On Being the Only Queer Person in My Small Town (For Now)

By Sam Okonkwo, community contributor

The town I grew up in has one traffic light, two churches, and a diner that has been open since before my parents were born. It is, by almost every measure, a lovely place. The people are good. The summers are long. Everyone knows everyone, which is sometimes comforting and sometimes the exact problem I am describing in this essay.

I have known I was queer since I was about twelve. I am now 27. The years between those two facts contain a lot of material.

The Arithmetic of Invisibility

When you’re the only queer person in a small town, you do a lot of math. You calculate which situations are safe and which aren’t. You calculate how much of yourself to show and to whom. You develop a very specific skill for reading rooms that probably serves me well in professional settings now and cost me a lot in personal ones then.

I wasn’t closeted in the classic sense. I didn’t deny it if someone asked. Nobody asked. The question didn’t seem to exist in the vocabulary of my town.

I existed in a kind of gray zone: not hidden, not seen. The loneliness of that is hard to explain. It’s not dramatic. It’s just quiet. It’s a quiet that follows you everywhere.

The Internet Was Everything

I need to say this clearly, because I think it gets overlooked: the internet saved me. Specifically, the queer corners of it. Tumblr at first. Then Twitter. Then communities I found specifically because I was looking for people like me.

When I was 14, I found a forum for queer teenagers. I never posted. I just read. For two years, I just read. It was enough to know those people existed. It was enough to know I wasn’t alone in my specific way of being alone.

I say this to anyone in a similar situation now: the community online is real. It does not replace in-person connection but it will hold you until you can get there.

Leaving and Coming Back

I left for university at 18. I came out, properly and fully, within the first three weeks. It felt like putting down something I had been carrying for so long I’d forgotten it wasn’t part of my body.

University gave me the community I’d been starved of. I found my people. I dated. I made mistakes. I made friends I still have. I became, gradually, someone I recognised.

I went home for Christmas that year. I was terrified. It was fine. My mum had already guessed. My dad took a week and then was okay. My younger brother, who was 15 at the time, pulled me aside and said, “I think I might be like you.”

We have talked every week since.

The “For Now” Part

I still visit home. It’s still small. There still isn’t really a queer community there in any visible sense. But things have shifted in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

My brother is out now, at his school, with a small group of friends who look out for each other. A teacher at the high school started a GSA last year, which made the local paper and caused a brief controversy and then settled down. A woman who went to school with my mum recently came out at 55 and apparently the diner was very supportive about it.

Small towns are not monolithic. They contain people. People change. The ones who were always there but invisible start to appear when the conditions shift even a little.

I was not the only one. I was just the only one who was visible at the time. There’s a difference, and it matters. The “for now” in my title is not wishful thinking. I have seen it become true, slowly and then all at once.

If you’re reading this from somewhere small and quiet: I was there too. It’s not forever.