“They said a lot of parents pay a lot of money to go to Valor, just so their kids don’t have to mentored by someone who is gay,” he recalls. The offer they made was for Tonga to attend some form of “conversion therapy”, and when he returned to announce he isn’t gay, cut off contact with his fiance, scrub his social media of any support for the LGBTQ community, and denounce his support for them before the school. “They said I should take my time to decide if I will accept their help, and they’ll tell everyone I’m on a spiritual journey.” “They offered to help me stop being gay, with my ‘struggle’,” Tonga says. Like me, they quote lines from All about Eve and whistle show tunes as they jog.Īnd they are welcome to the club.Tonga had been out for years – and knew his contract never stated he couldn’t be gay and teach at Valor – but shame-filled memories of his closeted years as a young man rose up in that moment, as his job slipped away.
Yes, within them there beats a heart of disco. They might not want me to admit it on national public radio, but a number of my straight friends are culturally gay. Years ago, my son’s kindergarten teacher said, “Now I know the difference between children of straight parents and children of gays: your son is the only 5 year old who knows all the words to “ I Will Survive.” Just ask a straight man to say the word “fabulous” and you will hear the difference.Īnd if there is a gay sensibility then it is this: tragedy happens so you might as well enjoy life. We have our own dialect of inflection and irony. In saying that I am culturally gay, I’m not saying we gays have a single uniform culture, but rather we are a diaspora, a scattering of boa feathers and leather. In 1982, my lesbian friends set up ironing board on Christopher Street and helped raise money for the first National AIDS switchboard not because they were getting sick but because we shared this crisis. What joins us is a sense of belonging, a sensibility from the perspective of my fellows who are not in the mainstream. Gore Vidal once said that if we are the gays, then they must be the grims. But I celebrate the community of gays and lesbians and transgenders and intersex and what-have-you with whom I belong and who have become my family in the thirty-five years since I first came out. In my late middle ages, and married to the same husband for thirty years, I don’t spend most of my day doing gay things. She said that as a secular Jew she identified with a community not by belief, but by a relation of history and shared experiences.īy this notion, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am a secular gay. We were avoiding a discussion of religion when a friend told me that she was culturally Jewish.