Queerness in Death and Memory

This article will be a little more personal than usual. This article will discuss aspects of queerness and queer identities, including the hardships and hatred endured by the lgbt community. It will also touch on how the queer community is both tied to death and lost in it.

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Today I went to the funeral of a close family friend. I had grown up with him, visiting the large house he lived in and playing in the boxwoods. It was a historical estate that came from old Southern money. I had grown up visiting him, John, at that house where he lived with another man, Johnny. They loved to host lavish events and parties. Every inch of the house was decorated with historical art and articles, every room well decorated with posh furniture and crystal lighting; the house was eclectic, but sophisticatedly and beautifully so.

When I was growing up, my parents never really talked about queerness. My father was against it but held his tongue in public, and my mother would never shun someone simply because they were gay, but she had told me once that it was not a lifestyle she would wish for me. They never introduced me to queerness. They never even really told me that these old gentlemen we visited, John and Johnny, were partners. In my childish mind I had always just assumed that they were best friends and that was why they lived together. It took far too long for it to occur to me that they might have been gay, and even longer for me to actually ask my mother and get her to confirm it.

By the time I knew they were partners, Johnny had already passed away. He died when I was nine. My parents didn't take me or my sister to the funeral. Now that I was older and figuring out my own queer identity, I felt guilty that I had remembered Johnny incorrectly. I had not remembered him as the kind, dashing gay man that he was. There was so much of his life and identity that my parents had taken from me, and that I had inadvertently erased from memory. It hurt to know that if my parents had been a little more open, I could have had queers as important figures in my life. I might have been able to figure my own identity out sooner and smoother, I could have had mentors and confidants to seek advice from, I could have had an example of old queers being happy.

I see so few of them. Old happy queers.

So many members of the lgbt community have been taken by hate crimes, thousands taken by the AIDS crisis; and those are the times that John and Johnny lived through. They lived through some of the dakest and most revolutionary moments in queer history and came out fighting. They were proof that queers could live happy lives and die of old age.

Even though I know they were happy, these modern times still offered its challenges for the lgbt community. John and Johnny have gone but the fight for their community continues on. It had been so easy for my parents to ignore the fact that they were gay, I worried that it might have been easy for others to ignore it too.

But when we got to that grand house in the hills where Johnny had been buried over a decade before, I saw so many other queers of different ages. All of them older than me, I realized, but younger than John and Johnny. The two of them had been able to touch the lives of multiple generations of the lgbt community. That realization alone made me tear up.

John was being buried on the property right next to his life partner. The two of them get to rest together by the house they shared, facing the sunset. Eulogies were given by close friends of John who had helped take care of him in his old age. It was clear that the lives of these gay men had been incredibly impacted by the presence of John and Johnny in their lives. A large part of me envied them the experience. But one of them told a story about a time he had stayed the night in John's house while taking care of him, and said that John often talked in his sleep. There was one night-time quote that stuck with him more than the others; there was a night John said softly in his sleep, "All's well that ends well. Couldn't be happier."

I keep thinking about those words. And I was thinking about them after the service today, when I looked at the fresh dirt of John's grave next to the embedded tombstone that bore Johnny's name. I was glad it ended well for them. They shared a good life, guided and cherished those around them, got to openly be themselves and be buried as themselves. I know things would not be quite the same for me. I know if I died, my parents would bury me with a name that wasn't mine, in clothes I didn't wear. I wouldn't get to die and be remembered as me. My parents would bury me as a stranger. I think about how easy it would be for them to ignore my queerness even after I'm gone. They would say nothing about it to anyone, and no one would know I lived life as a queer, and my true memory would be erased.

I wonder often, and especially today, how many lgbt identities were lost in death. How many people never got to come out before they died? How many people have their memories tarnished and erased after they've died and can no longer stand up for themselves? How many never even got proper graves at all?

As I mourn the loss of John and Johnny, I also mourn the queers that didn't get the jouyous lives they did. The feeling fuels a fire deep within me. I have to live my queer life as best and as openly as I can-- both to honour the forgotten queers that came before me, and to become the representation that John and Johnny were to me.