June 26 will always hold a complicated kind of magic for me.
Ten years ago, I was still invisible to myself.
I read your piece, and I found myself nodding, feeling that deep “me too” echo in my chest. I once judged what I now hold sacred. Queerness. Community. The right to live and love fully.
I played “smear the queer” as a kid. I flinched when someone acted “too feminine.” I wanted so badly to fit in, to be liked, to feel safe. And I thought maybe that meant staying small. Quiet. Straight enough. I didn’t realize I was folding up parts of myself like notes never passed.
I came out at 47. Its taking time to unravel what I thought was safety but was really erasure. Now, as I approach 50, I find myself craving the very spaces I used to avoid — the queer spaces, the weird and tender and radically alive places. Not because they’re righteous, but because they are real. Because they are home.
There’s a sacred ache in what you wrote — that internal conflict, those blank pages that still thrum with questions. I think so many of us queer later bloomers carry that ache. The what-could-have-beens. The dreams we buried. The apologies we offer — not just to others, but to ourselves.
And yet, here we are.
Still becoming.
Still learning how to stand in the full, glittering truth of who we are.
Thank you for your honesty. Thank you for writing this. For me, Pride isn’t just about joy — it’s about reckoning and return. About claiming the beauty we were once told to fear.
Here’s to open marriages and open hearts. To blank pages rewritten. To queerness as homecoming.
Thank you for sharing this, Molly. As much as we'd like to just "be" queer when we are ready to admit that we are, it is so much more complicated and messy and laborious than that. Muscle memory, be it in our limbs or in our minds, does not change overnight.
I also responded in other spaces here on Substack. Our 25 years together-23 year marriage ended this month in an uncontested divorce. Would we have done the Civil Union post 9/11 and then legal marrige in 2017 knowing then what we know now? Probably not. But the world forgets how it was in 2001 when it came to heterosexism and homophobia.
Relationships are hard. While yours and your ex-wife's marriage may not have lasted, may not have been the best, I'm still glad you had the right to enter into it. Just as much as straight folk get to "fail" at marriage, so do queer folk.
I'm so glad you shared this, Ty! I incorporated a snippet of the memory into our roundup at The Queer Love Project, but I hope people read the full piece here as well.
June 26 will always hold a complicated kind of magic for me.
Ten years ago, I was still invisible to myself.
I read your piece, and I found myself nodding, feeling that deep “me too” echo in my chest. I once judged what I now hold sacred. Queerness. Community. The right to live and love fully.
I played “smear the queer” as a kid. I flinched when someone acted “too feminine.” I wanted so badly to fit in, to be liked, to feel safe. And I thought maybe that meant staying small. Quiet. Straight enough. I didn’t realize I was folding up parts of myself like notes never passed.
I came out at 47. Its taking time to unravel what I thought was safety but was really erasure. Now, as I approach 50, I find myself craving the very spaces I used to avoid — the queer spaces, the weird and tender and radically alive places. Not because they’re righteous, but because they are real. Because they are home.
There’s a sacred ache in what you wrote — that internal conflict, those blank pages that still thrum with questions. I think so many of us queer later bloomers carry that ache. The what-could-have-beens. The dreams we buried. The apologies we offer — not just to others, but to ourselves.
And yet, here we are.
Still becoming.
Still learning how to stand in the full, glittering truth of who we are.
Thank you for your honesty. Thank you for writing this. For me, Pride isn’t just about joy — it’s about reckoning and return. About claiming the beauty we were once told to fear.
Here’s to open marriages and open hearts. To blank pages rewritten. To queerness as homecoming.
With you in it,
Molly
Thank you for sharing this, Molly. As much as we'd like to just "be" queer when we are ready to admit that we are, it is so much more complicated and messy and laborious than that. Muscle memory, be it in our limbs or in our minds, does not change overnight.
I also responded in other spaces here on Substack. Our 25 years together-23 year marriage ended this month in an uncontested divorce. Would we have done the Civil Union post 9/11 and then legal marrige in 2017 knowing then what we know now? Probably not. But the world forgets how it was in 2001 when it came to heterosexism and homophobia.
Relationships are hard. While yours and your ex-wife's marriage may not have lasted, may not have been the best, I'm still glad you had the right to enter into it. Just as much as straight folk get to "fail" at marriage, so do queer folk.
I'm so glad you shared this, Ty! I incorporated a snippet of the memory into our roundup at The Queer Love Project, but I hope people read the full piece here as well.
Thanks for prodding me to write it, Jerry. :-)