Times they are a changing…

Times they are a changing…

I first acknowl­edged myself as a gay man short­ly after I grad­u­at­ed from col­lege in 1979. I’d had a few encoun­ters, but it was only after I fin­ished school that I real­ly allowed myself to accept that I was gay, and that being gay was like­ly to impact the rest of my life. For the first time I found myself accept­ing myself, and iden­ti­fy­ing as a gay man. It was a start.

When I moved to Atlanta in the Fall of 1979, it was to attend Can­dler School of The­ol­o­gy. But I knew, even before I got there that I was not going to enter that Fresh­man Class. My plans to study Pas­toral Coun­sel­ing and The­o­log­i­cal Lit­er­a­ture were falling apart in the face of both a lack of finances (my schol­ar­ship was tied to a require­ment that I serve as a min­is­ter in the West­ern North Car­oli­na Con­fer­ence) and in the face of my self accep­tance.

Not to say I was real­ly “out” then. It had not so much come into fash­ion at that point in his­to­ry. Enough to be liv­ing whole and healthy. I was clos­et­ed to fam­i­ly, and at work — kept them sep­a­rat­ed from my per­son­al life. Back then you could be fired for being gay. you could be attacked for being gay. You could get beat­en up by the police for being gay. Stonewall may have hap­pened, but this was Atlanta, Geor­gia, and that world didn’t have much to do with what was hap­pen­ing in New York City and San Fran­cis­co.

Look­ing back, it’s some­what dif­fi­cult for me to imag­ine that I actu­al­ly lived through that time. Hard to believe the first gay pride event that I attend­ed was not a PRIDE Parade at all. Rather, it was a protest march to the steps of the state capi­tol in Atlanta. Some two hun­dred of us marched in protest; deter­mined just to be pro­tect­ed and accept­ed. There were a few oppor­tu­ni­ties to do out­reach. I vol­un­teered at the local Gay Cen­ter as a PR Coor­di­na­tor, and lat­er served as its PR Direc­tor. But back then, what we most­ly did was pub­lish a newslet­ter and a cal­en­dar for the com­mu­ni­ty. We issued press releas­es, but they were rarely picked up by any­one oth­er than the local bar rags. Gay was def­i­nite­ly not on anyone’s agen­da.…

It’s dif­fi­cult for me to imag­ine that I was clos­et­ed at work, and wor­ried that some­one might fig­ure things out. Dif­fi­cult (and painful) to remem­ber final­ly com­ing out to my par­ents in an explo­sive ses­sion that result­ed in their leav­ing to dri­ve back home to North Car­oli­na the same day they’d arrived (osten­si­bly to take care of me because work­ing two jobs had left me with a case of mono).

I look back at all that and think, my how the world has changed.