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Most of them fled after graduating, out of Central Florida to anywhere with an existing LGBTQ+ community. The few teens I knew who had the label “gay” attached to them suffered through continuous shame and abuse. But there was none of that relief in high school in the late ’90s.
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I found places online where I could hide, small hubs of support.
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Not to my parents or my friends, and certainly not in Orlando. Because I knew that the things I felt were not acceptable. Read More: After Fleeing Ukraine, LGBTQ Refugees Search for Safety in Countries Hostile to Their Rights And the immediate follow-up: I’m gay and I’m scared. If I could tell someone, anyone, without fear of repercussion, then I’d have found relief. Whenever I sliced at my skin, or when I pulled the hair from my head in order to feel something other than the self-loathing of my secret burden, I needed that frustratingly inaccessible language. All those times I cried myself sick and prayed for death, I needed the words. So much of that overwhelming despair could have been abated by the simple act of voicing the unsaid thing. My words were too gay.Īs an adult, I can see that the smothering of the queerness that lived inside me led to long, tumultuous years of depression and misery. I know now why I couldn’t write them down. There was something unacceptable about them. The memories flickered neon red at the edges, warning of danger. A swirl of images spit and hissed steam beneath the lid: friends changing out of wet bathing suits after a pool party, the heart-shaped sweat mark on a girl’s back during gym class on an especially sweltering Central Florida afternoon, the sun tracing shiny golden tinsel into a woman’s plaited hair. Regardless, my hopes and fears sometimes erupted from the watched pot of my brain, boiling over to reveal truths I was desperate to hide. Those scribblings were too unruly, I thought at the time, unwilling to let any of it live outside the privacy of my head.