Be Proud of How God Made You
For national LGBTQ Pride Month, we bring you a Southern novelist’s story of coming out.
No one’s story is complete if it doesn’t explore our relationships with the ones who raised them right. Or failed to, depending on your situation.
I’ve been thinking about that because this month is Pride Month. As a nation, this is the 24th year we’ve celebrated this commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. President Bill Clinton issued the first executive order declaring June as Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, and ten years later, President Barack Obama changed the name to make it more inclusive: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Pride Month. Six years after that, the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned same-sex marriage in the Obergefell v Hodges case.
Our brothers and sisters and others in the LGBTQ+ community have made great strides since then, but the reality is that far too many of them were condemned by the ones who raised them, and even kicked out or abandoned. In my commentary for Georgia Public Broadcasting last week, I pointed out that the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that provides services for LGBTQ young people, did a study in 2021. It showed that twenty-eight percent of LGBTQ youth have been homeless or experienced unstable housing and fourteen percent of queer young people reported that their parents had kicked them out or abandoned them because they were gay or bisexual or transgender.
Everyone who has come out of the closet to their parents has a different story. This week, we bring you one from Jonathan Odell, a Mississippi-born novelist who came out to his parents a long time ago—back in the 1980s. They accepted him from the get-go—or, at least, they thought they did.
We have a family story of a different sort from Atlanta writer Dee Thompson about all she inherited from Cordelia Thompson, the grandmother she never knew from Hephzibah, Georgia. And because it’s officially peach season, cocktail writer Mary Ann Anderson offers you a tipple called the Georgia Sunset.
Next week, we will take a break from publishing for Independence Day. We'll be back with new stories on July 9.
Y’all love one another. And don’t forget that y’all does mean all. Remember the ones who have been abandoned or faced cruelty because of how God made them. Help fight the hundreds of pieces of anti-LGBTQ legislation that are working their way through state legislatures all over the nation and right here in the South.
And a note to all of you: next week, we will take a break from publishing for Independence Day. We'll be back with new stories on July 9.
Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.