The other day I caught myself thinking: my partner is the greatest contributor to my happiness. It is not only because I am a recipient of her generous love, but what is more subtle is that I got to gradually know myself better through her. People around us act as mirrors, and the intimacy of a romantic partnership makes our partners one of the most effective mirrors. It is deeply uncomfortable to see my own warts and flaw so closely and clearly, yet through her eyes I also got to know the better parts of my self I was never capable of knowing on my own. I know for a fact that I would be much less of a person if she didn’t appear in my life.
Imagine if I gave all of that up because I was worried about people’s judgement of my queerness and my queer relationship. To be clear, I was never actually worried. I am making the point that this is how absurd it is to exchange our lifetime’s potential inner richness for societal conventional approval. It should not even exist as a tenable equation. But this is what some people demand of us when they deny our right to be queer, and the right to be in a legal relationship with our partners. Sadly this is also what some people believe they have to give up because they cannot bear societal rejection. More tragically, queer people in some environments are still being persecuted or bullied.
I have never struggled with my queerness. Even as a young child I just could not see the logic of it being wrong. I can be socially anxious about anything and everything, and my low self-esteem permeates into almost every single area of my life, but I have never once believed that I was less of a person because of my sexuality. I cannot explain why.
My relationship towards my sexuality is positive. I am an example that not every queer journey is fraught with shame or struggle. This is not to dismiss other people’s struggles but to correct the misperception and projection that there is always shame involved. I have never felt like I wished I can be straight, and have always perceived queer love as a beautiful thing. Not everyone thinks their non-heteronormative sexuality as something to hide. There are many parts of myself I cannot accept, but my queerness is not something I had to accept because it was not something up for acceptance to begin with. It felt so fundamental, and right. I know I am one of the lucky ones.
Right now in Singapore we cannot legally get married but no one gives a shit if we hold hands in public. I don’t think this for granted, and I know not everyone can be safe with their true identity. This is why I believe it is important to celebrate Pride. I acknowledge that this space that I have now did not come easy: there were plenty of people who bravely stood up before me, and there are many who have lost their lives for this. I acknowledge that even if I have no qualms about being queer myself, that does not translate to actual physical safety to be who I am if I was in the wrong time and place. For many, the world is still very unsafe.
I post photos of us regularly. As of now, in the 9+ years I have been posting them no one has left hate comments or threatened to kill me. I consider myself very lucky. Maybe some people may think I am attention seeking or something but nobody bats an eyelid when heteronormative couples post photos of themselves and their kids. I partially do it because of my continuous awareness of impermanence, but partially I also believe that representation matters. I come from a time when it wasn’t that typical to see lgbtq+ couples out in the wild, when seeing a photo of a lgbtq+ couple felt like striking lottery. Again, I don’t want to take this for granted. The media still sometimes portray queer people negatively when there are tons of us just leading lives like any other human being.
For a long while now I have stopped thinking of my queerness as this separate, different thing. It is just not in my consciousness. So I have to admit that writing this is not something I would write normally, since I tend to write on stuff that has been sticky in my mind. I am writing this with deliberate intention because I don’t believe that the universe bends towards justice. Justice must be a conscious human decision, made again and again. As we can see in some areas of the world, the tremendous progress we’ve made in the past few decades is actually backsliding again. It is a continuous struggle for our humanity.
I just wish the world is such that I don’t have to write such a long essay to express my pride towards my queerness but unfortunately so much this world is still stuck in illogical thinking. I am conditioned to see the word pride as something uncomfortable, but one of the definitions of pride says, “your feelings of your own worth and respect for yourself” – I just want to reemphasise that I am proud to be queer and to be my self, in a world that seems perversely bent on making us shrink our selves. I cannot help but feel deep pity for human being sometimes, because so many of us seem to need to crush other people’s souls in order to feel better about themselves. Are they proud of themselves? That they have led lives depriving other people of the right to be and the right to love? Every one of us who have stood tall against this crushing tide of forced conformity deserves to pat ourselves on the back and call our selves proud.
I still hope to be able to marry my partner in my home country some day. Before meeting her I have always thought of marriage as unrealistic: how can a person vow to love someone else for the rest of their lives? But now I know. I don’t have to vow to love her for the rest of my life, because any alternate reality is unthinkable. There is something more powerful than love. It is the melding that occurs when two people spend a long time together. She is just part of me now.
When I was younger, the legal aspects of marriage were also meaningless. But now that I am middle-aged I see the value of being legally bound. To my abstract mind, celebrating pride publicly like this is my tiny contribution to the march towards marriage equality. Our voice matters, and this voice to express oneself: my beliefs, wishes, values – this voice is hard fought for. Even in this modern day and age, the privilege of expressing oneself is not afforded to everybody.
I hope people who are able to have a voice will cherish it. Do not take it lightly in such precarious times. That is why even till today, every opportunity to write or post a photo feels precious to me.
With this, I hope everyone on the lgbtq+ spectrum gets to celebrate Pride in their own way, that we continue to honour those that came before us, and that we will continue the march forward so those who come after will also have opportunities to celebrate love.