Happy National Coming Out Day! Today, I have something very special for you. This is a poem by Andrea Gibson called First Love. When I first read it, I sobbed at its accuracy. I hope someone out there who needs to hear it sees this, and for the lucky rest, I hope it speaks to you as it did to me.

FIRST LOVE BY ANDREA GIBSON

I don’t think I ever really kissed
any boys. I think my tongue had
just been punching their tongues.

But as soon as you loved me
all my callous went away.
My hands so soft it hurt to pray.

You’d pick me up at my Catholic college
and I’d sleep for hours until we reached your house.
The first time in my life I’d ever rested,
the first time I didn’t have to play a role
I’d never really wanted to get.

That’s the medicine it is
to be finally seen by someone.
I’d crack a smile and you’d point to my chest
and say, What just broke?

I’d throw my body in the river
but you’d say my name right
and I’d become a stone that skipped.

Do you remember the first record
where we didn’t have to change
the pronouns to sing along? We’d gone
so many years without music
that knew us. Music that knew you
could arch your back and I’d have proof
that the earth was round.

Bless who we were then.
Bless who we still are.
My straight friends tease me
because all my best friends
are my ex loves,
but a wise heart told me
it’s the most tender part
of queerness—how we’ve all lost
so much family when we find people
we call family, we’ll do almost anything
to not let go. Thank goodness
for the ice storm that trapped us
in that cheap hotel where I drank an entire bottle
of something awful,
and with my fisherman’s accent
that I hadn’t yet chased away, I finally told you
I’d loved you since we were 15
playing basketball under the street lights
beside the poorest part of the sea.

The ice storm froze the world outside
into a photograph of the past
while I kneeled down and kissed
my future onto your kneecaps.

Two decades talking to Jesus.
That was the first time
I heard him talk back.

Months later, church bells ringing
through my dorm room, I wrote my senior thesis
about you and no one knew
how hard I was praying
to stop hiding myself in metaphor,
to be brave enough to carve the truth
into the chapel door.

Only you can imagine
how much time I spent
picking out my outfit the night
you took me to my first queer bar
in Portland, Maine––the biggest city
I’d ever walked through. I was so excited
and so scared that we’d be spotted,
or killed, on our way inside,
we sat in the parking lot
for over an hour till I changed my mind
and you drove me home,
mascara pouring down
my brand new boy shirt.

I couldn’t
have guessed there’d ever come a time
like the winter we traveled to Blue Hill
to visit your mother.

Asleep when we arrived after midnight,
she’d lit our room with candles and rested
a joint in the center of the bed.

Neither of us were any good at smoking
but we pulled her welcome into our lungs
like it was one hundred years of oxygen.

Up until then we didn’t know
anyone in the world would celebrate us
wiping the steam from the glass
to see each other blushing
in the same bathroom mirror in the morning.

I was thinking about that a few months ago
when I was invited back to my catholic college
to read my poems for the first time.

You, in the front row,
near the nuns and the school president
and the teacher who had given me an A
on the manuscript
I had been too terrified to write your name in.

Mandy, I know so much has not gotten easier.
I know so much has not gotten better, but
that moment knocked the wind out of me––Time
finally being the kind of father we all deserve.

The world turning its porch light on for us.
It was so bright
I could feel the freckles on my 15-year-old face
warming in its glow.

I could feel hope
traveling backward to find us,
to whisper into our chests,
There will be music for you one day.

There is so much more to say about Andrea Gibson (including the fact that she has been remarkably generous in sharing her very personal struggles with ovarian cancer), but I’ll save that all for another day. You can follow the luminous Andrea Gibson on her website and on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.