Note:  This is part 1 of a 2-part essay.  The conclusion of this personal essay was published the morning of the Supreme Court’s first hearing on California’s Proposition 8.  Click here to read it.

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For the past five months, I have tried three times to write something entitled, “I am a Gay American.”  In November, when the people of Maryland, Washington, and Maine voted to legalize same-sex marriage, I started with cautious inspiration:  “In one fifth of our union, same-sex marriage is no longer evocative.  It is realized.”  I struggled to continue.

I stopped writing for many reasons.  I have spent more than a decade processing my identity and quite a few years battling my own negative perceptions of homosexuality and, by extension, myself.  I have acquired so many strong feelings about my sexuality and its politics, yet with every attempt to write at a coffee shop, at my desk, or on a bench, my determination to say something – anything – has turned into frustration.  In all my attempts, I have been overwhelmed by my emotions.  I often feel incapable of translating queerness, in all its complexity, into a neat, singular narrative.  I could never “find” adequate words nor create a “thesis” for whatever argument I was supposedly writing about being gay.  And why?  Who would read this?  Does it matter?  If enough people know that I am gay, that must mean that I have done enough.

Months began to pass – Obama became the first sitting President to publically support gay marriage.  I felt a surge of encouragement.  In February, a Vietnamese American LGBTQ group was banned from marching in an annual Tet parade because “LGBT is against Vietnamese tradition.”  I was steeped in disappointment.  With the oscillation of emotions came another failed attempt to properly articulate the personal and political – to depict how difficult it is to live a life where my future is an election wedge issue, a sin worthy of evangelical sermon, an example of how the human race is abject, hopeless, and disgusting.

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will begin to scrutinize California’s Proposition 8, which, in 2008, effectively defined marriage between a man and a woman.  On Wednesday, the Court will question the constitutionality of the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  The outcome of either ruling will deeply affect the way I live my life – it could determine whether I can see my partner in the hospital if she is ill (or if I have to break twenty hospital windows with my bare hands to get to her), it could affect whether my future child can legally call me “Mommy,” it could constitutionally define me as an inferior American.  How can I sit idly in the comfort of people simply “knowing” that I am gay?

I fear that I am losing time to write.   And so, I will try and begin once more:

I am a gay American.

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The teleology of the modern queer narrative is this:  You spend years being teased and/or quietly hurting yourself.  You finally, after years (sometimes decades) of suppression, mutter the words “I’m gay” to someone you deeply love and trust.  A proverbial weight is lifted off your even more proverbial shoulders.  It, somehow, gets better.  “Wait,” the narrative tells you.  “You’ll be the hero of your story.  Just wait.”

Yet, here is the narrative as I have witnessed and experienced:  In the story, love is not the telos – it is the beginning, the source of conflict, and the reason for war.  In any given year, you can feel like the hero, the villain, the damsel in distress, part of the ravished village.  You can slay one enemy, only to find 50 more people who call you “faggot,” or “dyke” or simply roll their eyes in revulsion.

It can feel never-ending:  You start a new job and must meticulously assess whether your colleagues can stomach the story of how you fell in love.  You want to have children, but now you must navigate all of the laws that either obfuscate or ban your ability to adopt children.  You want to travel and experience everything with your partner, but you must research whether the destination allows you to hold hands in public.  You meet the love of your life, but must wait for at least five out of nine Supreme Court Justices to approve of this union.