Tag Archives: photography

Adam, Writer, New York City

photo by Kevin Truong

Adam, in his own words: “My three best friends from childhood are gay. None of us lives in Sioux Falls, SD anymore—they’re in Minneapolis, DC, and Chicago—although we are each incredibly proud to have a shared history there. In the future, I’d love to write a gay version of “Now and Then,” just to laugh at all of the things that brought us together and have kept us united since. We adored Paula Abdul, and the 1996 Olympic Gymnasts—Kerri Strug was my girlfriend, obviously—and we knew every word to every Disney song ever made, yet it still took us 19-23 years to come out of the closet. I was the fourth and final.

We all waited a while to share this part of ourselves with each other and our loved ones. For myself, it took lots of mulling to let go of tradition and the singular lifestyle with which I was presented. I am so surprised when I meet people here who came out at age 15 or 16 and told their parents and friends and religious communities with little or no friction. On top of that comparison, I’m very young as a gay
man—just over two years old. So I feel far behind most others here, and with the gay community being an affluent one—I apologize for the generalization—I worry if my standards of success are being too influenced by my peers having Fire Island timeshares or bottomless brunch budgets or Equinox memberships. This city keeps its people moving forward so quickly that I feel like I am simultaneously growing
up and falling behind.

I think I did myself a favor by coming out while training for a marathon. I had a lot of time to myself, to ruminate and strategize and to be alone with my thoughts and fully love the space between my ears. And, as any runner knows, when you’re racing long distances, you aren’t racing against other people. You do not know if the person beside you is overcoming injury, running her tenth marathon or her first, if he started fifteen minutes before or after you, or whether he is meeting or falling short of his expectations. What you do know are your own expectations, your own circumstances, your own parameters for success. You are competing against past versions of yourself, past standards of excellence, and that is how you measure your achievements. By progress.

That’s how I measure my own success as a proud gay man: steady, controlled progress. Everyone in the LGBTQ community has had a personal, internal reflection on his or her identity. My three best friends and I, having started our lives together, are each benchmarking them individually, at our respective paces, in our respective places. We are making personal progress and supporting one another through it all.

The components of this progression—the contemplation, the standards of success, the frustrations and rumination of each day—are welcomed guests in my thoughts, and I hope they are also in yours. Their existence evolves the man, making him happy and making him confident, whether he is gay or straight.”

Oscar, Urban Planning Graduate Student, New York City

photo by Kevin Truong

Oscar, in his own words “Coming from a religious Latino immigrant family and going to a small high school in Washington D.C., I did not grow up knowing a lot of gay people. There were rumors that one or two of my high school teachers could have been but it wouldn’t be confirmed until long after I had gone to college and only for one of them. Not knowing or seeing any gay people and feeling unable to talk about sexuality have made my coming out an ongoing process.

I started coming out when I was 18, after I had been intimate with a guy I genuinely felt I could love and fight for. Even though I’ve known I was gay since I was a teenager, I had always been afraid of being gay because I did not think it was possible to be a part of society as a gay man of color. I felt that the only “other” identity I could claim was being Latino. There was no way I could be a gay Latino and still have the same future and opportunities my parents and I had envisioned for myself.

I know that coming out is a process, be it difficult or easy, for all LGBTQ people. However, I believe that for some LGBTQ people of color, our coming out story is not complete without referring to our culture and race. We have to not only figure out what being LGBTQ is but what it means to be a LGBTQ person of color.

As open and diverse most LGBTQ people are, I still feel invisible in many gay spaces. Whether it is because of the color of my skin, my body size, my interests or what I am wearing, I feel that there is little room for gay men of color, within that traditional gay male ideal, to be more than just their skin color or culture. However, I think that by promoting and showcasing that there are other gay men that are not white, with different interests, studying, working hard/hardly working or just living their lives proudly, we can break some of these patterns, become aware of our differences and embrace them.

This is why I decided to be a part of this project. I hope that these few words might encourage people to engage in constructive conversations about the different identities within the gay community. “

Alex, Artist/Mover, Baltimore

photo by Kevin Truong

Alex, in his own words: “Gay is a Word I occasionally use to describe myself. Sometimes the word gay connects too much to a gender/culture dynamic that seems outdated, or just not enough. I find around radical queer folks I like to say I am a gay male, where around gay men I need to assert my queerness as something reaching into gender and my every self-constructed person. I identify more as a queer person. To me gender and sexuality are units of the creature I call me, but not the only ones. Being queer, means I connect to a culture, a world, a history that is constantly trying to reinvent itself. I suppose that’s why art and dancing help. It’s always a colorful game of movement and surprise. I like the history of magic and shamanism that friends of dorothy link up to, so somtimes its more fun to tell people that I’d rather be called a Witch than a gay male.

I would say the biggest challenge is just knowing when to speak out, and when to be chill with the circumstances of the gay/queer rung on the social ladder. Self-tokenizing is often a vice of protection and safety. Both empowering and problematic, the conflict and grey fuzzy areas of being queer tend to be super tricky. Stonewall and then some happened so we can continue to push forward to new terms and ideas of how people live their lives and celebrate their sexuality. I think there is a global need to make queerness acceptable throughout the whole world. Unganda is about to unload/has been unloading a bunch of Witch hunts on gay people. The challenge here is embracing the growing freedom and privilege of being openly gay in this culture and trying to share that with the rest of the world.

Gay Baltimore is all over the place. It’s a diverse situation, small and cozy. I’ve been more drawn to the group of artists, dancers, and thinkers who indentify beyond the basic needs or race/class/gender specificity. We’re all sentient beings working through the struggles of life. Baltimore’s gay scene can be as vanilla as queer as folk gay bar, or as granola crusty as a group of gender queer kids making art in the abandoned buildings and rustic environments of charm city.

I came out to my parents when I was 14. My twin brother had come out to me the year before, and I was intimidated to come out to him immediately. I guess that evil twin high school brat vibe kicked in, and I decided to be the first one to come out. I waited till my brother went to a weekend work-camp for this Christian cult called Young Life to take advantage of their sweet foresty resources and challenge evangelist nut-jobs. A year later when he came out to them, my parents said they wished we had both come out at the same time. I never really need to come out anymore, most people either assume or don’t care either way. At the same time, we don’t live in a 100% queer-friendly world, so coming out will always be a routine of “getting to know you” rituals. I think until the world sees queerness everywhere, no one will ever be done fully coming out. I kind of cherish the quiet retreat of the closet at times. Its like my own faggy Narnia.”

THE GAY MEN PROJECT

The visual catalog of gay and queer men around the world.

Tag Archives: photography

Adam, Writer, New York City

Oscar, Urban Planning Graduate Student, New York City

Alex, Artist/Mover, Baltimore