First, I wanted to thank all the posters here for printing their lives and histories to explain how we got here. Thanks for the original question too, JITNK... Your stories are edifying and make me both cry and make me proud.
You all deserve some
My own story started in the last half of the last century. I was a boy brought up in the 60s and 70s in France and England.
As a bi-national family, then later on of the sons in a separated then divorced couple, things were sometimes tough, but I wouldn't say that my childhood and teenage years were difficult. My parents were loving, though not loving each other, and fair. The biggest blow to hit my family in the 90s was something that we didn't even dream of as we were growing up.
For many the 70s and late 60s were the years of sexual liberation (maybe of bulimia for some). My mum who never asked to be a feminist, found herself alone trying to raise 4 boys, and as she had to go to work, she also found power in being a working woman. Let's say that, to some extent, feminism was forced upon her. She devoted herself to her family and never had another male companion in her life. That was her choice. My dad, on the other hand, went through a string of female partners, never remarried... None of them stuck.
Mum was also a devout Christian, a faith in which she found strength, and no doubt some solace. She was a good Samaritan and a good friend, always welcoming strangers and people who might have been feeling down and out. Her values came from a good place and I shall always be grateful to her for the things she tried to instill in all of us. We received a good upbringing and good schooling.
Little did she know, however, that she would end up harbouring two gay boys... At first when I started having relationships (and I was one of those boys who at 21 had never been kissed, although I had many female friendships) my mother didn't see that I was well over the age to start having feelings for someone else. I could have gone on being the virgin son. Handy for her, but not realistic.
My younger brother of two years was already quite a busy guy in the love sphere and had presumably started living his life as a gay man... I was still struggling to become myself and lose my virginity. It actually wasn't hard for me to keep my virginity, I didn't strive to lose it, I believed that I'd some day find the one I loved and marry them (or form a relationship) and lose it, as was fitting, in wedlock. Foolish, I know, especially by today's standards.
The pill was available for women, people could have sex young without the fear of starting a pregnancy. It was a time in which fun could have been had, but, in my case, wasn't. I went to do my military service at 22 at a time when I officially had a girlfriend. Somehow I knew this wasn't quite right, but she and I were in love and it seemed to get me through a tiresome year of military instruction and lots of music (I played in the band). No one questioned my sexuality in the barracks. If anything, they envied me.
Attitudes towards gay men and couples, though far from perfect, started evolving in France when François Mitterand became president in 1981. A whole new generation awaited this eagerly and passionately. He did away with the death penalty, and in time things like domestic partnerships emerged as soon as the spectre of AIDS started appearing. These partnerships had to be fought for, but I didn't need one and didn't do anything particular about them. I felt totally unentitled at the time, since my girlfriend and I had broken up and I was single again.
The decade just before the 80s had been a decade of wild sex and partying, the 80s put a lid on all that and people started being interested in making money and acquiring goods, since sex was becoming taboo. Nevertheless, sex was still quite easy for most people, pregnancies could be planned, but little by little AIDS changed the way we had sex. I spent those years in total abstinence. 18 years later I woke up, but in the mean time we had lost my gay activist brother to the dark plague....
His death, and many other people's very much influenced the way we considered gay couples, gay sex, gay partnerships. The need for the PACS (a civil partnership) had to emerge so that gay couples would not be the vicitims of unfairness when one person in the couple happened to fall sick and die. People died in those days, like flies; there was no cure and when the drugs started changing things a bit, people were still dying.
My brother deceased in the early 90s, a victim of a disease that he should have known about maybe better than anyone else in the community. After all, he was a journalist and an activist. He started up the French branch of Act-UP when the governments in the States and over here were not taking responsibility for what was potentially a very big disaster. We even had a huge contaminated blood scandal which made a lot of ink run.
In the mid 90s I was just about coming to terms with my sexuality and thinking I should do something about it when my brother's illness was disclosed to us and it pushed me further back into the closet. I'd started telling my mother about me being gay when I was 21, but she didn't want to hear it. I had no idea that she'd made a lot of research to understand it all by the time my brother died. Losing him was an immense trauma on the family and, of course, especially for me. The one who had been fighting for more visibility, for more right to love, for more equality had gone, our champion for gay rights, and suddenly things seemed to be impossible once more. I'm sure you can understand what a blow it was after having lived through a golden age of hedonism such as the 70s had been... I'd not used my right to live that life but maybe it's what preserved me in the end. I might not be here had I indulged in the type of romance and sex I craved.
After 18 years of willful but also partly forced celibacy, I started realising that I had a right to love and be loved. I started writing on a gay forum (which no longer exists) and that's how I met my partner, a man slightly older than myself, who was married and had 6 children, a former Mormon. What's more he didn't live in France....
Couldn't I make things a bit easier? Well, I wouldn't want to change a thing. He's got a divorce. His children are all grown up and mostly having children of their own. (yes, I know, I'm a surrogate granddad too, lol. 9 times now.) We live in two countries but definitely ARE a couple. My friends know, my family knows, no one seems to care. My mother gave us her blessing... that was before she died, last year. She saw I was happy at last. The only thing that is making it difficult is the differences in status for partnerships in France and England and the fact that we'd like to have equal marriage rights. For a long time it seemed as if France was lagging on behind (it still is) but now the government has changed, this might happen sooner here than in Great Britain... That'll be interesting. What I think counts is for our marriage to be recognised in both countries equally, and maybe in more than those two countries, if Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands etc...don't change their laws by then.
In retrospect we owe an awful lot to the generation of gays and lesbians who lost one or two or more partners, friends, brothers and sisters, and to the families who finally saw what some members of their families were going through. It's been a hard battle (and an on-going one) but it was worth it. AIDS delved a huge hole in a generation but helped to forward the rights that we are no longer fighting for, and for those we still need to defend. Some would want us to go backwards and would like us to disappear but being gay is probably as old as mankind. It's not suddenly going to go away, even if it does go underground again. I hope we won't have to. But the fight for equality is not over yet, and even if we gain those rights for ourselves, we'd still have to free all those for whom those rights as still just a dream.
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