By Fergus Tuohy
Fergus Tuohy (Medium.com)
I decided not to hang our Pride flag this year. The level of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, legislation and violence going around this country right now put a fear in me I’ve never in my life experienced. What if some psychopath shoots up our house? My husband and I just moved my mother here on hospice. What if she gets hurt?
I was 31 years old when I came out as gay. It was 2010, and the momentum towards equality was clearly building. Congress had just voted to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and a host of states were on their way to legalizing same-sex marriage. It was the safest time in history to come out, and I had little fear of being beat up or murdered. My main worry was my relationships with my family and my colleagues might suffer. But even that that proved needless.
I came out to my parents over Sunday dinner. My father, an Episcopal priest with a Tipperary brogue, immediately invoked the Bible.
“Well, it’s no secret that David and Johnathan were in a same-sex relationship. That’s King David!” he said, pounding the table with his knife and fork. He went on to list several admirable gays from history, literature, and Irish mythology, eventually ending his sermon by saying he loved me and was proud of me. “This is a cause for celebration!” he declared, raising his glass of wine.
My mother was loving and supportive too, though less vociferously, while my sister seemed genuinely excited. “When can we go out dancing?” she asked.
I shouldn’t have expected anything less from my family. My parents, both from Ireland, met in Gadsden, Alabama in 1962 when my father was appointed assistant pastor at St. James Catholic Church. My mother, then called Sister Marion Margherita, taught second grade at the parish school. Soon after my father arrived, he happened upon a Ku Klux Klan rally while driving through town. When he stopped at an intersection, a man in full regalia approached him with a donation bucket.
“I’m sorry sir. But I am not in sympathy with your cause,” my father said, before rolling up his window and driving off.
“You could have gotten yourself killed!” his pastor Jim Wathen shouted when my father later told him. “You might still get us both killed.”
The Klan had a long history of terrorizing Catholics in Gadsden, having run many out of town in the early 1900s. Threats did come in. My mother told me the nuns returned to the convent one night to find a cross burning in the yard. My father and Jim Wathen kept loaded shotguns in the rectory.
After keeping their feelings secret for several years, my parents finally told one another how each felt. They decided to marry and then faced their own sort of coming out. In 1960s/70s Ireland, nothing was more taboo than a priest and nun marrying, and their families took it hard. But their parents eventually welcomed them home.
My father could have remained a Catholic, but he refused to give up his priesthood. “I’m not the one with the problem,” he said to the hierarchy. “You should allow priests to marry.” Of course, that wasn’t going to happen, so they excommunicated him.
My parents tried to start a life back in Ireland, but no one would hire my father there. His own country rejected him, so he and Mom and my infant sister returned to Alabama, where Dad’s former parishioners welcomed them back and helped them get on their feet.
When my sister and I were kids, our parent sat us down one evening for a serious conversation. “If you are ever in trouble, do not be afraid to come to us,” they said. “We love you, no matter what. And if you happen to be gay, do not be afraid to come to us. We love you, no matter what.”
In retrospect, I see the context from which this came. This was at the height of the AIDS crisis, and my father, by then an Episcopal priest, was providing pastoral care at his urban church to dying gay men, many of whom had been disowned by their families. He was writing letters to the papers challenging local pastors who claimed the epidemic was God’s punishment on homosexuals.
But even with my parents’ sincere promise of acceptance, I wasn’t ready to come out until I was 31. Our culture gives us a great deal to fear for just being ourselves.
Thankfully, my coming out went very well at work. I had a thriving financial planning practice and was anxious about how my business partner might react. But he was incredibly encouraging, quite notably when I expressed the practical concern that some clients might take issue. “Any client that has a problem with you being gay, I don’t want in our practice,” he said.
When I told my best friend from college, a Rush Limbaugh Republican, he bear-hugged me and later declared his support for same-sex marriage. “Damnit, Fergus!” he lamented. “You’ve ruined my perfect conservative credentials!”
Over the next few years, I was heavily involved with advocacy, serving as chairman of Equality Alabama, then the state’s only statewide LGBTQ advocacy organization. Friends worried about my safety, but the only abuse I suffered were a few unkind comments below my al.com op-eds.
In 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage the law of the land, a straight acquaintance wrote to me on Facebook: “It’s over. You guys won. You ought to feel really good about that.”
Oh, the halcyon days of being gay and out! There were so many rainbows framing the profile pics of straight friends. Back then, there was so little to fear.
But that was then.
This month, the Human Rights Campaign declared a national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans, citing the onslaught of right-wing legislative efforts and the violent attacks on businesses, individuals and drag shows around the nation.
“In the wake of the passage of Florida’s discriminatory “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” bill, extremist politicians and their allies engineered an unprecedented and dangerous anti-LGBTQ+ misinformation campaign that saw discriminatory and inflammatory ‘grooming’ content surge by over 400% across social media platforms,” read an HRC press release.
There exists no credible evidence supporting claims pedophilia is greater among LGBTQ+ persons. But these cynical politicians and influencers are not actually interested in protecting children. They’re employing an old political tactic used throughout human history, where an authoritarian movement selects a vulnerable scapegoat to distract the masses from its own power grab, stoking fear and rage and setting citizens one against another. The disgusting groomer angle is simply the latest version of the Jewish blood libel, the abhorrent lie that Jews used the blood of Christian children in religious rituals. It was a calumny that led to the murder of countless European Jews by violent mobs seeking to… “protect the children.”
Here in Alabama, citizens with an understanding of this state’s history, or anyone who’s read Diane McWhorter’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Carry Me Home might recognize these tactics as variations on those orchestrated by Alabama’s industrial powers in the last century. Fearing unionization, wealthy industrialists (known locally as “Big Mules”) stoked fear and distrust between black and white workers, pitting them against one another with false rumors of black men targeting white women, all part of a calculated effort to prevent the two races from organizing to demand better wages and conditions. Lynchings, bombings, beatings and the murder of four little black girls in a Sunday school classroom were the inevitable result of this diabolical business plan.
Bring to mind the contorted, hate-filled faces of 1960s racists screaming and spitting on civil rights activists, the images we know from museums and history books. Well, in America today, we can see new versions of these on the nightly news. In the year 2023, as we suffer one mass-shooting every single day in this country, we’re seeing red-faced, spit-spewing bigots decimating cases of Bud Light with assault rifles and harassing Target employees over the store’s Pride merchandise. In America today, modern-day brownshirts are violently attacking gay bars and drag shows, while a recent protest over a California school district voting to recognize Pride month turned violent. This is why I decided not to hang the Pride flag.
One evening last June, my husband Michael and I were strolling down to 32nd Street to meet members of our church lining up to walk in the Central Alabama Pride Parade. “I don’t mean to be a downer,” he said. “But if something bad happens and we get separated, let’s meet back right here.”
I nodded, acknowledging the pragmatism of the plan while shrugging off its necessity. Things were certainly worse than they’d been, but I still wasn’t fearful for my safety. The only torment we experienced that evening was the predictable droning of a street preacher’s bullhorn warning we’d better repent or go to hell, this as we passed him led by a crucifer hoisting a tall brass cross and a Chevy Silverado displaying a sign that read, “St Andrew’s Episcopal Church Birmingham Choose Love.”
But this year, as we approached the month of June and our church announced details about the 2023 Pride parade, I thought it might be too dangerous to walk. I thought it might be too dangerous to put up that flag. I decided I wouldn’t.
On the last night in May, I helped Mom get ready for bed. As I wheeled her into her bedroom, we passed a picture of my father as a young priest, baby-faced and smiling joyfully. Tears welled in Mom’s eyes. It’d been 14 months since he died in the memory care apartment they shared.
I helped her brush her teeth and get into bed.
“You’re a darling Fergus,” she said. “How will I ever repay you?”
“Just pray for me.”
“Oh, I do,” she said. “I pray for you every day, you and Michael. I’m so happy Dad blessed your marriage. He was so open to everything. He was imitating God.”
When I woke up the next morning, I texted Michael, who was out of town, and asked him where we kept the Pride flag. By 8 am, I had it hanging from the front porch just across the steps from the U.S. flag.
Later, I had lunch with a psychologist friend and told him about the flag. He told me he was glad I overcame my fear and put it up. He said all day he listens to people worrying about things that never actually happen.
“Anyway, he said. “This is a good reason to get shot.”
This brought to my mind a line from the end of James Joyce’s short story, The Dead.
“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”
Back home, I found Mom sitting in her wheelchair reading the newspaper by the front window.
“I love that flag,” she said. “Is it for Pride month?”
“Yes,” I said. “You know, I almost didn’t put it up. I was worried someone might attack us.”
“No, no,” she whispered. “I’m so happy Dad blessed your marriage.”
“So am I.”
“Ah,” she said with a soft smile. “He was a holy man. He was always so far ahead of his time.”
Happy Pride, y’all. And Happy Father’s Day.
Writer, REALTOR®, multimedia producer, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™, Columbia Journalism School alum.Follow