Our Values. Our Families.

Do you need some hope? Want to feel better about what you are? Read this article. It’s about what we are and what we’ve been through. I’ve said it in so many articles all over this side, in one way or another.

Everyday in this country, there are those who want to do things to our community, the ones we love, and to make us feel small and worthless. When you feel like that, look into yourself for strength because believe me, it’s there.

I have done things in my life that, looking back, seem almost impossible. I wonder how I had the emotional and psychological strength to get through it all. We all have things that we have to get through. We all have people in our families that dislike us, or those we love.

It’s a burden to carry for many of us. But there is a secret. You don’t have to carry that burden. The problem isn’t with you. The problem is with those who can’t see you for what you are and won’t accept you for what you are. You really don’t have to put yourself through that. If you do, that is your choice.

I still battle with it at times myself. I try so hard to make certain people accept me and they don’t want to because I’m gay. I wonder why I try. I think I try because it makes it easier for someone I love. But that is my choice, and because of that, I bear the burden of that.

At the end of the day, they will never know the horror we went through as our friends died. How do you really tell someone of that and make them understand? I imagine it’s like telling someone what war is like. It’s beyond their understanding. And that is what the war on AIDS was in the early 1980’s. It was a war.

More formidable than the disease, homophobia was our worst enemy. It spawn the reality to many of my friends who are now gone, that the only people left that loved them were people like me; their friends. Not brothers, sisters, cousins, mothers, or fathers. Just people like me who showed all of them that water, so many times, runs thicker than blood.

No matter what happens in our fight to gain equality, no one can ever take that away from us. These are our values. This is our family.