"Forbidden Friends"

At the vulnerable age of 13, the slow-motion awakening that one might be gay or lesbian is traumatic. Back in the early 1970s, it was beyond life-altering. If those feelings were shared with anyone, it literally put everything at risk, including your life.

My choice was to deny myself any close attachment to boys that I had feelings for, and as a result, I graduated from high school and university without a single friend that I wanted to stay in touch with. 

It was survival, but it came at an enormous emotional cost. Shortly after my 21st birthday,  I chose to marry a woman, and because I had zero emotional attachment to women, it was a calculated decision. The approach I took was that this was a long-term commitment to a "job" that I was going to have to endure, regardless of whether it was a good "career fit" for me.

For 25 years, I dutifully showed up to "work" everyday. I fathered four children and did my best to provide for their every need.  At the time, I had no clue of the harm that I was doing to both myself and my loved ones.

I  became so adept at compartmentalizing my authentic self that, at the age of 46, when I finally did come to terms with the fact that I had been born gay, and that I had never once experienced an emotional desire to be with a woman, it felt like waking up from a bad dream. 

The best way to describe my memories from the time I was 13 (and went through puberty) would be to say that it felt like somebody else had livied their life in my body. My brain has connected those memories to my body, but my soul lacks any deep emotional connection to the events of that 25-year period.

This realization is so deeply distrurbing to me that I still, 19 years laters, lack the words to describe the trauma. How do I come to terms with the fact that I raised four children to adulthood during this time, and at some level they feel like they are somebody else's kids?

This enduring pain is the driving force behind writing this book. Personally, I hope to improve the healing process so that I can knit together the two very separate lives that I have lived. More broadly, I want to ensure that nobody makes the same mistake I did, and to that end, the broader public needs to be educated.

What I can say is this. If the rural community that I lived in as a teenager had been willing to accept gay teenagers, then I would have almost certainly dated boys in high school and college, found one that I wanted to be married to, and still chosen to create and raise a large family with the person that I fell in love with.

This understanding of what I might have done, if I had lived in a different time and place, naturally leads me to re-live every memory I have of parenting as I come face-to-face with how different life might have been for my four children and their mother. The fact that they were denied a more genuine family life because of mistake I made multiplies the pain that I continue to feel exponentially.

It is a safe bet that nobody growing up in a rural setting woke up one day and decided they were going to be a bigot, but ignorance (lack of knowledge) is likely at the foundation of most bigotry.

Make no mistake. Hatred is a taught, but bigotry is a behavior that can be handed down from one generation to the other. In other words, in the absence of being taught an alternative view of the world, it is safe to assume that a child raised in a home with beliefs that support bigotry will adopt the same belief system.

In the 2024 presidential election, it was clear for all who wanted to see it that ignorance was allowing bigoted beliefs to be weaponized. Nowhere was this more visible than in rural America, where not only was the percentage who fell into the trap of demagoguery higher than in 2020 or 2016, but so were the raw numbers.

In the so-called "culture wars," the dreaded other can be just about anyone who is different, and the billions of dollars spent were spent across the broad spectrum of threats to "traditional" values. The hashtag #TradWife started trending (especially in Utah), which meant that feminist would be among the "forbidden friends."

More insidious, certain media channels and personalities started talking in terms of "poisoning our blood," acertaining that only one in-group had the "best" blood. That left it up to each tribe to define their own class of "forbidden friends."

The final two ad themes that were attributed with having the deepest impact against the broad coalition candidate for president tell the story best.

If the ads in the anti-trans theme are to be believed, men who cannot excel against "real" men will want to become transgender in the hope of winning in a less competitive field. And, to ensure that fear of the dreaded other is invoked, the demagogues are spending tens of millions of dollars to claim that male predators want to dress up as women so that they can get inside women's bathrooms unnoticed.

The other theme was that "liberals" as a class of people are proping up people who are living off "the system." American values cherish the idea of "rugged individualism," and if you're dependant on government handouts, then it only shores up the idea that "my taxes" are going to support people who won't make an effort to support themself. Worse yet is the notion that millions of these people living on government handouts are undocumented immigrants who snuck across the border.

In short, in the new culture war of 2024, even the idea of "fairness" was weaponized. It "isn't fair" to let a man pretend to be a woman so that they can compete in women's sports, and it "isn't fair" that undocumented people in the United States are living off support systems that are paid for by taxing hard-working Americans.

Racism is the elephant in the room in the 2024 presidential election.