One night Lance and I were sitting on the sofa watching television-I think marriage equality had passed in Massachusetts, but I was insistent that because I was born and bred in New York and New York had done so much for me, that until I could get married legally in New York, I was going to wait.
It was not even part of my dream it never seemed like it could really ever progress to that point. Then all of a sudden-to fall in love with someone who you could share your life with! But still, Lance and I never had any thought that we would ever be able to get married. One of my mom’s concerns for me always, when I was growing up-her friends who were gay were not in long-term relationships, and I think my mom just didn’t want me to be lonely. First off, I thought, Well, I’m in Greenwich Village. We were zooming along and a car started following us and screaming at us: “Fags, fags, fags!.” I got so defiant and angry. Do you remember when rollerblades became the trend? By then it was the ’90s, and I was rollerblading on the West Side Highway with a friend. Everything that Larry Kramer and all of the people at ACT UP were doing… what they pushed through saved so many lives.Įvery time you think that homophobia is over and you’re making progress, somehow something happens to make it slide backwards.
But at the height of ACT UP, at the height of people being outed, the whole thing seemed so radical-yet the reality was that radical actions were necessary: People were falling and dying left and right. While you’re in the middle of something, it’s hard to gain perspective. At the time, I thought that everyone was going to assume that if you’re a part of ACT UP, you have AIDS. But then there was suddenly this fear in the fashion business-“Oh: Does every gay man have AIDS?.” Maybe I was too young to register what was going on. When ACT UP really hit…in a weird way, ACT UP put me back in the closet again a little bit, because I was so angry at what was going on around me. It was the first time that I was in a group of gay people, and I didn’t feel that I was the only one. Then I was off to the FIT for college, and that was literally an explosion. She started telling me, "If there’s anything you need to tell me, you can tell me anything." And I said, “No, I have nothing to tell you.” Even though I was living in this liberal household, I was still afraid to say anything. I never played the game and said, "Oh, I’m a straight guy playing baseball.” With long hair and being skinny, did they think I was a girl? Was this something to avoid? Strangely enough though, when I became a little bit older, a teenager, my mom had quite a few gay friends. Don’t do that.”Īs a teenager, I was super, super skinny, a little androgynous-looking, and there was this fear of being exposed and having someone say, “Oh-you’re queer.” I was fearful but not fearful at the same time.
My mother said to him, “He’s talented, and he’s special, and that’s something we should celebrate.” It’s funny-I think at that point, there were little things like, if you put your hand on your hip, you’d hear someone say, “Girls do that. One day I overheard my stepfather say to my mother, “Why is he locked in his room drawing women’s dresses all day? What is he-a fairy, or something?” That literally cut me in half. I was an only child, and the last thing I was doing was rushing out to join the football or baseball team. When I think back to my childhood, when I was 11 or 12 I would literally be locked in my room drawing or reading or watching TV.
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Growing Up, Coming Out is a series of personal reflections from queer American designers, released every day this month.