I'm 62 years old, and I know thousands of queer people. Almost all of them have known they were queer since they were children. I knew I was gay when I was 11 years old, and I realized it in church listening to a homophobic sermon.

The details were pretty terrible. I fled the pew and lost my breakfast in the men's room, internalizing what an evil, disgusting person I was.

Many years later, after lots of internal struggle, I marched in the streets with Act Up and Queer Nation, fighting against the queerphobia that leads to that kind of stigmatization. And it led to about 40% of the people in my partner's and my address book dying of AIDS.

So being queer is very important to me. Meaning, thinking about the implications and fighting for social justice are critical to me, and I think to society as well.

I'm fighting for transgender people, for bisexual people, for gay people, and for all members of gender and sexual minorities.

I don't know what that means with respect to "culturally queer." I don't think culturally queer has much of a definition.

The author of this story wrote about a guy who says he is straight. He's never expressed the least bit of non-traditional gender. He has not hinted that he's transgender.

To be clear, people who say they are straight and who are obviously not transgender ... are not queer.

You seem to think that by calling himself culturally queer, he is expressing confusion about whether he's straight or trans or not. I don't make that assumption.

Nor am I reducing people to anything.

My marginalized sexual orientation is a very important thing. My transgender friends' marginalized gender identity is critically important to them.

We get treated like s*** for that all the time. Laws get passed against us, neighbors give us the cold shoulder, churches reject us, you name it.

I lost most of my family.

So please forgive me if I take being queer deadly seriously. It really is a matter of life or death for many people.

For a lot of other people it's the difference between leading a life on the margins and being happy and fulfilled.

I have appreciation for people who are struggling to come to terms with understanding whether they're queer or not.

Nothing in this story struck me as being about people in that situation.

We're talking about an actor who says he's straight and in the same breath says he's culturally queer.

I don't hate him for that, and I'm not even angry at him. But I would like to point out that my being queer is deadly serious, whereas his invocation of culturally queer means pretty much nothing at all. Though I do appreciate his genuine allyship.

Somebody else in the comments talked about whether or not it would be appropriate to for someone to say they were culturally black because they admired black culture.

The answer to that is no, obviously no. We already know that people get furious about that.

I'm not furious.

But I am queer, and the actor in this story is not.

That's important to me.

You might not think it's important, but that doesn't really matter. We queer people are important to ourselves, and we're going to fight for our rights as queer people.

Culturally queer is not part of that equation.