Little did we know, we married on Pete Burns Birthday, August 5th, 1995. If you do not know Pete was a beautiful man in the ’80s and the lead singer for “Dead or Alive”. His legacy lives on for breaking the gender stereotypes and living as a beautiful man!
I would not discover this profound serendipity until 2014 when I was saving my life and started to live my authentic gender identity as an intersex born, non-conforming androgynous gay man.
Coming out of the closet was honestly terrifying. As you can see, men who do anything womanly or pretty, are not treated very well at all in this world. So, I spent a lot of time on Youtube trying to find others like me. I had followed Pete, Boy George, Prince, Adam Ant, Duran Duran, and many other pretty boys with great envy as a young teen. I was not allowed to be me back then so I suffered terribly. The consequences, my parents even locking me up in psychiatric hospitals and ultimately would almost take my life by taking away physical health. I would not be able to free myself from being assigned the wrong gender at birth, to live my authentic self, until the end of 2014. Which ultimately would be my first intersex awareness, October 26th, 2014. Once again serendipity and a burning bush, I would not realize until after it happened.
Pete Burns doesn’t appear to have been born intersex, but he was androgynous, breaking all the stereotypes and roles, and either bisexual or pansexual. I do not know for sure what words he personally used to describe himself, but he felt it his human right to use clothing and his gender expression as an art form. He would celebrate every day showing the world how not to conform to being a “real” man. No matter how feminine he became, Pete never changed his pronouns, and never called himself transgender. He would even stay married to his wife for 27 years, which happens to be the exact amount of time I was with James as a woman. On our twenty-seventh year of marriage, at that time, when I was coming out of the closet a man, Pete would divorce Lynn and ended up marrying a man. Yes, profound to us!
After discovering the serendipity of my marrying my husband James, on Pete Burn’s birthday, and coming out of the closet when he would divorce his wife Lynn at twenty-seven years of marriage, I wrote him the year before he died, sharing all these coincidences with him. I also had all sorts of questions. He sadly never got back to me, but I am grateful for all the public interviews and he lives forever in my heart. He is deeply missed by many in this world. His death too young and two a massive cardiac arrest.
Sometimes things are such co-incidence, I now like to call it “God-incidence”. Little things like this mean so much to me. It shows me the universe works in mysterious ways and we are not alone when we feel so abandoned and so alone.
For our 25th Aniversary, we hope to be ready to renew our wedding vows. We want this to be a big celebration. A celebration of surviving coming out of the closet, and surviving losing our family and so many friends to hate and prejudice.
But for this year we will conservatively simply celebrate one more milestone by simply going out to dinner and being grateful to still have a full house of kids, with our two dogs, cat, and parrot, in our new home!
Note: what was written above was shared as a life event on Facebook. Here is a tribute I made for Pete Burn’s too for August, 5th, 2019.
What It’s Like: A WJCT Podcast with Anunnaki and his husband James
I was born perfect, and I am lovable. Thank you, United Nations.
~.V.~
Mx. Anunnaki Ray Marquez 
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