He Comes Out at 90 and Made The News But Why? The Media was Glad He Could Do No Damage
"Ninety-year-old Kenneth Felts has just come out as gay.
The Colorado resident used his lockdown time to write his memoirs, which brought back old memories.
So Kenneth opened up to his daughter Rebecca about his first love, Phillip - 25 years after she told him she was gay.”
Sweet is it not? It is not. He "feels happy" he says and "now he is got freedom to wear any shirt and to color hair he wants to even blue”. The thing is he always had those freedoms. There are so many changes the LGBTQ community has gone through even in the past 30 years. How did these changes come to be? Not naturally nor easily but by fighting.
The first tough fight a gay man or woman faces is coming out. This is when the person opens the door to his/her heart and says don’t have to hide like an animal. I am a human being and I am who I am.
From there on, the fighting for all our lives commences. It is not a fight with weapons and at the very beginning is a a silent war until someone says the gay joke, challenges us of who we are and we have to come out again. Something this gentleman would probably never will experience and is the one we have to come out many times.If it took him 90 years and only because his niece came out first, he is got no time for the second one unless he is going for the second century. We don’t carry a sign on our heads saying we are gay so when the opportunity comes we have to verbalize it by saying it or coming to the defense of haters or homophobic or both.
I don’t wish to be disrespectful, but in a war sometimes feelings might get hurt and I want to make sure to those younger gays/lesbians that have not come out yet, 90 years is not acceptable. Why? Because they will be missing most of their lives to live in freedom and honesty to themselves. The worse experience a human being can have is wanting to become an airline pilot when he had an accident and became paraplegic. At the end of our lives the worse thing is to wonder is how it would have been? The media loved that story, which gave me a headache. They love it because wouldn’t they would like to see history repeat it self in which people never came out and only when they were pretty old because saying was “What can they do now?”
We are not given a plan of action to fight for ourselves and our community but our hearts and the way we feel. Wether we have a BA or no A’s in school it has nothing to do with coming out. Because coming out is being ourselves, just like when we were infants. We did what we needed to do without asking permission from onlookers or anyone else.
Once when I was around 4 years old I followed my mom to the car service full of other passengers. The thing was I had not pants on and no undies. My mom thought I could put things together in my head like an adult and ask my sister to take my pants off and put me to bed for nap. She figures I would not follow her (naked) if I woke up while she waited for the car. Wrong! Yes I woke up when didn’t hear my mom’s voice but I ran until I found her getting inside the car. No pants, no problem. I did feel a little uncomfortable for the ladies inside the car saying I should not be showing my Wewe. But I just found a nice place around my mom’s skirt to the town we went and to the children Dept. to get me pants.
Being gay is like me as a child. I was doing things that were ‘me' without shame because I was not fighting or doing the things I was already taught I could not do. I was never taught not to get inside a car with strangers and no pants on. My mom was getting on, then it was safe!
We fight this fight by setting the clock and the world on the correct time. What time is it? Our time and time we change the world against ignorance and hatred of a community that is no difference than any other community. We might be different on the eyes of others but not on our eyes. We do what is natural to us, what we most do or we loose the chance of being human in those 90 years or so, we will be on this earth. I am glad the gentlemen feels good, that is because he is being honest not with his family but with himself. He lost 90 years and the opportunity to be part of our history we turned the clock around and said this is our time too and no one is going to rob me of it.
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