Oh yeah? Back when my paternal grandmother divorced her gay husband in the 1940s, back when she herself rode under the radar even though her only friends were “Aunt Abbie and Aunt Martha, back when my sister lived with her girlfriend but we did not celebrate the engagement, I’d tend to agree with you.

Today however, I have a keen desire to know these people, many long deceased. Who were they if they hadn’t had to mask? How am I a product of their pride and shame? How can our family pass on the cool and forgive the lies that were enacted to survive the times?