Be Proud; You Deserve It

Guest Opinion

By Aaron Wright | June 1, 2024

In the 12 years since I became an adult, my professional life has spanned from running a middle school summer camp to leading wilderness expeditions to being a first responder—and dozens of other jobs in between. I’ve fallen in and out of countless hobbies, relationships, experiences, and lifestyles. In 12 years, I’ve met people from every continent and many cultures; people who want to live the same way I do, and folks who live very differently from me.

It feels safe to say at this point in my life that I’ve met a pretty representative cross-section of humanity. The thing I’ve found is that we have so much more in common if we are willing to take the time to be respectfully inquisitive of how other people’s reality has been created by the experiences they’ve lived through.

To boil it down in another way: People are afraid of the unknown, and similarly, people want to be in control of the things that they fear. Sometimes people are so driven by the urge to control what they fear that they resort to irrational or harmful ways of maintaining that control. Given that, the most assured way of controlling your fear is to become familiar with the unknowns in your life. To be respectfully inquisitive, if you will.

That, of course, requires people in your life to believe that your inquiry is genuine and that your respectfulness is authentic. In my experience, when people feel you’re open minded and interested in their life experiences, they are more than willing to let you know more about all of the little joys and trials that have made up their lifetime of experiences.

Twelve years ago, I did not personally know even one openly gay person. In those first 18 years, I knew gay people existed. I knew that the biopic about Harvey Milk got great reviews. I knew gay people were unmentionable in my social circles as a middle schooler, unless as the butt of a hurtful comment. “Gay” was an entirely unknown thing to me, and I was afraid of it. Especially because I knew that “gay” was what I was, and I had known it all my life.

Discovering how my identity fit into other people’s experience of the world was a tricky journey. Learning to love the person I became was even more difficult, but worth it. If you’re still on that journey, let me reassure you that it gets better. If you’re thinking about starting that journey, you’ve got the right idea. Being yourself and loving that self is so rewarding, and you deserve it.

I’ve had a lot of open and honest conversations about being gay with thousands of people, both in individual settings and in front of crowds of people. I’ve been so open and honest because I want people to be familiar with a lifestyle they’ve maybe never understood for any number of reasons. I’ve been the only gay person that some people have ever spent any significant amount of time with. When their kids ask them what “gay” means, they will explain me, and who I was when they knew me. And maybe that means another kid doesn’t have to go 18 years being afraid of themselves like I was.

Sometimes it feels like a big responsibility, to be the only example of a vastly diverse community of people for someone. But it is important to me that people have a real-life example of what a gay person is and that they can see that we’re just like everyone else.

I so wish I had gotten the chance to know a gay person when I was young to prove that I could be gay without having to squeeze myself into some box that I was never going to fit into. It certainly would have saved me a lot of time, sanity, and heartbreak. I wish I had known a gay person who liked video games and could live in the wilderness for weeks without a real shower, or who liked to do drag, or had been the lead in a musical. Because I’ve been all of those people.

But I didn’t know anyone like that. So I became the only version of a gay person that I had ever known: myself. Now, I show up as myself everyday so that young people can see some part of themselves reflected in someone who made it through the fear of the unknown. Someone who is happy, healthy, confident, and most of all, PROUD.

Aaron Wright is on the board of Up North Pride and a lifelong advocate for inclusive and positive communities. He is a first responder in Grand Traverse County and resides with his husband in the East Bay region of the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabek people.