65 and 43 years ago today

Today is an anniversary, a bit of an odd one, even by my standards: Sixty-five years ago today I was baptised. That’s probably the sort of anniversary I might mention in a blog post—but it wasn’t on my list of posts for this month. However, I knew that today is also the 43rd anniversary of the first time I ever did anything to publicly come out as gay, and that fact was on my list, though I wrote “Outaversary (43rd, so probably no post)”. And so, here we are.

I’ve talked about this coincidence of anniversaries a few times (links at the bottom of this post), but what interested me this year was that the baptism part wasn’t the first thing I thought of, even though it was 65 years ago. Instead, I just thought of it as my “Outaversary”, which makes perfect sense. As I said in my 2009 post about the anniversaries:

Fifty years and twenty-eight years later—again, to the very day—it’s clear it was the second event that had the bigger personal effect on me because on that day, in a sense, my parent’s work was completed as I began my own life. On that 1981 day I started to stop being afraid, though I had more work to do.

I guess the fact that I wasn’t planning on blogging about my “Outaversary” this year means that the more significant of the two anniversaries still wasn’t significant enough. To me, that was kind of funny, actually.

When I did finally remember that this was the 65 th anniversary of my baptism, I suddenly wondered something I’d never bothered to look up before: When was Easter in 1959? It turns out it was Sunday, March 29, 1959, and that was an issue because my grandfather, who baptised me, was still working as a minister at the time, and so, wouldn’t have been available on Easter Sunday. Also, my dad wouldn’t have wanted to have my baptism on Easter Sunday, either. So, my they picked the next Sunday, April 5. The next time it falls on a Sunday will be in 2026, which will be the perhaps somewhat more interesting (to me, anyway…) “Outaverssary” number: 45.

From time to time, I’ve thought about changing at least some of the anniversaries I mention to once every five years, on the zero and five years. That’s simply because it’s hard to come up with something new and fresh to say every year, and that’s literally doubly true for what I’ve described as “the only truly double-barrel anniversary I have”, this one—these two? Whatever.

It turns out that this date may have two different anniversaries, but it’s because of the second one—the one that’s more important in my life’s path—that I remember either one. I may not talk about either one every year, but I nevertheless remember them both. And I think that’s a very good thing.

The photo up top is from my 2009 post. I STILL really need to re-scan that slide sometime.

Related:
”Coincidence of baptisms” – 2009
”Outaversary” – 2016
”60 and 38 years ago today” – 2019
”40th Outaversary” – 2021