Most queer storytelling stops at the coming-out moment. Dallas essayist Huck Smith is far more interested in everything that happens after — the decades of relationships, chosen family, grief, aging and singlehood that nobody hands you a script for. We sat down with him for #ILoveGay Today to talk about The Leaving Gene, his new collection out October 27, and the pattern he spent years calling resilience before he was honest enough to call it a reflex. His reframe on why our timelines were never going to match our straight counterparts’ is worth the read all by itself — as is what he says about the box we were put in, and what we did to decorate it.
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“There were some really good men in my life that I learned at a young age leaving was safe and staying was not.”
That’s Huck Smith, a 52-year-old gay essayist in Dallas, describing the pattern that gave his new book its name — and, along the way, describing something a lot of us recognize and don’t often say out loud.
We caught up for #ILoveGay Today from Dallas, where Huck moved onto Cedar Springs Road about a month ago. (“I’m as gay as they get,” he said. “I think I’m a Kinsey six.”) His second collection, The Leaving Gene: Essays on Staying, Going, and the Cost of Both, arrives October 27 from Quick Draw Press.
The story that starts after the coming-out story
So much queer storytelling — and understandably so — lives inside the coming-out moment. Huck is interested in the much longer stretch that follows it.
“Some of the best written books I’ve read, we focus on coming out and that process, because it is different for everyone and it can be really challenging,” he said. “But I started thinking, well, how did I get here?”
That question — how did I get here — is the spine of the book. Relationships, friendship, chosen family, grief, aging, singlehood, belonging, and what kind of life actually fits you. Decades of it, not one weekend of it.
He’s also clear about who he’s writing for. “When I write, I’m always really concerned with writing human first, gay second,” he said. “It’s always about appealing to everyone, because there’s more commonality between us than we sometimes allow ourselves to be.”
A dog, a toilet seat, and the last man standing
The whole collection grew out of one essay, called Raider at the Door, named for his puppy. It started with an ordinary thought: if something happens to me, what’s the plan for my dog?
“I’ll be very honest, I don’t have a will. I don’t have a medical directive. But what is the plan for my dog?” he said. “And it turns out my contingency plan for my dog is leaving the toilet seat up when I’m gone, because should something happen, he could get some water for a couple days.”
From there it opened into something much bigger — the thing we all say we want without examining it.
“We all talk about wanting to live the longest and, like, the last man standing,” he said. “I always joke I’m going to live to 107. But then what does that really look like when you are the last one of your friends and family there? Who’s in that room with you? Who’s attending your services? I started to think that might not be the flex that we thought it was.”
And when he went looking for other people’s accounts of it, he found the obvious problem: “There’s no one to tell those stories, because their people are gone.”
Chosen family you can count on one hand
Huck left home at 14. His sister stayed. Same house, same formative years, two adults who could not have come out more differently.
“While our formative years were identical, who we’ve come to be as an adult, our lived experiences and our thought process on things probably couldn’t be any more different,” he said. “I think it’s really interesting when you start to delve into that and wonder who it cost more, me or her.”
That’s the book’s subtitle doing its work: staying has a cost too, and it’s not always the smaller one.
Which leads straight into chosen family — a term he loves and also wants handled with some care.
“There’s a part of me that loves that the term chosen family has become so widely adopted. But there’s also a part that it’s like, it really does mean something to people in our community or people who have gone through some trauma earlier in life and had to have that established.”
He described finally watching Pose — expecting it not to be for him, and then being completely taken with it. “I electively left at 14 to make a better decision for myself, but the characters in that show, none of it was elective for them.” Drag mothers, houses, chosen family in a form he hadn’t lived himself.
His read on the rest of us is bracing and, I think, correct: “When you take good inventory of your life and understand who your real chosen family are, the truth is you could probably count the real ones on one hand.” Plenty of acquaintances and outliers. A small handful who are there through the good and the bad.
The timeline that was never ours
This is where the conversation got to the heart of the episode’s title. Huck pushed back on the habit of measuring our lives against a script we were handed by somebody else.
“One of the mistakes we’ve made sometimes is — yes, we should have equality, we deserve it, we’re not second-class citizens — but to compare ourselves to some heteronormative construct, I don’t know that that’s really feasible,” he said.
The reason is simple arithmetic. “I didn’t get, when I was 14, the organic dating experience and getting my heart broken at 14 over, like, you didn’t circle yes on my note back, because you couldn’t do that back then. So when we’re in our 20s, we’re having our 14-year-old dating situation.”
“I’ll hear some of my gay friends talk about, well, I want what my parents had, I want 50 years. And it’s like, yeah, but they met at 23. And at 23, some of us are not out yet, or we’re trying to figure out who we are and where we fit in and discovering our chosen family. That is not a linear timeline like it is for a lot of our straight counterparts.”
Add to that everyone who came out at 40 or 50, leaving a heterosexual marriage and entering gay spaces where the rules are entirely different, and the idea of one shared queer life stage starts to fall apart completely.
We also got onto what the apps changed — and he named it well. “App culture has dramatically shifted how dating works, because it’s become more shopping, where you’re just scrolling through the pages to find that thing.”
What got lost was the accidental connection. “You would walk into the gay bar on a Friday night and you’d see someone, they were good looking, and that was kind of enough for a conversation. And there would be guys you would never look at twice — if you saw them on an app, you’d swipe left so quick, and I implicate myself in this — but you just happen to be there, and then they’re funny, and all of a sudden there’s something that sparks.”
“Let’s decorate this box”
I raised something I’ve heard from the outside looking in for 30 years: the notion that our lives are somehow selfish, that we’re living something other people can’t. Huck’s answer reframed it in a way I keep thinking about.
“All that’s true, those luxuries,” he said. “But some of those things became luxuries because we were not afforded the opportunity to do it.”
He would know. He was a foster parent for years. “There are a lot of foster agencies that won’t work with you and adoption agencies that won’t work with you. There’s still a pushback today in 2026 about same-sex couples raising a child. It’s gotten better, there’s been progress, and the noise of it has calmed down — but it’s not silent.”
And thirty years ago in Texas, the state was still enforcing sodomy laws — kicking in doors and arresting men on suspicion of what they were doing in their own beds.
“So I think we’ve really leaned into the fragments that were given to us,” he said, “and said, okay, well, if this is what our menu is, let’s make it the best that it can be. They put us in a box. And so, well, let’s do what we do best and decorate this box and make it the most fabulous it can be.”
He’s also watching the script loosen for everyone else. More straight couples are choosing to be child-free, for cost reasons or climate reasons or simply because they want a different life. “And that’s really new for America.”
Two books, two different spines
Huck’s debut, Boys, Bars & Becoming: Essays for the Still Reckless, Still Hopeful, covers the formative years. It opens with an essay called Death of a Gay Bar, which he describes as closer to archaeology than memoir.
“If you go back to 1995 and you walked into a gay bar on a Friday night, there was always an old man sitting — well, now we’re the old men,” he laughed. “When you’re 20-something, a 50-year-old is old. There’s always that old guy that’s like a piece of furniture at the end of the bar. There’s always a woman that came with somebody. And then there were just your friends, and all of those people met and experienced each other.”
Now, he said, people are head down in their phones at the bar, checking who else is at the bar.
The Leaving Gene has a different architecture entirely. It’s the honest accounting — the part where you put it on the page and have to confront it.
“We all have really good selective memory,” he said. “You can know you’ve done something and just file it away, and you can do it again and file it away. But when you put it on the page and you’re forced to confront yourself with the truth, if you’re being honest, you start to see some of the things that it did cost you.”
He’s generous about the younger version of himself without letting him off the hook. “When you’re younger and you don’t know how to communicate and you haven’t developed that skill set to problem solve and compromise, we just leave a wake of terror in our path. And hopefully we grow out of it.”
Then, to the camera: “For anyone watching, I’m better now. Those are old essays, people.”
Why this matters beyond the bookshelf
There’s a practical lesson sitting underneath this conversation for anyone trying to reach LGBTQ+ audiences.
The default assumption in a lot of marketing is that our community shares one arc: come out, find your people, settle down, buy the things that go with settling down. Huck’s whole point is that the arc isn’t shared. A 52-year-old single man in Dallas, a couple who came out at 45 and are dating for the first time, a 28-year-old who never had a closet to leave — these are different lives, at different life stages, with different money, different priorities and different media habits. Age brackets don’t sort them. Milestones don’t sort them.
The community that actually exists is the one that shows up in the comments, the group chats and the local conversations — which is exactly why LGBTQ+ voices telling their own stories, in their own formats, remain the most reliable way in.
And the quieter point, the one he made about last-man-standing: there is an enormous LGBTQ+ audience over 50 thinking hard about aging, care, community and who’s in the room at the end. Very few brands are speaking to them at all.
Where to find Huck Smith
Our full conversation is up now on the Pink Media / #ILoveGay YouTube channel. Watch it here.
The Leaving Gene: Essays on Staying, Going, and the Cost of Both is out October 27 from Quick Draw Press. Both books are available in paperback, ebook and audiobook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and anywhere else you buy books.
Find Huck at huckysmith.com and follow him on Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, Facebook and Substack.
If you’re working on a book, a film or a project that deserves to reach the LGBTQ+ community, we’d love to hear about it — that’s the kind of story we like putting in front of people.
