Nothing can give one the truest sense of what it means to be an American, then to live through being marginalized by your fellow citizens, forming close-knit subcultures and communities, being overrun by a plague and the associated stigmas, and then finding the strength and fortitude to overcome...all within my lifetime.
I’ve lived long enough to be a victim, a survivor, and now a witness. I’ve lived through the silence of a country that let men like me die during the AIDS crisis while calling it divine punishment. I’ve seen religious leaders turn pulpits into weapons and shame into policy. And yet—here we are. Still standing. Still building. Still loving.
In hindsight, I think that’s why I’m doing the work of hospitality. To call back the country’s moral compass from those who retreated behind the thin veneer of religious justification. To remind America who it really is: not a land of conformity cloaked in sanctimony, but a place of wild, hard-fought liberty carved by the very people it once tried to silence.
We—queer folk—have carried more than just rainbow flags. We’ve carried the burden of being this nation’s scapegoat and, somehow, its conscience. Maybe, karmically, it was always meant to be that way: that us Gays would burn off society’s excess hate, transforming from the meek to the messengers, from the whispered secret to the voice that can no longer be ignored.
And yet, the struggle is not past tense. It’s ongoing. I’ve seen the cruelty that cynicism cloaked in Christian righteousness can deliver. I’ve felt it from neighbors who show up online to "correct" my lived experience with Bible quotes. They pretend they’re offering truth, but what they really seek is dominance—a fragile echo chamber where their beliefs never get challenged.
But, they find out that when you can’t be civil, you don’t get a seat at my table. After fair warnings, they get the wake-up call by being exiled from engagement. Community isn’t owed—it’s earned.
Others get such a wake-up call through devastation. I don’t rejoice in that. But I do recognize the pattern. Red states stripped their own safety nets in the name of small government and bootstrap religion. Now they drown in floods with no warning, no support, and no infrastructure. That’s not karma—that’s the inevitable result of policies rooted in punishment, not community.
A powerful reminder came to me through The Red Hand Files, where someone asked: Do you still believe in us? The answer cut through my cynicism like lightning:
“Cynicism is not a neutral position. It is infectious and destructive. Hopefulness, on the other hand, is hard-earned. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.”
Hope is not naïve. It’s radical. It demands something of us. And I still believe in it—because I’ve lived it. I’ve lived through the AIDS devastation that taught me the preciousness of life. I’ve watched people grow, evolve, and surprise themselves with compassion they didn’t know they had.
To my Christian friends: I hear your defense that you’ve “come a long way.” Maybe some of you have. But there’s still much more work to do. Because the “average Christian,” the quiet one who mutters veiled insults, or compliments laced with ignorance, while touring our ranch, still carries the hubris of assumed moral superiority.
When they say things like, “Wow, there are no women here, yet it’s so clean?” or “I didn’t think gay guys could run a homestead,” it’s not cute—it’s cutting. Even when cloaked as curiosity, your worldview seeps out, and we do our best to diplomatically correct such statements of ego.
But don’t think we don’t notice. And don’t think we’re staying silent.
We are not more afraid of Sharia law than we are of Christian nationalism. We know where the real threat comes from—it’s not from across oceans, but across pews and policy meetings. We’ve felt your judgments physically, spiritually, and politically. We will not let your god sit at our government’s table.
Is this biased? Absolutely. But that bias comes from personal experience. If it makes you uncomfortable, good. Maybe it’s time to stop defending and start doing the work of changing that narrative.
The Statue of Liberty doesn’t just stand for the religious. It stands for the tired, the poor, the queer, the exiled. And we’re lifting our lamps now, too. We will continue to hold the door open. We will continue to connect Community with our hospitality. We will continue to hold Hope for the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
