Identity is not a Contract: Joshua De La Luz on intersectionality, love, and self-forgiveness

CHICAGO, ILL. - By Michael Oboza, Special to GoPride.com

During my final year as a volunteer photojournalist, I made it my intention to help acknowledge extraordinary people in our intersectional LGBTQ community. Thank you, Joshua De La Luz, for your time and for sharing the wisdom of living in your own truth that only you can.

Coming out means different things to different people, and for Joshua De La Luz, the earliest understanding of feeling different emerged against a backdrop of deep cultural and religious isolation.

"Some of my earliest memories of knowing I was different go back to childhood. My family moved to Allen, Texas, when I was about to start fifth grade," De La Luz recalls. "Allen then was nothing like the diverse Dallas suburb it is today. It was a small, overwhelmingly white, conservative, Southern Baptist town. I was Puerto Rican, and I had hit puberty very early and was becoming increasingly aware that I was attracted to boys."

That growing self-awareness was complicated by high spiritual stakes.

"Being raised Jehovah's Witness added another dimension to my fear," he explains. "This wasn't simply an environment where homosexuality was considered undesirable. I grew up believing that acting on those feelings could cost me my family, my religious community, my relationship with God, and ultimately my hope for everlasting life. When you're a child, those aren't abstract theological consequences. That's your entire universe."

Faced with those overwhelming pressures, De La Luz learned to divide his life into separate, guarded spaces.

"So I became very good at compartmentalizing," he says. "I learned how to be the person different environments expected me to be. I could love my family genuinely while hiding enormous pieces of myself from them. I could participate in a religion while knowing there were thoughts and feelings inside me that couldn't safely be spoken. I could form relationships while carrying this underlying belief that some essential part of me had to remain controlled, hidden, or overcome."

That protective armor, however, carried an invisible weight.

"For a long time, I thought courage meant successfully suppressing those parts of myself. Eventually, I learned that suppression has a cost," De La Luz reflects. "Eventually, I had to confront the fact that trying to live a life that was acceptable to everyone else wasn't making me whole."

Looking back on those formative years, De La Luz views his younger self with deep empathy rather than criticism.

"Looking back, I don't think the person I was before coming out was fake. That's important to me," he emphasizes. "He was surviving with the tools he had. His love was real. His relationships were real. His faith was real. His fear was also real. He simply hadn't yet given himself permission to discover who he might become if fear stopped making his decisions for him."

For many people, coming out creates the space to begin an entirely new journey. Yet stepping into a single identity label can sometimes present its own limitations.

"For a long time, 'gay' was enormously liberating. It gave a name to something I had spent years fearing. It gave me community. It allowed me to stop treating my attraction to men as something that needed to be explained away," De La Luz says. "Nonetheless, eventually I realized something uncomfortable: I had escaped one box and, without meaning to, climbed into another one. 'Gay' described an enormous part of me, but not all of me."

Allowing himself to explore that realization meant embracing a broader personal spectrum.

"Over time I became comfortable acknowledging that my sexuality exists farther along the bisexual spectrum than I had previously allowed myself to recognize," he explains. "If we're using the old Kinsey scale, I'm probably about a 4. I might call myself bisexual. I might say homoflexible. More often these days, 'queer' feels wonderfully uncomplicated. It gives me room to be myself without having to submit supporting documentation."

That journey of self-discovery eventually expanded into how he approached love, partnership, and connection.

"After my divorce and through subsequent relationships, I began confronting another assumption I had inherited: that loving one person should somehow diminish my capacity to love another," De La Luz notes. "Discovering polyamory wasn't primarily about sex for me. It was about finally recognizing that I experience love as non-zero-sum. Loving another person doesn't inherently subtract something from someone I already love. Different relationships can occupy different spaces, meet different needs, and develop their own identities without one having to invalidate another."

Navigating non-monogamy brought its own rigorous personal lessons and demands for emotional honesty.

"Polyamory has forced me to confront jealousy, insecurity, attachment, trust, communication, and my own expectations in ways I never had to before," he says. "It has also forced me to recognize my own mistakes. I've learned that being transparent doesn't automatically mean I'm communicating well. Having good intentions doesn't mean my behavior can't hurt someone. Being comfortable with polyamory doesn't mean everyone I love will experience it the way I do."

Building a life that is genuinely your own requires moving forward without regret, reshaping how you respond to tension between your inner self and the expectations of the world.

"The greatest difference between my life before and after coming out happened while trying to build relationships consistent with the person I've finally allowed myself to become," De La Luz explains. "For much of my early life, when something about me conflicted with the world around me, my first instinct was to ask, 'What do I need to change about myself?' Today I'm much more likely to ask, 'Is there actually something wrong with this part of me, or have I simply been taught that there is?' That's an extraordinarily powerful question."

For De La Luz, personal liberation has meant making peace with every layer of his identity rather than forcing them into conflict.

"For me, coming out has ultimately been the process of becoming less afraid of my own complexity," he says. "I'm Puerto Rican and American. I'm someone whose Jehovah's Witness upbringing profoundly shaped me even though I eventually had to leave it behind. I'm queer. I'm predominantly attracted to men without needing that attraction to erase every other possibility. I'm polyamorous. I've been married and divorced. I've loved people deeply whom I couldn't ultimately build a life with. None of those things cancels out the others."

He views personal growth as an evolving process that refuses rigid definitions.

"Identity isn't a contract you sign," De La Luz insists. "You do not have to understand everything about yourself today in order for who you are today to be valid. You are allowed to discover new things about yourself. You are allowed to change the words you use. You are allowed to recognize that something you once believed about yourself was incomplete without deciding that you were lying before."

Recognizing that every individual travels a unique path also means understanding how different identities intersect and shape the cost of openness.

"Intersectionality matters too because none of us experiences queerness in isolation. Race, ethnicity, family, religion, gender, geography, economics, and culture all influence what being LGBTQ means and what it costs someone to live openly," he says. "That's why I would also caution younger queer people against measuring someone else's courage by their own circumstances. Coming out can be liberating, but it can also cost people families, homes, careers, communities, and safety. I know firsthand how complicated it is to love people who may not fully understand or accept every part of you. Give people room to find their way."

Even so, De La Luz emphasizes that extending compassion to others must never come at the expense of your own boundaries.

"At the same time, giving other people grace does not require abandoning yourself," he stresses. "You can understand why someone isn't ready and still decide that what they're able to offer isn't enough for you. You can love someone and leave. You can forgive someone and maintain a boundary. You can recognize another person's trauma without volunteering to become collateral damage from it. You can also admit when you caused harm without turning that admission into a declaration that you're a bad person."

In reconciling the past with the present, De La Luz finds healing in honoring the journey of his younger self while claiming the full space he deserves today.

"My generation fought incredibly hard for the right to say, 'This is who I am.' And who I am is allowed to keep evolving," De La Luz says. "At 11, I thought survival meant making myself small enough that nobody would discover who I really was. It took me decades to understand that the goal was never merely to survive being different. It was to become curious about myself. To forgive myself. To hold myself accountable. To love other people without disappearing inside them. And, finally, to live without apologizing for taking up the space required to be all of who I am."