Marched with my brother

It has been something I have wanted to do for the last fifteen years. March with my brother in a pride parade. My brother was gay our whole lives. My earliest memories of him would have been when he was about eight and I was two and I knew then. I can’t really explain it, but, I think it is about more than who you are intimate with. 

He never really came out to our family. Growing up in the Bible Belt in the ‘80s and ‘90s it was just not something you did. You were not ‘out and proud.’ You stayed in the closet and hid, hoping you didn’t get beaten to death.


Since he was six years older than me we never really got to go to school together. Still, everyone compared us to each other. I think it was the way we interacted that people noticed, but to be honest the connection ran far deeper. We just understood each other, and that was something neither of us found often.


Growing up, I now realize that he often played the role of ‘protector’ for me, and maybe this is why I wanted to protect him back when I got big enough. When Matthew Lynch was beaten to death the anxiety of his situation became real and scary to me.


My brother also struggled with drugs and alcohol since he was a teenager. It was not a journey that was easy to watch, and it sadly did not have a happy ending. He never really stayed ‘clean,’ and the downward spiral would continue until he hit bottom, then he’d get a tunneling device and start digging. 


Then he got AIDS. He didn’t tell us for a while, but eventually he did. He also was asking to come live with me. At the time one of my kids was a baby, and his smoking was not something my asthmatic lungs could handle. So in that conversation I pitched to him instead ‘let’s march in a parade together one day.’

One year we even started planning for it, but something fell apart and we had to cancel. I meant to go on my own, to support him, but before I could he died. It was May of 2019 and the parade was a few months after, and I just couldn’t. 

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