“A child born to a same-sex couple will never have to doubt if they were wanted. Our children were made with love.”
Growing up in Georgia, I dated boys in high school, imagining one day taking their last names and having their babies. It wasn’t until the winter after I graduated that I kissed a girl for the first time and realized a truth I’d been denying myself: I was sexually and romantically attracted to women. It was 1997, and I wasn’t paying a lick of attention to the news. I was ignorant of the freshly inked Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between one woman and one man—a bill cointroduced by Georgia Congressman Bob Barr and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. I delighted in dating, dinners, and dancing without a single clue that people all around me—nearly 70 percent of Americans at the time—were cheering the homophobic rhetoric, sealing my fate.
Read more of my essay for Atlanta magazine’s October 2020 print issue.
