When Cameron Kasky hit “send” on a tweet coming out as queer, he felt as if he were finally reclaiming control of his life.
“It’s not that I felt seen for the first time because I’ve been radically seen for a very long time,” he tells them. of the September 13 post. “But I feel like I am realizing myself in a way that I never even believed [was possible].”
In a statement tweeted to his 390,000 followers, Kasky opened up about what he called his “journey to self-acceptance,” one which ultimately led to the realization that he was not straight. What kept the 20-year-old activist from coming out sooner, he said at the time, was the “security” that heterosexuality provides: the bliss of invisibility he didn’t get to enjoy during his teen years.
“I wanted to be straight for so long,” he wrote, adding that heterosexuality would allow him to “fit in with everybody else, at least in one way.”
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What made Kasky’s desire to belong all the more potent was the unique way in which he came of age. When he was just 17 years old, a gunman opened fire on Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February 2018, with the first bullets ringing out just as he was leaving drama class. Seventeen people were killed during the shooting, making it the deadliest act of violence at a school campus since the massacre at Columbine High School 19 years earlier.
Kasky, who now attends Columbia University in New York City, co-founded the activist group Never Again MSD with other survivors of the shooting soon after and became a leading figure in the national conversation around gun reform. Never Again MSD’s efforts led to the March for Our Lives in March 2018, in which thousands of protesters called on Congress to pass common sense regulations like instituting universal background checks, closing the gun show loophole, and banning assault weapons. Each of these policies are supported by the majority of Americans.
Looking back, Kasky likens the experience to being raised in public. Because his formative years were spent attending State of the Union addresses and pressing Florida Senator Marco Rubio on whether he will accept donations from the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the future, having so many eyes on him at all times made it difficult for Kasky to define his life through his own lens.
“My entire life was put on television,” he says over the phone. “My trauma and pain were televised for America to consume like entertainment. Because of the experience of my trauma being used as media fodder, I really have had a hard time establishing a way to see myself because it’s always about how everybody else sees me.”
The experience of being locked down in COVID-19 quarantine, in which he was alone with his thoughts, helped Kasky realize that it was time to reassert parts of himself that he had long suppressed. Even before the attack on Marjory Stoneman Douglas, he learned far too early that queer people are forced to thrive under the shadow of violence. Kasky says the Pulse nightclub shooting, which took place just 19 months earlier, “scared the little queer boy” in him and forced him to ask a horrific yet all-too-real question: “If I embrace this side of me, are they going to kill me?”
“It was a horrifying reminder that embracing yourself can get you killed in this country,” he says, referencing the elevated rates of hate-motivated violence against LGBTQ+ people, particularly trans women. “In America, where anyone can buy a military gun, nobody's safe, but there is a unique and evil and horrifying threat toward queer people.”
Coming out is helping him to express that voice, which he is using not only to redefine his narrative but also push back against the toxic way in which men who identify on the bisexual spectrum are often treated. His coming out statement took particular aim at LGBTQ+ people who have told him that “bisexuality is just a stepping stone” to identifying as gay. When Kasky has brought up the possibility of being demisexual, in which an emotional bond is a prerequisite for attraction, he says that “white gay men” have laughed at him.
Kasky says that what makes these kinds of remarks particularly “cruel” is that they could prevent others who identify similarly from coming out, in fear of being dismissed or erased. A 2019 report from Pew Research found that bisexuals, despite comprising the largest segment of the LGBTQ+ community, are the least likely to be out to friends, family members, and coworkers.
“Bisexual men are told they’re just gay but afraid to admit it and bisexual women are told they’re straight and having a little fun,” Kasky wrote in September. “We need this to change forever.”
In conversation, Kasky credits the LGBTQ+ people in his life who have offered him space to exist as his full, unvarnished self and hopes to see others provide that same resource. Instead of gatekeeping queerness, he says that he particularly wants to see white, gay men “building bridges” for others to figure themselves out and better offer them support on their journeys. “You don’t have to be straight or gay,” he says. “You can be anything.”
At this exact moment in his own journey, Kasky doesn’t personally know how he defines, and he isn’t sure if he ever will know. He says that he is learning to be OK with that.
“Maybe one day I’ll say I’m bisexual,” he says. “Maybe one day I’ll say I’m gay. But the best thing I’ve been able to do for myself — and the joy that I wish could be shared with as many people as possible — is that I look at the uncertainty surrounding sexuality now as a beautiful thing, not something to fear. I look at the ambiguity as a world of joy, not as the hell that I once thought it was.”
“I don’t see this path very clearly, but I love that I’m on it,” Kasky adds. “I’m so happy that I’ve been able to embrace that.”
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