We’re offered Gay Days, Pride-themed Mickey Mouse ears, a parade float. Last year the nonprofit Come Out with Pride in Orlando held one of its biggest festivals yet, but the community struggles to find space and funding and room to grow. Though Central Florida is home to many queer people, there are only a handful of LGBTQ+-designated establishments. Read More: Florida Just Passed The “Don’t Say Gay” Bill. They are left with nowhere to turn, denied the language necessary to their continued survival and growth. The young people affected by this are in the same position I was in as a teenager. It wants to eradicate us by denying our voices. It is a blanket meant not to comfort, but to stifle and to smother. With the passage of the Parental Rights in Education bill-more commonly (and accurately) called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill-which bans public schools from teaching kindergartners through third-graders about sexual orientation or gender identity or “in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students” and allows parents to sue the school districts for violations-the state is trapped in the same cycle of wordlessness, with queer and trans people unable to speak the truth of our lives. It’s been more than 20 years since I graduated high school, yet the repression of LGBTQ+ youth in Florida remains much the same. Only then did the fear begin to dissipate. Those words led me to queer community, allowing me to understand that I wasn’t alone. It took years of stewing in anguish for me to finally come out. Young people, already faced with the stress and anxiety of coming out, knew that the additional obstacles placed in front of them by the edicts of our conservative state meant they wouldn’t be able to thrive.
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. I found places online where I could hide, small hubs of support. 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.