Coming of age in the early ’90s in a small city in southeastern Wisconsin meant growing up in a time and a place when no one said “gay.”

The author at Disney World with his uncle Ward, who died of AIDS in 1990.

Note: I wrote this piece for HuffPost four years ago, when the first national “Don’t Say Gay” law popped up in Florida, and I’m publishing it again now in June 2026 — Pride Month — because it’s still all too relevant. Since I first shared this piece, hundreds more anti-LGBTQ bills have been proposed in legislatures across the United States and many of those hundreds of bills have been approved and signed into law. Countless LGBTQ books have been banned and pulled off of library shelves. Funding for queer organizations that do life-saving work has been cut. So much new unthinkable trauma and tragedy has been unleashed upon the queer community since 2022, but, at the same time, one thing has not changed: No matter what happens, we continue to fight back. Because we refuse to be erased. Because we have been here before and we know the only way forward is standing our ground. Because we’ve seen that when we rally together against those who wish to do us harm, we win. When we tell our stories — to each other, to ourselves, to anyone who may hear them — we root ourselves here and we create the potential for others to do the same until they’re safe and ready to share their own stories. Too much of what I wrote about in this piece is still too true, but queer people have existed since the beginning of time and we aren’t going anywhere. 

Noah Michelson is the head of HuffPost Personal and the host of “D Is For Desire,” HuffPost’s love and sex podcast. He joined HuffPost in 2011 to launch and oversee the site’s first vertical dedicated to queer issues, Queer Voices, and went on to oversee all of HuffPost’s community sections before pivoting to create and run HuffPost Personal in 2018. He received his MFA in poetry from New York University and has served as a commentator for MSNBC, the BBC, Entertainment Tonight, Current TV, Fuse, SiriusXM and HuffPost Live. You can find more from him on Instagram.

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