Happy Pride
This photo was taken 11 years ago — 2013 — as part of my senior photos for my high school graduation. I’m sitting on the concrete bunker to the cattle barn at my grandmother’s house, and behind the wooden wall behind me is about 100 head of cattle chewing their cud and wading around the enclosed pen.
About 30 feet to my right is the entrance to the barn where the radio is playing 99.9 FM K100 — likely Sugarland, Miranda Lambert, JoDee Messina, Martina McBride, Kenny Chesney, and Tim McGraw to be heard.
Here, you can see a pretty big smile on my face. I was a happy kid — it’s part of my natural disposition. If you look closely, you can see the metal cross necklace I’m wearing — part of what I wore everyday, and I never took it off. It was a gift I received for my confirmation into the Lutheran church a few years prior, and it was a reminder of the importance of my faith. Even more, my hands are folded, and I was intentional in doing so because I wanted my senior photo to reflect the importance of my faith.
It was a Friday night in the summer time, and my good friend Katie was taking my photos (hi Katie!) — we took photos all around the farm, and we were laughing the entire time, thinking of how goofy this whole process was — modesty is a pretty strong value where I’m from, so it felt incongruent to my faith and my background to take photos like this at the time.
I’m wearing my Washington Leadership Conference (WLC) shirt because this was an event that was really important to me. Throughout high school, I was very active in my school’s FFA chapter. For those who may not know, FFA stands for Future Farmers of America and is a class and curricular organization that helps to strengthen one’s leadership skills for the world of agriculture. For two years, I served as our chapter’s Reporter, and then I finished by serving as Vice President my senior year.
Heading into my senior year, I was able to attend a week-long conference in Washington, D.C. where I furthered my leadership skills even more, meeting some incredible peers from around the country, and creating personalized plans for taking action back home in our communities to make our communities better places. For me, my goal was to create a non-profit organization to help improve the lives and well-being of people in my community (something I successfully was able to do). This conference had a massively positive impact on me, and I wanted to honor it by wearing this shirt in my senior photos.
It was what was happening in-between the photos that is most striking to me, especially now as I take a look back at this time. As we moved from one location around the farm to the next on a golden Friday evening at dusk, I’d be checking my early-age cell phone (quite neurotically) for messages from the boy I had a crush on.
At this time in my life, I knew I was gay, and it was certainly a secret I was keeping from everyone (sometimes even from myself). Recognizing the values of community I’m from, I knew it wasn’t a wise decision at the time to share my truth with those around me. I greatly feared losing the people I loved and the people that brought me the most joy. I was afraid that being true to myself meant one day being alone, and so it was easier, safer, and — in some ways — happier for me to keep the core of myself hidden. It was like I could be happy 60% of the time because I’d still have my friends and my family, but 40% of the time, I was in a deep, deep depression when I was in my bedroom at night, once everyone else had gone to bed, and I was alone with myself.
Looking back, if I had to define this summer, I’d recognize it to be the Summer of Wrestle.
Specifically, it was that wrestle back-and-forth with myself.
Do I listen to my heart, or do I listen to my faith?
Do I be true to myself, or do I do what makes other people around me happy?
Do I live my life as a “sinner,” or do I live my life “pure,” even if that means I’m unhappy?
The wrestle was strong, but it was videos like this one that gave hope:
And this one too:
I’d watch both of these videos over and over again in my bedroom after long summer days working on the farm while I’d text my crush and try to figure myself out.
In the wrestling, it felt like a majority of the time my faith was winning. Most of the time, I felt convicted that my life path was to be a hidden gay man at worst, or a converted heterosexual at best, recognizing that a struggle with sexual attraction was the task the devil gave me.
Through this all, though, there remained a little flicker of hope that what I saw in these clips could actually come true. Looking back, I realize that this flicker of a flame was my intuition and the core trusting of myself. And I’m so grateful that it remained. Even more, I’m grateful to have had resources of support like these videos and the stories of the handful of gay people I knew at the time to keep the flame alive and show me that a life of authenticity could be possible.
The older that I grew, over the next couple of years, and even entering seminary right out of high school, the wrestle grew stronger, and it was time to face it head on, primarily due to my rock-bottom mental health.
I knew that addressing my sexuality to myself was one thing, but translating that out to my family, my friends, and the world around me was a whole ‘nother ballgame. And it was. I lost a lot of people, it changed the trajectory of my family, and it absolutely shook up the path of my life.
It was fucking hard. And even though I’m almost 10 years “out of the closet,” there are still moments (more than you probably think) where I wonder what life would have looked like if I chose a different path. I still wrestle with “Am I born this way? Or did I make a choice?” I still wrestle with the guilt of the changes I caused for my family and community for being true to myself. I’m still uncovering the damages of the ground-shaking that “coming out” caused for me — from sexual trauma to unhealthy relationships to financial debt.
Today begins Pride Month, that time of year we celebrate who we are. Every year for the month of June, it generally seems to become “extra okay” to be gay or part of the LGBTQIA+ community, and it seems like we gloss-over the fact of the struggles our community continues to face by having parades, celebrations, and fancy logos from big companies. And yes, these are wonderful things, but in many ways, it’s not as simple as this. And for many people still throughout the US and the world, it’s still “not okay” to be true to oneself.
Pride is a complex topic, and each of us within the LGBTQIA+ community has a unique relationship to it. Informed by personal experience and coaching gay men through their emotions for the past decade, I’d venture to say that a majority of us have a complicated relationship with the concept of pride — we may have moments where we feel proud of who we are, but we also have moments of shame, guilt, humiliation, unsafety, embarrassment, etc. for who we are and for the impact our truth has had on those around us, particular the ones we love.
I just want to pause and acknowledge the difficulty and the grief of this — particularly, the difficulty of feeling forced to choose one’s authenticity vs. maintaining the status quo or maintaining the happiness of the people around us and the grief of having to navigate through the life adjustments and changes that often occur when we do choose ourselves.
It’s fucking hard. And it’s okay that it’s hard. Life isn’t fair, and all of our experiences are going to be different from one to the next. I think there’s a subtle beauty in our acceptance of these facts.
Even more, I think the deepest beauty lies in our personal and individualized listening to the flame that lives deep down within each of us. What is that flame saying to you? When you dive in to discover the core of who you are, what is that flame saying? What does it look like? What is it guiding you toward?
My prayer for you is to find the flame within you — and to hold it safely, cherish it, celebrate it, and allow it to grow.
The flame within you is the reason you are here on this planet.
The flame within you is the truth of who you are.
The flame within you may challenge others around you to grow.
The flame within you is likely going to present some of the biggest challenges of your life to you, but what a gift it is back to yourself to allow that flame to exist, exactly as it’s meant to be, because you are meant to be here, exactly as you know yourself to be.
My prayer for you is to give yourself compassion today, this week, this month. Hold yourself with the biggest of hugs and the most gentle of embraces. Whether you are out-and-proud, are “in the closet,” are still exploring and uncovering and discovering who are as of this moment, and everything in-between, I’m so happy for you and so proud of you for giving yourself space to allow your flame to take up the space that it deserves. There is nothing you need to figure out today. You are allowed to be exactly who you need and want to be. You are allowed to make the decisions that work the best for you, right now.
It’s 11 years since that photo was taken, and I still listen to Sugarland, Miranda Lambert, JoDee Messina, and Kenny Chesney. I still miss the farm like crazy. I still smile when I look at this photo, and I still hold these memories with deep and sincere gratitude. I still recognize the pain that “coming out” caused, and I don’t push this away — instead, I hold it, I give it space to exist, and I keep it like a book on the shelf; I get it down when I need to reference it, but I also put it back up when I need to, too. I’m grateful for the pain that “coming out” led to because, over the span of 10 years, it brought me deeper to myself, closer to the family, friends, and loved ones that are fully aligned with me, and it opened up new relationships with my soulmates and soulsiblings — bringing me a joy and love I never thought possible, ones that the senior in the photo couldn’t see.
My prayer for you is loud, and I hope you fall farther and farther in love with yourself, your truth, and your life, day by day.
Happy Pride, everyone.
Love,
Kevin