Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 102

I met my first wife when I was twenty-one and she was eighteen. We were working together at an overnight camp for girls on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It was 1998, I had just graduated from college and was planning to move to San Francisco once I saved up enough money for the plane ticket.

She was tall, dark and handsome and completely different from me. Where I was the life of the party, she’d be sat quietly in the corner. Where I was happy to be the centre of attention, she blushed if anyone asked her about herself.

She was English, recruited by Camp America, a scheme to get young people from all over the world to work for next to nothing at American summer camps. The allure, a chance to come to the USA and enjoy weekends and evenings off…in the woods.

We got to know each other slowly over those summer months and eventually fell in love. It was your standard summer romance, and once summer was over and camp ended, she was back on a plane to England and I was headed west.

We kept in touch over the years while dating other people. Although I’d been dating girls for years, I’d been her first girlfriend. My sense was she needed to sow her wild oats and I wasn’t about to be tied down in a long-distance relationship while breaking onto the queer scene in San Francisco.

As fate would have it, in the summer of 2002 the camp where we’d met was desperate to find a director. I’d been working in San Francisco as a youth worker and decided to apply for the job. I got it and headed to Cape Cod. When I got there, there she was, back for another summer at the camp she’d grown to love. We reunited and fell in love, again.

By the end of that summer we decided it was worth going for it and I asked her to move to San Francisco. She managed to get a six month tourist visa and that was it, we were officially together, for real. It was serious.

Now the question was, how do we stay together? The only answer we could find was that she become a student and remain a student for as long as possible. So she started school, first at the local community college and then the state university.

As an international student she wasn’t technically allowed to have a job, so she had to find creative ways to support herself. I also provided a lot of financial support. Because of this, instead of saving money during my first fifteen years working, I went into debt.

As an international student she had to pay exorbitantly for her education, which would have been much, much cheaper had she had residency status.

As an international student she had to leave the country as soon as she was done studying.

So the next thing was to get her into graduate school. She wanted to study nursing so she applied to programmes across the country, including in San Francisco. She got into two programmes, one in Maine and the other in Massachusetts, but they were too expensive because of the higher tuition fees for international students.

Meanwhile, we had gotten married and then the state had voided our marriage and then we’d watched the ping pong ball of gay marriage legislation go back and forth between the courts and the voting public for the next four years.

In all that time I held a frustration deep in my body. Why couldn’t I marry the woman I loved and bring her to this country to live with me, be my wife, and build a life together? Sometimes the sense of impotency was palpable and my mental health suffered.

It wasn’t until 2012 that the Supreme Court of the USA finally repealed the Defense of Marriage Act, making it illegal for any state to refuse to marry a gay couple.

But by then it was too late. Our relationship had ended the year before as a result of a series of unfortunate events, some of them being the weight of the stress of never knowing how we could stay together, build financial security, get on with our lives.

In fact, part of how I ended up in the UK was because when her options for remaining in the US dried up, that became our only option. I applied for a visa based on our relationship, which by then according to UK law was a valid enough reason to emigrate.

But I didn’t actually want to move to the UK. It was partially a forced decision. Move country or lose your wife.

My ex eventually did become a nurse. She ended up studying at the University of Manchester and now works at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital.

The personal is political. And anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is deeply deluded. I have looked for the boundary between where the conditions that shape my personal life end and the conditions that shape the world around me begin and I can not find it.

June is pride month. Luckily, because of my conditioning, I was able to come out of the closet at a young age, be accepted by most of my friends and family, and make it work with my first marriage, despite the discrimination we faced on the part of our government.

I had the option and the means to move to San Francisco, a known haven for the queer community. I could move there and get a job and be openly queer without fear of being harassed in the workplace or losing my job.

Others are not so lucky.

Some don’t make it to adulthood because the fear of coming out is too strong, or the bullying so painful, or the self-hatred so debilitating that they would rather end their own lives.

Some don’t make it to adulthood because they become victims of hate crimes and sometimes end up dead.

When I was a teen and young adult I wrote religiously. Then I started practicing Buddhism and my writer’s voice went quiet. For a long time I didn’t write anything. Instead, I delved deeply into my own suffering, my conditioning, my story.

I examined it all, turning over every stone I could find, looking for the source of my suffering. And what I’ve found is that my suffering is intimately connected to yours, and yours to mine.

It’s taken me twenty years to find my voice. This is the first time I’ve written about this part of my story. Now feels like the time to speak up, tell my story, be seen and heard and witnessed in my struggle, and in my truth.

June is Pride month and this Pride what I want to remember is the inextricable link between queer liberation and Black liberation. These two movements have weaved in and out of each other for decades.

What is at the heart of these movements is love, and joy, and liberation. And what unites them is the struggle to be fully seen as human, fully recognised as equally deserving of all the good things, and fully free.

My hope in sharing this is that others also feel inspired to tell their stories.

If you’re ready, I’m listening.