Is the drive to leave home an inherent queer need? Many of us don’t feel kinship within our communities, places of birth, and sadly sometimes our own families. We venture out, often to bigger cities, to find our tribe and create our chosen family. But in doing so, do we jeopardize the very thing we crave, setting the stage for a constant search for belonging?

On my own journey to build community, I have turned to the arts, developing stories about gay men looking for their place in the world, stories about the domestic lives of men living together grappling to balance finding themselves while establishing lasting relationships. As a member of Gen X, I am part of the first generation of same-sex partnerships navigated out of the closet. I have lived my own thirty-year relationship openly from the start with few templates and little sage wisdom on how to navigate the uniqueness of a domestic partnership between two men.

There’s always a certain memoir quality to my work, documenting the phases of my life. In the feature film Tiger Orange, a small-town gay man struggles to free himself from the shadows of his recently deceased father. In my current project and first novel, No One Is Coming To Save You, one half of a content-creator couple wrestles to disentangle his co-dependency and redefine their twenty-year relationship. My work explores the grand acts of change and reinvention, because it seems that even when we find a sense of belonging, the hunt is still on.

I wonder if this chase is an inherently male trait, learned or biological. Or perhaps it is endemic to our capitalistic mindset. A cultural emphasis on youth and supersonic trend cycles seem to pressure us to constantly search for relevance. Or do we just feel the need to live the fantasy, girl? Even the word, gay, has pressure surrounding it: to be lighthearted and carefree. We are supposed to be the fabulous ones living exotic disposable income-filled lives jet-setting around the globe. Has this paradigm started to shift as our community de-centers the gay male gaze and celebrates a more inclusive queer culture? Or, as my algorithm seems to reinforce, have we become more insular struggling with the pressure to conform to a monolith culture? 

I am hopeful there is a third space, between self-sacrifice and estrangement, where we can create new models of being queer that incorporate where we came from while leaving space to grow and redefine ourselves. This is where I believe a just and healthy future resides. This is the reason I create new gay folktales.