Yes, nothing like rainbow flags everywhere to make you feel like celebrating your emotional destruction. Yay. I've been dreading this month too. I'll be avoiding social media as much as possible. It's impossible to escape it all but I'm damn sure going to avoid what I can. Just wanted to let you know I understand some of how it feels and that I hope you make it through okay. There is support here if you need it.

I was in a small local theatre last night and on the wall were several paragraphs, each one framed, written on white and lit for easy reading.At the end of one were the words 
" There will always be more letters in the LGBTQIA alphabet. If we see only our own glass ceiling we forget we are always standing on a glass floor. Let others bloom..."

Blah....blah....blah. I wanted to scream.....what about us! The straightspouse? We are collateral damage in a struggle to be seen as a letter in an inclusive acronym. 

 

All those social media quotes are posted by people who want to "signal their virtue" but have no idea of the realities behind coming out, or what our experience has been like being lied to, deceived, and left behind.  
 Pride Month and Transgender Awareness Month are the two times that I suspect most of us feel most like collateral damage.  Ironically to me, many of these virtue signaling people are quite concerned about collateral damage in other contexts (like drone bombings).  
  Maybe we need our own commemorative day/week/month.  Although come to think of it, I had mine.  It was a day in court, also known as Divorce Day.

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (June 2, 2019 9:09 am)

I made a divorce cake: a lemon cake and frosting and a Statue of Liberty on top, I hope with all these Pride parades and flags people who are not straight will stop feeling a need to hide who they are and won't date straights.

A registry implies that you know what you want in your future life. I have found since my divorce that my tastes have changed. Choose what you want as you go along. You can often pick up items at charity shops and do good at the same time. As I relaxed my style in dressing and decorating has become more casual, more in tune with current styles.

Yes, I agree, be who you are, proudly.  Don't deceive someone into marrying you.  However, not all decisions to marry a straight person and hide your gayness are made out of shame.  Some are the result of a deliberate decision to live or benefit from a straight life. Perhaps increasing acceptance will make that unnecessary, but I don't believe that with 100% certainty.
   I told my trans-declaring ex right up front after he told me he'd decided he was "a woman in a man's body" that I didn't want to stay married to him because I did not want my life to be all about all things trans, and I knew that my ex would be the object of discussion and attention, and intended to make himself one (at that point he was talking about wanting to give a public presentation at our college about his "journey," for example).  My best friend from graduate school is lesbian, and she and her spouse talk about "professional lesbians," women who make their lives about being lesbian, vs women for whom being lesbian is just one more attribute about them and just want to live a quiet life, like the rest of us.  I suspect that for many gay people, we straight people also put them in that "Gay" box: once we learn they're gay, they become GAY above all else.  
   I'll tell you this: when I walk around campus during Pride Week and see all the slogans chalked on the sidewalks-- "Come out, come out, whoever you are!--I think to myself that my ex will NEVER come out, and I wish he would (have).  It would have made my life a lot easier for the four years I taught there with him.  I wouldn't have had to close myself off from my colleagues and friends, and to avoid them because I felt like a deceptive liar hiding the truth of my life, all because he decided that if he'd starting living his truth he wouldn't have passed, would make an ugly woman, and would lose the prestige and respect he gets as a premium for being a man.  Pride and privilege, pure and simple.  I wanted to come out and tell my truth!  But I was not allowed to, because his right to stay in a closet trumped my right to speak about my life.  He had the right to keep me in his closet. 

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (June 2, 2019 6:54 pm)