If you love the LGBTQ you should vote out Peter King on Nov 6

I came out during my first year attending Northwestern, thanks to a now close friend. He walked straight up to me during orientation and said, "You're gay, right? Want to go to the gay-straight alliance meeting later?" Despite living as a closeted gay man for 18 years, I didn't even hesitate; for the first time ever, I freely and openly acknowledged my sexuality with another person:

"Yeah, sure. Of course."

At the end of the year, I was disappointed about heading back to Long Island for the summer. It meant I either had to go back into the closet or make the effort to come out to all of my friends. I didn’t want either, so I ended up messaging four friends: "Hey. I'm gay. I'm out now. I want to come home and still be out. But I don't want to exert the energy of coming out. Do me a favor and tell everyone." And it worked. That summer, I came home, and friends of friends of friends were coming up to me at parties to tell me how proud they were of me for being true to myself.

The only caveat was that I had chosen to keep my orientation a secret from my immediate family. My family was always socially progressive; it was just easier to live my life knowing that they kind of knew instead of sitting down one night at the dining room table and "come out" to them.

This emotional avoidance led to one of my biggest regrets: never coming out to my dad. He died in 2014 after fighting a three-year battle with cancer. "He only talked about two things: his sports car, and you. That man was really proud of you. If there's one thing I know it's that he loved you," one of his employees told me, as he brought over a box of his things from work the week after he was buried. I felt guilty: why hadn’t I shared my first crush, my first boyfriend, my first heartbreak, with my dad? I'm pretty sure he knew I was gay, but he would have loved to know I was living happily as an out gay man. I knew since the fifth grade that I was attracted to men. Why didn't I come out sooner?

In hindsight, Evanston was the perfect place to come to terms with my sexuality. I was seven hundred miles away from home and didn't know anyone within a three-state radius. It was a clean slate on which I could start fresh and I started fresh as a gay man. However, there were also cultural and political differences that came to play. Evanston, IL has been historically very friendly to the LGBTQ community, passing ordinances in the early 1990s that protected gays and lesbians from discrimination. Incumbent Peter King, in contrast, voted against legislation that would protect LI LGTBQ from discrimination as recently as 2016. Three decades later, he still can't say it's wrong to discriminate against people for their sexual orientation.

As a congressman, Peter King has actively tried to strip away rights from LGBTQ people and continues to do so. He doesn't think I should be able to marry another man. He doesn't think I'm fit to raise kids. He believes businesses should have the right to discriminate against me and he believes my employers should have a right to fire me just because I'm a man and think other men are physically attractive.

The only time he has ever referenced the LGBTQ community was immediately following the Orlando nightclub shooting, which he took as an opportunity to assert that Muslims are homophobic. He spent three decades trying to shape society so I have fewer rights and suddenly he feels he has the authority to assert who is and who is not homophobic. Peter King, if you love the LGBTQ community so much, why did you vote down every legal protection proposed in Congress to support LGBTQ rights back in 2016, the same year as the Orlando nightclub shooting?

Peter King’s voting record and his vilification (albeit indirect) of the LGBTQ community played a role in how I viewed myself growing up: different and lesser because of my sexuality. King set the tone back in the 90s that would lead to the differences in how the affluent suburbs of Evanston, IL and Massapequa, NY respond to the LGBTQ community today. While representatives of the former city was passing laws to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination, Peter King was actively expending time and energy trying to make it illegal for us to adopt children in need of loving homes. Our representative failed to create a healthier, more accepting environment; rather, he did whatever he could to stand in the way of progress.

Representative Peter King makes it more difficult for me and other Long Island LGBTQ people to accept ourselves by telling our community that we are not worthy of the same rights as cisgender heterosexuals.

If you live on Long Island and you are LGBTQ or know someone who is, then this should disappoint you. And if you're as concerned about it as I am, please help vote out King in November.