Coming Out

 There is a large group of men who mostly identify as heterosexual who are celibate and abstain from sexual intercourse.They are Catholic priests. There is also a large analogous group of Catholic women who are called nuns. I was raised by my Osage family, my grandmother and mother. They never said “I love you,” but I knew they did because they showed it in many ways. I never had a father. The first time I said “I love you” was in 1955 when I was 11 years old to another 11 year old boy. We boys and girls often said “I like you” to a friend, and I had told Jerry that many times, but this day, we were wrestling, and it just slipped out, shocking me that I had said the words. But I did love him. Being straight or gay doesn't have to be an action, something you do, for you to be either straight or gay. It's an identity, a spectrum, similar to being autistic. It's just what you are. I've been in two long term marriages of more than 20 years each with women whom I loved. I've identified as heterosexual all my life, and there have been many women in my life. I have had a son who lived and then died when he was 36. I have been afraid of saying what I am acknowledging now. I am gay and I have been all my life or I would not have fallen love with two boys, Jerry and then Ernie. I was born so. I have kept it my secret, but I have known it, and I acknowledged it to myself more than 20 years ago. My late wife, Charlotte, and I had a great sexual relationship for our first five years and then it just stopped for the remainder of our 30 years long marriage. There were no arguments, or even discussions. Just a tacit agreement. We continued to share the same big Sleep Number mattress while being celibate within our marriage. 

I have not been in a relationship with another man, but I have almost been. It might have happened, but it didn't. I am 81 years of age now and I have no idea how much time remains for me to be here. I have no intention of engaging in a sexual relationship, and I made a vow to the woman who talked me out having a vasectomy that I would not be in one. I do not want to create a child. I do not want to contract or transmit an STD. I am speaking out because I believe in equal rights. If all of us do not have equal rights, then none of us do. You are either in the fight for equal rights or you're not. There is no middle ground. I have  stood on the sidelines for too long and I now fully join the fight. I will continue to focus on acknowledging the lives and history of black people, but I add myself to the LGBTQ community as well, as one of them, and I will no longer be just a spectator. 

"I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything; but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the

something that I can do. " Edward Everett Hale

Stephen Joe Payne