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Hiding in the Straight World as a Gay Man
Being Gay While Looking Straight. Hairdressers and Florists, Oh My!
During the HIV/AIDS period, many of us learned to camouflage
This morning, my husband and I were having coffee and reflecting on the obituary of a longtime friend who had passed away. I read the notice on Facebook. He and his husband were friends from our old frenzied fund-raising days in Southern California during the 1990s and 2000s. We were brothers in arms in protests over AIDS/HIV funding, gay-marriage acceptance, and anti-war demonstrations over the Gulf War. (All those deaths, and the Taliban remained and eventually won, just as history predicted.)
His husband had died about sixteen years ago from lung cancer. They were both hairdressers. Neither fit the stereotype. Michael, the younger of the two, was slim, animated and funny, but having grown up in a small farming town, he had learned to put on the every day persona of the butch, straight guy. That is the way many of us survived our childhoods.
We pretended to be someone we weren’t.
Michael’s husband, Terry, was a BIG man. Very gruff-voiced, six-feet-plus, plus-sized, and covered in hair. A real “bear” in every sense of the gay vernacular. But within the confines…
