OCTOBER | 2019 | LOVE & RELATIONSHIPS

REVOLUTIONARY ACTS

“Telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” We’d like to tell you exactly who is responsible for this quote but we don’t know. Some say George Orwell, others say differently. Honestly, by the time we realized the depths of the who-said-it rabbit hole, we stopped caring. Just know that someone said it, dammit. At any rate, we saw the quote and wanted to integrate it into this month’s Love & Relationships as it relates to our second annual Out issue.  

History is riddled with what many have cited as being revolutionary acts. In no particular order there was First Lieutenant Ehren Watada who refused to be deployed to Iraq in 2006 after he concluded that the war was based on a lie, the unknown rebel who appears in Stuart Franklin’s infamous photo of the 1989 standoff in Tiananmen Square, Rosa Parks’ and the sit that helped ignite the Civil Rights movement, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech. These are some of the most revolutionary moments to known to man. They were brave, altruistic, and represent those very rare moments of time when people stopped what they were doing and paid attention. Kind of like how a lot of people stop and pay attention when they see our kind of love- because it’s not supposed to exist. 

Many of us were made aware of the consequences that we’d be subjected to by coming out at very young ages. Before we knew anything about our future Beaux, we knew that we had to move differently in order to be with someone who we hadn't even met. That lead many of us to carefully craft ways for us to experience and experiment with our sexuality and love. We kept things under wraps, ran off to college, or moved to Atlanta to ensure that we had the time and the space we needed to figure it all out. We had (and still have) targets painted on our backs, and it seemed like everyone was out to collect the moral bounty as a reward for taking us down.

Many of us were so busy either hiding or trying to escape from our homophobic friends and family, and the church that we forgot about the political actors who were working overtime to keep us from being able to marry, limit our ability to raise children, and to ensure that there were actual laws that could be used to justify us being denied from employment of fired from our jobs because of our sexuality. It’s amazing that we’re still standing considering all of the things that we’ve had to endure as SGL gentlemen of color, yet here we are…. 

We’re not going to name names, but someone on our very small staff of unpaid writers, has always taken issue with people who boast about living their truth. “I mean, I get it,” he says, “but its [redacted] and that’s the hill I’m dying on. So,what?” It’s not the people or the action he minds, as much as the way he feels about the statement....according to him.  At any rate, the people who openly “live their truth” are the reason that we’ve made the progress we’ve made. Our wins result from the people who, despite what anyone said or thought about them, decided that they were going to live.  

Part of this living includes (but is not limited to) them making their relationships as public as they can stand for them to be. It's them not only recognizing that our kind of love is the new normal, but them taking an active hand in being a part of the representation of that love. Those relationship goals hashtags on Instagram are about so much more than the pictures, likes and interaction, they represent fillers in the ever shrinking void of Black SGL visibility. 

Anytime any of us who are open to sharing parts of our relationships with the world we’re committing a revolutionary act.  Its an act that shows our detractors that we’re here regardless of what their thoughts, opinions, or views may be on or about same gender love. Its us spitting in the face of the challenges they tirelessly work to create for us, and each instance where we demonstrate a resistance to their backwards ideals, is an instance that will hopefully seem alien to those who come after us. 

The only way any of this can be possible will be for those of us who can, to serve as examples for those of us who have yet to. This means being as visible as possible whenever possible. It means matching outfits, respectable levels of PDA, publicly using pet names on one another, and, of course, posting as many pictures as humanly possible while using the #relationshipgoals hashtag. 

Telling the truth is a revolutionary act, and the time for us to tell the truth of our love is now. If the straights find themselves unbothered by the presence of heterosexual couples in media then our presence should be equally unbothersome. We may not think of ourselves or our relationships as things that should be looked up to, but they are. They serve as constant reminders that the world is not only changing, but has changed, that love in 2019 doesn’t look the same as it did in 1959, and that the don’t ask, don’t tell days of old are but shameful throwbacks to a time when romantic love was restricted to one man and one woman.