CHAPTER 23: The Fighter

I guess that I’ve always been a fighter. My fighting identity came well before my self-realization as a gay man around the age of 12. When I was born, in January 1956, on one of the coldest days in Minnesota history, I came out kicking and screaming. Like many gay activists, I really haven’t stopped since. I never was sure why I should kick and scream, since I wasn’t self-aware until later of being gay, with all the struggles that that identity would entail. But, somehow, I did know that it was all right to fight back, and I did so religiously. From the onset of my life, as a child in the 1950s and early 1960s, I drew fighting strength from my grandmother’s Old Country tales of oppression and from my mother’s stories of Great Depression hardship. When I subsequently concluded, from my elementary school years in the middle 1960s onward, that I wanted to be a teacher and wished to excel in that less-than-gay-friendly role, I was encouraged by these challenging stories, by some of my own “feminine” academic strengths, by my buy-in to my elementary school’s straight-laced curriculum, by my tutoring capabilities with anti-gay high school peers, and by my subsequent survival of decades-long anti-LGBTIQ rites of teacher passage. Somehow, I also managed to maintain the openness needed to take in support from others as I went through these rites.