Meditation on Transformation     People sometimes say—with the best of intentions—that gay/bi/trans folks are no different from straight people, except for their sexuality.  Well-meaning straight-but-not-narrow people say it to indicate their grasp of the fact that our commonalities are more important than our differences when it comes to our ability to get along as a society.  Well-meaning gay people say it to affirm their understanding of the gay individual’s interconnectedness with the straight society that spawns and surrounds us.     But there is a fundamental difference that profoundly affects our development as human beings.    All people challenged with gender- and sexuality-identification questions have something in common that the majority of straight society does not experience: we spend far more time in deep introspection. The biggest difference between gay people and not-gay people is that we’ve been where they are—or, more precisely, who they are.  We were all pretty much raised with the assumption that we’d become straight adults with husbands and wives and kids.  (Some of us tried that.)  We had the same foundation as all the kids who turned out straight, but we didn’t turn out straight.  And because we were raised to be what we were not, we had to look hard at what we were becoming and how we were going to live with that.       As everyone knows who’s been through it or loved someone who has, “coming out” is a process, not an event.  It can take years to answer the questions that storm through the head and heart of the individual wrestling with issues of sexual or gender identity.  The road to self-acceptance can be a painful, difficult journey for a seventeen-year-old; it can be agony for a forty-year-old whose closet is splintering and who must consider the outcome as it relates to the husband and twelve-year-old child whose lives will be forever altered by her decisions.     Every gay/bi/trans person must negotiate this treacherous ground on his own terms.  There are books and groups to help with the navigation, but a simple truth remains: for much of the journey, we walk alone, facing frightening questions which will impact the rest of our lives and the lives of all who care about us.  The difficulty of the terrain depends much on the people closest to us, but the path is never easy.  Our very survival depends upon our ability to establish and rely upon the strength of our convictions about concepts as profound as truth, love, justice, spirituality and family.  The ultimate decisions about how we’re going to live our lives are made in those timeless, uncertain hours when we are most alone with the weight of our questions.     This introspective examination of personal values is simply not necessary to the average straight person, whose perceptions of truth, love, justice, spirituality and family are largely in alignment with (or at least not in direct contradiction to) those of his own family, community and religion.  What could a straight teenager confess to a parent that could be more cataclysmic (and less understood) than “I’m gay”, or “I think I was supposed to be born a girl”?  No straight person has to think twice about whether it’s okay to hold his significant other’s hand in the mall, or about how she’ll define her partner to her boss at the Christmas party.  Straight people never have to worry that the mortal representatives of their God will oppress or condemn them.  They need never question their own alignment with the will of the Divinity they place their faith in.  They need never worry that their adult relationship (no matter how crappy or destructive) will cost them a promotion at work or cause their child to be harassed at school.  They will never have to consider whether their decision to adopt should be deleted from conversations with Grandma because she might have a heart attack if she knew.     In this, our effort to live a life meaningful and true to ourselves, gay people are different, for we must dig into the rich, dark depths of our hearts and minds for the dull gleam of truth; we must hold it up to the light and examine it carefully and decide what is real and valuable, and what is fool’s gold, deceptive and worthless. Our validation as good human beings is singularly our own.  We look within, of necessity, shaping our beliefs in the forge of our own critical thinking; if we are lucky and determined, we emerge from the fire somewhat scarred but stronger for the effort, wearing the armor of self-knowledge we have won, and carrying our convictions as our weapons against bigotry and stupidity. ###