Would They Have Loved Me More If I Were Straight?

There are some questions you spend years avoiding because somewhere deep down you already suspect the answer might hurt. Mine is one I have carried quietly for longer than I realised. Would my family have loved me differently if I were straight?

Friday night I was talking with my cousins Michelle and Jenny. It was one of those ordinary family conversations that begins without warning or expectation. You talk about people, memories, who is doing what, who has changed, who has not, and somewhere between one story and the next something gets said that changes the temperature of the room. They told me that members of the family do not agree with me being gay. For a moment I think I just absorbed it. I did not cry. I did not get angry. There was no dramatic reaction. I simply sat there and let the words find somewhere to land. Maybe that was because I had considered it before. Maybe, if I am truthful, some part of me had always known.

It is strange what we do when we have spent years surviving something we cannot quite name. We create explanations that hurt less. Maybe I was not excluded. Maybe everyone was busy. Maybe somebody forgot to invite me. Maybe families simply drift apart as everyone gets older and creates their own lives. Maybe I was being overly sensitive. Maybe I was imagining the distance. For years I could tell myself those things because there was comfort in uncertainty. Then Friday night happened and suddenly I found myself travelling backwards through my own life. Birthdays. Christmas. Family gatherings. Celebrations. Photographs I saw afterwards. Conversations about occasions I did not even know were happening. Those strange little moments when everybody else seems to know something except you. I started wondering how many times I had blamed circumstance for something that might actually have been rejection and that is a very different kind of pain.

When somebody dislikes you, eventually you can walk away. When strangers judge you, their opinion can become background noise. You learn to filter it out because strangers do not know the architecture of your life. Family does. Family knows the childhood version of you. They know your parents, your grandparents, your cousins, the stories that existed before you were old enough to remember them yourself. They know where the family came from. They know the people who held you before you could hold yourself. Family is supposed to be the place where you do not have to audition for love. So what happens when you discover that perhaps you have been auditioning all along and failing because of something about yourself you were never capable of changing?

I came out all those years ago knowing my life might change. I knew there could be conversations. I knew there might be judgement. I knew that some people would take time to understand. What I do not think I understood was that coming out can sometimes mean discovering who is willing to keep loving you once you stop pretending. We often talk about coming out as though it is a single brave moment. You say the words, everyone reacts, the dust settles, and life continues. But that is not how it works. You come out again and again. Every new workplace. Every new friendship. Every time somebody casually asks whether you have a wife. Every time you speak about a man you loved. Every time someone makes a comment and you notice their expression change when they realise you are gay. You spend a lifetime making tiny calculations about where it is safe to be completely honest. And apparently sometimes you are still coming out decades later to people who already knew. Except this time the revelation is not about you. It is about them.

I have spent years wondering why I sometimes feel like an observer of my own family. I can love people deeply while standing at a distance from their lives, and for a long time I could not work out why that distance seemed to grow. I wonder now whether I have been grieving something without ever giving the grief a name. Belonging. Not the dramatic kind of belonging people write speeches about. I mean the ordinary kind. An invitation. A phone call. Someone asking, Eddie, are you coming? A chair kept for you. A message asking what time you will arrive. Someone noticing when you are not there. These things sound insignificant when you have always had them. When you have lived without them, they become enormous.

Since Friday night I have found myself thinking about another version of myself. Straight Eddie. I imagine him walking into family gatherings with a girlfriend. Maybe one day she becomes his wife. Perhaps people ask when they are getting married. Maybe relatives make jokes about children. Perhaps photographs of them are shared without hesitation. Their relationship becomes something ordinary and celebrated, not something tolerated in theory while quietly disapproved of behind closed doors. And that thought breaks something in me because I cannot understand what would actually be different about that man. He would still have my face. My laugh. My memories. My family history. My ancestors. My culture. He would still be the same Torres Strait Islander and Papua New Guinean man carrying bloodlines, saltwater, memory and story within him. He would still be me. He would simply love somebody different. Would that really have made me easier to love?

These days I understand time differently. When you live in a body that constantly reminds you that life is not guaranteed, certain questions become harder to ignore. My mornings begin with medication. Some days my heart reminds me very loudly that it is struggling. Severe heart failure, atrial fibrillation, diabetes, autoimmune pancreatitis, appointments, blood tests, food choices, fatigue that does not particularly care what plans I had made for the day. There are nights when the house becomes completely quiet and I can hear my own heartbeat. Those are the nights when the things I can push aside during daylight seem to come looking for me. I think about how strange it is to fight so hard to stay alive while wondering whether some of the people whose blood I share have spent years disagreeing with the life I finally chose to live honestly.

I did not wake up one morning and decide to disappoint my family. I did not choose my sexuality as an act of rebellion. I did not sit down and calculate which version of myself would cause the most discomfort. I simply reached a point where I could no longer lie about who I was. Surely honesty should not have cost me belonging. That is the part I keep returning to, particularly because of the cultures I come from. Family matters to us. Community matters. Kinship matters. Our people survived extraordinary things because relationships, story, Country, village and family were not optional extras to life. They were life. I carry Badu Island in my identity. I carry Papua New Guinea. I carry generations of people who understood that knowing who you belonged to and where you came from was fundamental to knowing who you were. So I find myself wondering what our old people would think about someone being quietly pushed towards the edge of their own family because they are gay. Would they recognise that as culture, or would they recognise judgement that came from somewhere else and was eventually mistaken for tradition?

Sometimes cruelty is defended as tradition. Sometimes rejection gets dressed up as values. Sometimes people say they still love you but they do not agree with your lifestyle. I have always found that word strange. Lifestyle. As if being gay is comparable to deciding where to live or what sort of car to buy. My sexuality is not an outfit I can take off before attending a family gathering. It is not something I can leave at home because somebody else finds it uncomfortable. It is part of me. Loving me while wishing that part of me did not exist is a complicated definition of love.

I do not expect my family to agree with every decision I have ever made. God knows I have made enough mistakes. I am not asking anyone to abandon their beliefs or pretend they understand experiences they have never lived. But there is a difference between disagreement and exclusion. There is a difference between privately wrestling with your beliefs and allowing another person to spend years wondering why nobody calls anymore. There is a difference between having an opinion about someone and slowly teaching them that there is no longer a place for them at the table.

If members of my family eventually read this and feel uncomfortable, there is something I want them to understand. You may experience that discomfort for the few minutes it takes to read these words. I have lived with it for years. I lived it at Christmas. I lived it on birthdays. I lived it while scrolling through photographs. I lived it whenever I discovered afterwards that people had gathered and I had not known. I lived it every time I searched myself for an explanation. Did I offend somebody? Did I say something wrong? Had I become difficult to be around? Was I imagining everything? I made excuses for people because believing they were busy hurt less than believing they simply did not want me there. That is one of the cruellest things about exclusion. It leaves the excluded person trying to solve a mystery everyone else may already understand.

Michelle and Jenny did not create this wound. They simply gave me information that forced me to look at it differently. Suddenly moments I had filed away in separate parts of my memory began sitting beside one another. The gaps between invitations. The silence. The distance. The feeling of being related to everyone but not always included among them. Now there is a question attached to those memories, and I cannot seem to shake it. If I had been straight, would you have treated me differently? Would I have been invited more often? Would my relationships have been spoken about openly? Would there have been a chair for me at the table? Would my life have been easier for you to celebrate? Would I have spent fewer years wondering what was wrong with me?

Because there was never anything I could have done about being gay. There were things other people could have done about making me feel unwanted. You could have called. You could have invited me. You could have asked questions. You could have gotten to know the adult I became rather than silently deciding which parts of me you were comfortable accepting. You could have loved me loudly enough that I never had to wonder.

Perhaps the saddest part of all of this is that I still love my family. Everything would probably be simpler if I did not. Anger is uncomplicated compared with love. Love remembers birthdays. Love looks at the empty chair. Love keeps hoping someone will call. Love tells itself that maybe next Christmas will be different, maybe next birthday, maybe next gathering, maybe next time. Even when years pass. Even when pride tells you to stop caring. Even after you have learned how to protect yourself. Somewhere inside you there is still a younger version waiting to hear the words, Eddie, we want you there.

I do not know whether that invitation is coming. Maybe I have reached the point in my life where I need to stop waiting for other people to decide whether I belong. I have built a life. I have built businesses. I have built community. I have tried to create opportunities for other people. I have survived hospital rooms, frightening diagnoses and moments when my own body seemed determined to remind me just how temporary all of this can be. I have carried my culture proudly. I have carried my family name. I have carried my ancestors with me. And, apparently, I have carried this too, quietly and for much longer than I understood.

Perhaps the question is no longer whether my life would have been easier if I were straight. Perhaps the real question is why anyone who says they love me would leave me imagining an entirely different version of myself just so I can understand what acceptance might have felt like. I cannot change who I am, and after everything it took to become comfortable in my own skin, I would not want to. But I can still grieve the family life I might have experienced if everyone had simply decided that loving me mattered more than judging me.

By now, I have mastered the art of not giving a fuck about whether people are comfortable with who I am. That did not happen overnight. It came after years of questioning myself, making excuses for other people and wondering whether I needed to soften parts of who I was just to remain welcome. Eventually, something in me changed. I stopped apologising for existing in a way that made other people uncomfortable. I stopped confusing acceptance with love. And I stopped waiting for permission to belong.

So if you are family and you are reading this, I do not need you to feel sorry for me. I am not asking for an apology, an explanation or some sudden attempt to rewrite the past. I have already survived the silence, the distance and the invitations that never came. I built a life anyway. I found people who never made me wonder whether there was room for me beside them. I created my own tables, my own community and my own sense of belonging. Somewhere in all of that, I realised that being excluded says far more about the people closing the door than it ever did about the person standing outside it.

But memory has a strange way of lingering. So perhaps, after you close this page, you might remember the birthdays, the Christmases, the family gatherings and the photographs. Maybe you will remember who was there and who was not. Maybe you will remember whether my absence was ever noticed, or whether over time it simply became normal. Perhaps you will think about the younger version of me who still believed family was the one place he should never have to question whether he belonged. The one who did not yet know that years later he might discover there had been a reason for the distance all along.

That is the boy I think about now. Not because I pity him, but because I wish I could go back and tell him to stop searching himself for the problem. I would tell him that there was nothing he could have changed that would have made him more worthy of love. I would tell him that one day he would become so unapologetically himself that the approval he once craved would barely matter. He would laugh loudly, love openly, build things he was proud of and surround himself with people who never asked him to edit himself before entering the room. Most importantly, I would tell him that he was never too gay, too different or too much. He was simply looking for unconditional love in places where conditions had quietly been attached.

Perhaps that is what hurts most when I look back now. I did not lose myself. I found myself. I became exactly the man I was supposed to become. I survived things far bigger than somebody else's discomfort with my sexuality. I survived hospitals, illness, fear and moments when life itself felt frighteningly fragile. Those experiences taught me something that exclusion never could. Time is precious, and we waste an extraordinary amount of it worrying about who people are instead of simply loving them while they are still here.

And that is why I am not standing outside anyone's door anymore. I am not knocking. I am not asking when the next gathering is or wondering whether my name somehow disappeared from the invitation list again. I stopped waiting for someone else to decide whether I was family enough to be included. My life moved forward.

Still, there is one question I think will always live somewhere inside these pages.

If Eddie had been straight, would we have treated him differently?

I already know who I am. I know what I survived, what I built and who I became despite all of it. I am not carrying shame for being gay, and I refuse to carry anybody else's discomfort with it either.

So whatever the answer to that question is, it no longer belongs to me.

It belongs to the people who need to answer it.

And perhaps one day, at a birthday, a Christmas or some ordinary family gathering, someone will look around the table and notice the space where I might once have been.

Maybe then they will understand.

I was never asking anyone to approve of me.

I only wanted to be loved like I was family.

And I should never have had to ask.