Editor’s note: This essay is being published on the 10-year anniversary of the week that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled there is a constitutional right to gay marriage. The essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.
“I don’t want you to have a hard life.” Those were my mother’s words to me as we stood in the hallway of my parents’ home in Leland in 2008. At the time, I was a 20-year-old college student, home that weekend from Ole Miss.
My mother had sensed that I had been growing distant, reluctant to talk to her on the phone, and pulling away generally from my family. She knew — as mothers often know — that to become fully myself I thought I needed to leave my family behind. I thought they wouldn’t understand.
She stopped me in the hallway and asked what seemed like a simple question: “Eric, are you gay?” In the ensuing conversation, I officially came out to my mother, who like my father, brother and sister, had known all along. Though she was not surprised by the confirmed knowledge of her middle child being gay, what she said next surprised me. “I don’t want you to have a hard life.”
I recoiled from her words at that moment. I did not appreciate the link she made between me being gay and my life being harder as a result. Knowing her work in healthcare, I did not appreciate what I assumed was her subtle link between being gay and adverse health outcomes. I wanted to believe then — as I still do now — that to be gay does not immediately equate a harder life. I wasn’t naive enough to think that life wasn’t hard, but I believed in my bones that the fact of one’s sexuality shouldn’t be a primary reason for it. I believed that to be gay was no different than one’s eye color or height: an inescapable and unavoidable biological fact.
Eric Solomon Credit: Courtesy photoSince that 2008 conversation, living an “out” life seems to have gotten a bit easier as reflected in national numbers. A 2024 Gallup poll found that nearly one in 10 Americans identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community. All in all, in the 12 years that Gallup has tracked LGBTQ+ identification in the United States, the rate of self-identification has nearly tripled.
While there are various explanations for this statistical change, many queer people prior to this administration believed our lives would not be made harder by being who we are and living our lives openly and authentically.
These national numbers reverberate locally. Recent numbers indicate that there are 93,300 LGBTQ+ adults in Mississippi, around 4.1% of the state’s total population. Further, despite a history of exclusion, LGBTQ+ folks in Mississippi raise and sustain families.
In a 2022 article for Mississippi Today, Nigel Dent related how “the percentage of same-sex parents in Mississippi is higher than the nation at 25.7% in Mississippi versus 17.2% nationally.” In 2022, Mississippi had the nation’s highest rate of same-sex couples raising children, an inversion of statistical realities that often place our state at the bottom of lists. The unexpected fact that same-sex couples in Mississippi are raising families at such rates should be a banner of pride for our state.
Mississippi is not an anomaly in the South. In 2023, the Williams Institute found that 35.9% of all of those who identify as LGBT (the center’s chosen acronym), more than five million people, live in the U.S. Southeast, more than any other region in the country. Chances are most Southerners today know someone who is lesbian or gay or bisexual or transgender. Beyond those of us who are LGBTQ+ in Mississippi, many of us have brothers or sons, sisters or daughters, mothers or fathers, cousins or chosen kin, who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer.
LGBTQ+ Mississippians are woven into the fabric of many of our daily lives, contributing to our economy, our culture, our sense of place, our ideas of community, family and home. The rainbow connection we create is being felt across the state.
In Jackson, Mississippi Capital City Pride hosts year-round events covering the state’s queer history and culture and the Jack Myers house opened in 2024 as the first LGBTQIA+ shelter in Mississippi. Since 2008, Tupelo has hosted a Pride parade as does the Biloxi-based Gulf Coast Association of Pride.
College towns such as Hattiesburg (Pine Belt Pride), Oxford (Oxford Pride), and Starkville (Starkville Pride) also host annual pride events and year-round programming. I attended this year’s Oxford Pride, where hundreds marched in full technicolor despite changing political dynamics and institutional support. In Water Valley, Violet Valley Bookstore is one of the nation’s most revered LGBTQ+ independent bookstores and is annually featured in a graphic from Oprah Daily.
Across many fields and walks of life, we are shaping our home state, creating and making the lives of all Mississippians better, easier, more beautiful and fulfilling. Why would we want to listen to rhetoric and support policy that makes the lives of any group of Mississippians harder? Why would we want to make the lives of LGBTQ+ Mississippians harder? Why would you want to make your son’s or your daughter’s or your friend’s or your co-worker’s life harder? What purpose does that serve? Whose purposes does it serve?
Today politicians across the country feel emboldened to advocate to make my life and the lives of folks like me harder in this politically divisive moment. Political leaders are positioning themselves to pass legislation that would strip away rights already codified and set a foundation for further intrusion into the lives and freedoms of LGBTQ+ Americans.
The following is but a sampling of our current moment: on March 8, 2025, Donald Trump posted a crossed-out pink triangle on his Truth Social, evoking the Nazi persecution of gay men. Republican leaders in five states—Michigan, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota—have suggested the Supreme Court overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage. Idaho and North Dakota have already passed such legislation. Four additional states—Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas—have introduced legislation that would create a separate category of legal marriage called “covenant marriage,” that could only take place between a man and a woman.
On June 10, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the US, approved a resolution calling for the overturning of Obergefell as they deem it “def[ies] God’s design for marriage and family.”
Executive orders have forced the National Park Service to remove “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall monument website irrespective of any consideration of the historic facts pertaining to that site. Transgender flags are no longer allowed at Stonewall “officially,” though visitors continue to bring trans flags to leave at the site.
With the fate of Medicaid in limbo, some insurance companies now feel comfortable denying coverage for PrEP, or Pre-exposure Prophylaxis, a routine treatment that significantly lessens one’s risk of contracting HIV. With the defunding of the federal USAID and PEPFAR in the balance, access to HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention protocols has been interrupted globally.
As with any virus, HIV does not discriminate based upon gender or sexual identity, and an HIV diagnosis, while no longer fatal for most in the United States, does indeed make life more difficult for whoever it impacts.
Under the new leadership of Kristi Noem, Homeland Security has quietly moved to eliminate a ban on surveillance based on sexual orientation and gender identity leading many to speculate that the agency will now increase targeted surveillance on gender and sexual minorities.
Finally, executive orders, policy reversals and legislation targeting trans Americans are too many for one list to capture. Regarding the executive order against trans people serving in the US Military and using the pronouns of their choice in such service, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes called the policy “unadulterated animus.” Absolute hostility: a policy reversal that exists for no other reason than for one group to be hostile toward another group of fellow Americans.
Aren’t we better than this?
In Mississippi, some state officials continue to vilify groups of fellow Mississippians without regard for expertise or diligently consulting established facts on a given issue. Adding fuel to the flames of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment without any grounding in evidence, such leaders strive to make the lives of a group of fellow Mississippians harder for no other reason than political utility.
What tangible benefit is there for a straight Mississippian to tell a trans Mississippian that they don’t exist? There is none. It is the politics of cruelty, plain and simple, a refusal, as Jane Fonda stated at the SAG awards earlier this year, to “give a damn” about someone different from you.
In Mississippi, only five cities — Clarksdale, Holly Springs, Jackson, Magnolia, Rosedale — and no county have passed ordinances to protect LGBTQ+ Mississippians from discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations. If federal mandates are removed or held in the limbo of ongoing legal challenges, then, only 6% of LGBTQ+ Mississippians will be protected from discrimination under local law.
With recent rhetoric and proposed actions from federal and local governments, one can only imagine how the lives of LGBTQ+ Mississippians may be about to get harder. And to be clear, some folks within our community will be hit harder than others.
“I don’t want you to have a hard life.” Seventeen years later, I understand now where my mom was coming from. She was coming from a place of care and concern for her child. Her words were not about who her son was but who other people were. She knew in her wisdom and experience that she would not be able to control how my life would be made manifestly more difficult by the actions of others who did not see, love and know me as unconditionally as she did. She knew people feared what they could not understand and that the so-called “marginal” among us will always be our most vulnerable.
My mother has been a healthcare provider since she was 15 years old in our native Mississippi Delta. She has often repeated a mantra attributed to Hippocrates, known best to us as the author of the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm. In a medical setting, such advice is often more idealistic than practical. Doctors and nurses must often react to extraordinary situations comparing risk and benefit for a myriad of treatments. Many treatments — such as those for cancer — often cause significant short-term harm in service of hoped-for long-term healing.
But the point is that many healthcare providers like my mother operate under the basic assumption that they should not cause further harm to their patients. That to heal, one must first aim not to make the problem worse.
I’ve been thinking in the last few months of the words harm and hard in conjunction. What if we simply told our politicians and representatives not to make it harder? No matter what you do — no matter what mistakes you may make in the process — no matter what ideological system aligns with your personal values — no matter from whom comes your campaign financing — no matter what your political party — can you first promise to not make it harder for any of us?
Can that be your first guiding principle and most basic commitment to all of your constituents? It would be nice to believe that public servants get into that line of work because they already adhere to that foundational ethic.
“I don’t want you to have a hard life.” Life is hard. I know of few people from all walks of life who have not gone through hard times. But we should expect our leaders not to go out of their way to make it harder for any one of us.
We should hold our leaders accountable when they attempt to target any group of us in ways that will make life harder for that group and, by the way, do little if anything at all to benefit those of us who are not in the targeted, oft-marginalized, group.
As a native Mississippian, my life hasn’t always been easy. But who I am in my full authenticity has prepared me to weather the hard times and cherish the easy ones.
In March of 2025, I attended my cousin’s marriage in Pass Christian; there, she married her long-term boyfriend. The weekend after, my partner and I attended his cousin’s marriage in Georgia. There, his cousin married his long-term girlfriend. Two straight-marriages in two weekends. Good times. Easy times. Fun times. Family time.
When I was growing up, I never dreamed that the legal path for me to marry the man I now call my partner would be as easy as it has been since 2015, since the Obergefell ruling. As my partner and I watched our cousins walk down the aisle to meet their beloveds and commit to them to weather life’s storms, for better or for worse, I prayed that option remains viable for us, two men who by the grace of God found each other. I pray, too, that marriage remains a legal option for all couples like us well into our nation’s future. Life is so much easier when you walk it with someone you love by your side. Love should be enough.
In 2008, a few months after I officially came out to my mother in that hallway conversation, my older sister got married. The easiest conversation I ever had about being gay was with my sister. The conversation was easy because it never took place. My sister knew; she knows. And yet, she didn’t need me to go through the hard part — the difficult step — of having that conversation where I described my supposed difference in contrast to her assumed normalcy.
My sister made it easy because all that mattered to her is that I’m her younger brother. For her, that was, and is, enough. No need to make it any harder than that.
Eric Solomon, PhD, is a graduate of Emory University and the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at the University of Mississippi. He grew up in the Mississippi Delta and is a lifelong Southerner. His work has been featured in Southern Cultures, Southern Spaces, south, South Atlantic Review, Studies in the Literary Imagination, Mississippi Quarterly, the North Carolina Literary Review, among others. Solomon is an instructor of English and Southern Studies at Ole Miss.
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