This is going to be a short post. This is just a short little note to let my friends know how very much they mean to me. I love you guys so much because without you I think I might have lost myself. I certainly wouldn’t have had the courage to come as far as I have. Every word of kindness and encouragement is needed and cherished.
Thank you for encouraging me to write. Thank you for keeping me from giving up when that would be infinitely easier than trying to stamp my soul onto a computer screen. Thank you for being bright and shining flames when the darkness keeps encroaching. Thank you for loving me, supporting me, and being my other family.
You may think that all your small gestures, comments, likes, etc mean nothing, but they mean everything. I love you all. You are all my heroes. Kindness costs us nothing, and the more you give it away, the more it multiplies… kinda like love. 😉
Sunday was the official day off from blogging, and I pretty much tried to decide all day what topic I was going to tackle today. It was pretty much decided on my facebook that I should talk about family. So here we go
F is for Family:
Family, some of us are born into great families that nurture and love us no matter what, but the sad reality is that a lot of people in the LGBT community are forced to either fit themselves into a mould or to lose their blood relations. I talked last Thursday about coming out, ad I told a little bit of my story. I told you how my family was great and accepting. But here’s the thing, I waited until I had two failed marriages and 3 kids before I came out at 30. I can honestly say that if I would have come out sooner, I’m not sure that my family would have been as accepting. You see, my sister came out as bisexual first. 4 years before I would be brave enough. Not only that but my mother had breast cancer, and her mother passed away. We lost a few friends over in Iraq and Afghanistan. Life taught us that it was short, and we had to love each other and hold on to one another. I think that if I would have come out in my teen years it would have been a lot more disastrous for me and my relationships with them.
I also grew up in a military household. One that while strict, was pretty fair. We didn’t judge people by where they came from our what religion they practiced. Their color and financial situation never mattered. Everyone wore the uniform and were treated equally. We also learned how to make our friends into the family that we chose because any blood relations were thousands of miles away. I grew up in a home where the important “aunts” and “uncles” were of no real relation to me, but some of those people are still in my life and important to me today. If I would have lost my blood family then it would have hurt deeply but I had been given to skill set to build another life for myself.
Not everyone is so lucky. Especially when they are young and sheltered and seemingly loved, until they do the unforgivable. They are born Gay or Lesbian or Bisexual or Transgender. They are born different, but many times it’s not physically apparent. It’s a secret that grows inside our hearts and when we finally get the courage to BE ourselves, there are people in our lives that tell us that we are wrong, abominations, going to hell. We are beat over the head with religious doctrine sometimes literally, and then we are cut adrift to fend for ourselves outside the bosom of family.
As a community we’ve learned to embrace each other. To become “family”. Are we perfect? No, but what family is. We are evolving and changing and learning and growing. We have to band together because no matter what our differences are, we ARE a family and a community. Sometimes we need to be more inclusive. We tend to leave our Transgender brothers and sisters to the side, and we need to better embrace our people of color, and maybe the less physically perfect. We know what it feels like to be shunned, so what business do we have doing it to anyone else?
As the laws and world is changing more and more LGBT couples are creating their own families, whether through adoption, surrogacy, or other means. Our family is growing. It’s also embracing more and more straight allies. If we keep it up we will all become one family.. So if you are out there and you are lost and confused, please reach out. Don’t hide yourself away in the dark.
Cam Kennedy Writes 