A gay man moved to Kentucky after a decade in the Castro: 'Now I'm in the closet politically.'

Ben Orser, 35, moved back to Louisville, Kentucky, after 10 years in San Francisco's Castro District. Ben Orser, 35, moved back to Louisville, Kentucky, after 10 years in San Francisco's Castro District. Photo: Courtesy: Ben Orser Photo: Courtesy: Ben Orser Image 1 of / 18 Caption Close A gay man moved to Kentucky after a decade in the Castro: 'Now I'm in the closet politically.' 1 / 18 Back to Gallery

As a gay teenager living in Louisville, Ky., Ben Orser would often dream about San Francisco's Castro District. There, thousands of miles west of his hometown, lay what Orser imagined to be “a giant ocean of gayness.”

At 18, his sexuality hidden from those around him, Orser decided to jump in. While friends were preparing for freshman year at the University of Kentucky or southern schools frequented by southern kids, Orser was packing up his belongings and making a break for San Francisco.

Louisville in the 1990s, Orser says, didn’t allow a gay kid the usual teenage experiences, things like having your first kiss or holding a lover’s hand.

“I’d only visited San Francisco once,” Orser said, “but I had absolute certainty that it would offer me a better way of life than the one I had in Kentucky.”

When Orser got to San Francisco, the city offered everything he’d craved. His first six months in the Castro provided what Orser thought amounted to a lifetime’s worth of adventures.

“I thought I’d done everything I would ever do, just in that time,” he said. That included coming out, which was “warmly natural” in the gay-friendly city. So too, Orser finally got to have his “firsts.”

Orser stayed in the Castro for 10 years, eventually settling into a quaint Market Street apartment with his boyfriend. Although not endlessly rosy, this period in his life was generally happy, and Orser would have stayed forever if not for fate’s intervention.

“I had to trade my coming out, my happiness, to get away from Louisville,” Orser, now 35, said. And his conscience couldn’t contend with that when, about four years ago, his brother got sick.

Orser’s brother, Alex, has Downs syndrome and chronic respiratory issues, and with his parents getting older, Orser decided to return to Louisville to help care for his little brother.

He moved into his old room in the basement of his parents' house — the same room he had left, running, 10 years earlier. This time, he wasn’t alone; Orser’s boyfriend moved south with him.

Around the time of Orser’s return, Louisville’s gay scene began to flourish, and the couple found themselves at the center of a blossoming queer scene, complete with its own unofficial district downtown. The neighborhood felt safe, as if covered by the same “protective bubble” Orser had grown accustomed to in the Castro. There were gay bars, gay coffee shops, Pride parades.

More than anything, Orser said, it was a privilege to watch as his “southern city caught up with the rest of the world.”

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Subjective perceptions aside, the South is behind the rest of the country when looked at with an essential, measurable metric. Nearly one-third of LGBT adults reside in the South, according to a study conducted by the LGBT Southern Funding Project, but the region only receives 3-4 percent of domestic LGBT funding. To put this in perspective: California receives more than $21 million in grant money for LGBTQ issues a year; Kentucky receives about $440,000. (California’s population is about nine times that of Kentucky.)

Despite the obvious funding hurdles, Aaron Angel, an LGBT activist and member of Louisville’s LGBTQ+ Community Coalition, says Louisville has become a representative southern city for the community.

Angel says the city’s rise as a southern gay refuge began, shakily, in the 1980s with Pride picnics organized by Louisville residents (back then, such gatherings had to be held outside city limits). In 1999, the city was one of the first in the South to adopt a fairness ordinance, intended to protect LGBT people from discrimination.

But within the last 5-10 years, Angel says the community has bloomed, ranking No. 11 on Gallup’s 2015 survey of U.S. states with the highest LGBT populations. Louisville has even begun drafting plans for a permanent LGBT center.

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It's been five years since Orser packed up his Market Street apartment and returned to Louisville, and his early optimism has largely faded. In that time, weighed down by his burdens, Orser developed a drug habit. His partner left because “he could never really get the feeling that this could be home.”

Then Trump got elected, and Orser says he watched as homophobia became more brazen in the city.

“Two months after the inauguration, I got my first gay bashing,” he said. “To be in the ‘most progressive southern city’ and have someone jeer at you for holding hands with a man … it felt like they had erased everything we’d built up all these years.”

Orser sees the homophobic incidents as reflective of the general climate in the U.S. “It’s finally socially acceptable for us (gay people) to be visible,” he said, but at the same time, “it’s also socially acceptable for others’ hatred to be visible.”

Angel doesn’t completely agree with Orser’s pronouncements. He says LGBT visibility in Louisville “increased long before Trump even entered the election.”

Louisville is a diverse city, politically and racially, and with that comes “the good and the bad.”

“I see us now divided more than usual on some issues,” he said. “But at the same time, I think the political climate has increased the discussion around those issues, too.”

Angel thinks those with anti-LGBT sentiments have always felt that way, though they might be more comfortable expressing such sentiments now. “If they’re ready to talk about it, maybe they’re ready to have more of a conversation,” he said. “It could lead to progress.”

But Orser is steadfast in his observations of a changed city: “Trump turned up the heat,” he said.

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Orser can’t leave political differences at the door. Most of his family members, he says, voted for Trump, including Orser’s father. The two are prone to arguments.

“He essentially voted against Medicaid,” Orser said of his father, who is blind, “which supports both his disability and my brother’s.” It also supports Orser’s trips to the clinic where he is receiving treatment for drug addiction.

Orser visits the clinic daily to pick up methadone, and he says those waiting in line strike up conversations, many of which turn political. During these jaunts, Orser says he overhears the same people benefitting from Medicaid, at that very moment, denouncing it.

“It’s hard not to get into a fight with someone who barely made it to the clinic that day and wouldn’t have had a chance to go at all if there was no government program,” he said.

He won't argue with strangers in line. “As a liberal, now I’m in the closet politically,” Orser said. But he’s less hesitant to pick fights with his father.

“Arguing with a blind person is very frustrating because they don’t see the world how everyone else sees it,” Orser said, explaining his father’s connection to the outside world is largely through Fox News.

“The television has made him so hateful, he won’t consider doing anything liberal.”

Ultimately, Orser recognizes that his father is “a good man with bad information.” He says his dream isn’t for his father to one day see his grandkids' faces, but for “his eyes to open to liberal causes.”

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Family is the reason Orser returned to Louisville, and it’s what keeps him there. Orser no longer cares for his brother full-time — his brother lives in a group care home now — but he can’t bring himself to move back to San Francisco and possibly miss time with Alex. People with Downs syndrome typically live to age 50, and Alex is 32.

“It’s hard to think about settling down in California, when I know I’d miss moments of his life,” he said.

I spoke with Orser by phone as he strolled around Louisville's gay neighborhood. By the time we hung up, Orser had outlined the two-block radius at least seven times. Seven times, he passed a street corner where a man is known to jeer at Pride parade attendees each year.

“Instead of walking these two blocks, I would love to walk all of San Francisco, sit in Dolores Park and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes,” he said.

“I’d love to return to that freedom, where there’s a thousand things to do and I’m not afraid what bar I’m stepping into or who’s behind me in line.”

Michelle Robertson is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @mrobertsonsf.