Lovelight: What a Wonderful World

All you young Truckers reading this blog, I wonder sometimes if you really, really appreciate how good you have it, how good it is to be young and gay and alive and out and free to love here in this day and time.

Forty-odd years ago, when I first got a glimmer of what "homo" and "queer" meant - and that was when "gay" still meant "merry" - there was no public discussion at all of the subject, not in the Deep South where I grew up. People like us were unmentionable in polite society.

Homosexuality - ugly word - was something whispered about, something shameful, ugly, evil. There were no pictures, no movies, no TV shows, no images of happy, loving gay people anywhere to be seen, not ever. In straight people's minds, and to some degree even in our own, we gay men and women simply did not exist - except as a scary, shadowy figment of the popular imagination, lurking in some dark alley ready to molest somebody's kid.

You younger guys and gals have grown up not only hearing about, but seeing lots of gay people, in pictures and in person. No doubt you take that for granted, as a reasonable, natural part of the way things are. But try to imagine for one moment growing up in a world - not very long ago, in my lifetime - where your sexuality was so shocking and shameful you could not tell anyone about it, could not discuss it even with your best friends, your teacher, your preacher - not even Mom and Dad. (Oh God no!)

And where you never once saw a picture of anyone else like you, anywhere. Much less actually knew someone like you. Think about it. No pictures, no models, no examples - just you, alone with your gay self.

I was 22 before I ever knew somebody who was admittedly gay - another employee where I worked, but I was way too closeted and shy - okay, terrified actually - to come out to him. And it was another couple years after that before I found a gay support group in college and came out myself.

So the ten years from age 14, when I finally put the words "homosexual" and "me" together, till age 24, when I came out - those 10 years were lost to me, emotionally, socially, sexually, psychologically. I turned inward, I hated myself, I believed God hated me too; I was chronically depressed, thought about suicide many times, missed out on a lot of normal development as a maturing human being. Like millions of other gays in my generation. But at least we finally did arrive at an era where we could come out and be our true selves.

The laws and the attitudes in this country still need some work, a lot more changes need to happen. But even though we aren't at the end of the struggle yet, it delights me to think of you younger folks, and the kids, and even the babies now being born - growing up free to be yourselves, free to live and free to love.

It's a wonderful world.

So we'll close out the last Sunday of the year with Louis Armstrong's classic song of the same name, and look at some sweet pics of gay lovers in love, and be glad.

(A suggestion: listen to the first one, look at the second one; sound track is awful, but love the pics.)