🏳️🌈 🏳️🌈 🏳️🌈 three rainbow flags celebrating National Coming Out Day, which is also the anniversary of my wedding-equivalent to my (alas, long-dead) husband-equivalent Jacques Transue (in those days, there were no same-sex marriages, so no same-sex wedding anniversaries either; queers had to invent their own practices and occasions, which most of the rest of society, with some honorable exceptions, simply dismissed as illegitimate — and, yes, that still fills me with white-hot rage). And then coming out, a process that proceeded slowly and painfully through the 1950s and 1960s, flowering publicly in the 1970s, but was still attended by shame and despair and near-suicidal depression, until I slowly embraced my inner fag and transformed, in steps, into some kind of warrior queer, ending up where I am now, known in some circles for being a Famous Fag (who used to teach linguistics, many years ago, and still writes some mostly fluffy stuff about language). An unexpected development, not at all how I expected to be remembered, but not an unpleasant one; I could have done much worse. Especially since my coming out was such a mess.
So if you’re queerly inclined, I passionately recommend coming out, but see if you can do it better than I did. Of course you’ll have to do it in a way that suits your own circumstances, which aren’t exactly like anyone else’s; but learn from others, be gentle with yourself, and cultivate friendships. (I know, such conventionally generic advice, but not entirely useless.)
I will have more to say about coming out and NCOD. But first, since most of life is random happenstance, I’ll have a few things to say about today’s Bizarro cartoon, which has nothing to do with NCOD or husbands (of any degree of legitimacy) or queerness, but instead is about henchmen (of a particularly thuggish sort). And, by the way, about language, because in the cartoon Wayno (a) commits a groan-worthy pun that (b) is about English vocabulary.
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