If you’ve been out of the closet for decades and you live in a state that has marriage equality and, better yet, your city and neighborhood reflect the diversity that’s a hallmark of urban life at its most rewarding, it is easy, most of the time, to feel as respected and at ease in society as any straight person does.

Then your partner slips his hand in yours as you walk down the street and your stomach clenches just a bit. Your heart rate goes up a nervous notch or two. It’s not shame that does this. It’s not embarrassment. It’s the awareness that even in Manhattan and even in 2013, you might easily encounter someone who will cast a disgusted look your way. Or say something nasty. Or, worse, throw a punch.

According to news reports, holding hands was what got Peter Notman and Michael Felenchak attacked around midnight Tuesday night. They’d just seen a movie. They were in Chelsea, a Manhattan neighborhood known for its gay-friendliness. And they were set upon by six young men who shouted anti-gay slurs at them.



Notman and Felenchak ended up in the emergency room, where X-rays were taken, stitches done. Luckily, none of their injuries was critical and they didn’t need to be hospitalized.

This comes after the fatal shooting in Greenwich Village last May of Mark Carson, 32, by a man who first taunted him for being gay. Around the same time, there were other incidents of anti-gay violence in the borough.

As best I can tell, police responded with concern and energy. Exactly as I’d expect, most New Yorkers whose attention was drawn to this rash of violence reacted with sorrow and outrage. We live in a city—and, I hope, a country—where the vast majority of people do not believe that being gay warrants victimization. This isn’t Russia. This isn’t Uganda.

But after all the education that we Americans have had and all the relished progress we’ve made, being gay does mean feeling constrained in situations where most people aren’t, scared in circumstances that wouldn’t frighten others in the least, self-conscious when you shouldn’t have to be.

Like when you’re holding someone’s hand. It’s the sweetest, most innocent and most natural of gestures: to interlock your fingers with those of a person for whom you’re feeling a sudden rush of affection. A person you maybe love.

And yet when my partner takes my hand in public in New York City, I look at the sidewalk ahead. I note how many pedestrians are coming our way, and how quickly, and whether they’re male or female, young or old, observant or distracted.

And I sometimes take my hand back, wishing I were braver, wishing our world didn’t ask me to be.