along the way that you didn’t know what you didn’t know and as you pass Bill’s place put on the armor of science and Lavern will be there to remind you that it can be a dress. It won’t be easy but we will be there along the way saying, “Remember fair maiden, should you ever need us…” and we will be there. 

And that, child, is what we mean that it gets better.