People often ask me, "when did you know you were gay?", and I can say, with confidence, that it was in seventh grade, when I was eleven. I never really tried fighting it, but I never expressed it either. So, on that fateful day in the locker room, I was cognizant of my thought, 'I wonder what he looks like without underwear.', and it didn't take me aback. I was never surprised that the thought came to mind. It just felt normal, and I went on about my day.
As I got into high school, I thought more about my sexuality and how society viewed it. At that point, I was only able to be sexually attracted to men. The idea of being in a relationship with a man honestly disturbed me. I always thought about a dividing line between what actions were considered sexual and what were emotional. In that case, I was only emotionally attracted to women. It was like a war in my mind that I felt I would never be able to win: having to choose between emotional companionship without sexual interaction, or vice versa. I became extremely distraught over this until I met Erick.
Erick happened to be a friend of a friend. He played drums and wore glasses. He was the definition of a hipster if there was one in the year 2009. He was the first guy I was able to develop feelings for. It was so strange to me, to have this feeling for another guy. But it was freeing at the same time. I learned that day that, someday, I'd be able to be happy with a functional relationship. Having said that, Erick wasn't of my persuasion, so I never told him how I felt. It was a learning experience nonetheless...
During the time I met Erick, I had been fooling around with a guy in my high school who was also confused about his sexuality. We were at a mutual friend's house and it was late at night. to this day I live by the rule that, "things get homosexual after midnight." And that they did. We were going to bed and I had to share a mattress with him. As soon as the lights went out, there was a hand in my pants of which didn't belong to me. This... fling went on between us through our senior year in high school and a bit afterwards. I supposed he was the one that allowed me to eventually enjoy kissing guys although I didn't necessarily enjoy kissing him. It was synonymous to making out with a wet mop.
At the point of my senior year, I was pretty eager to show the world who I really was. I started telling some of my close friends that I was gay, and I was getting positive and supportive feedback. I felt like it was going to be alright. I had heard storied of people getting bullied and killing themselves over their being gay, and I was thankful for not having to deal with that.
After graduating high school, I moved out of my house to get away from my parents; specifically, my mother. Her and I seemed to never stop arguing, so I needed to get away. I ended up moving in with a close friend's family. They helped me get my first job at a grocery store which led me to meet my first love, Aaron*. When I thought that him and I would be together for a long time, I decided it was time to stop living a lie to my family and tell them about being gay. (*Aaron is another story in himself)
One day in October, I pulled my mom outside to tell her. I said, "Now you have to promise not to get mad about this, because I know you're going to get angry. Can you promise not to?" and she said that she wouldn't get mad. And so I told her, and the sheer look of disgust and hatred that ran across her face at that moment killed me. She replied with, "You've got to be kidding. This isn't what God would have wanted. You're no son of mine." In that moment, my world started to crumble. It seems as if the word went black and the ground gave out underneath me. I didn't get along with my mother, but that didn't mean that I didn't still value her opinion or want her praise. She was still my parent. I felt so lost and betrayed. All I wanted was to share with her my happiness in finding someone that I loved. I left after that because it was just so terribly awkward. I talked to my sisters about it afterwards and they said I shouldn't have ever bothered telling our parents; that they would be better off dying, not knowing, than having lived with such knowledge. But they just don't understand what being a homosexual is like, because they haven't experienced it first hand.
No matter what anybody says, being gay is NOT a choice. You don't just wake up one day and say, "Hey, I want the majority of society to hate me." or, "I want to make my life harder because I want to fool around with the same sex.", or "I want to be bullied and depressed around my peers." People aren't that emotionally masochistic.
With my family knowing about my sexuality, and not being fond of such, I haven't been able to tell them about the people that I've developed feeling for. (For the first time since this incident, writing about this is actually starting to bother me.) If I felt disconnected from them before, this assuredly must have been the icing on the cake. I can't be my self around them because I can't share with them who I really am without offending them in some way. My mother never wants to hear anything related to the subject. My father just doesn't respond when I try talking to him about it. And my sisters, who I can share a little bit with, still think, "It's gross."
Being the person that I am, I always try to find the meaning behind situations like this, or to, "look on the bright side, when there is no bright side." I feel that going through this has made me a bit more hardened; A bit less trusting (which isn't always a bad thing). And through coming out to my family and having been dealt such a shit response to it, I really don't care anymore what people think about it. I've just about lost my family's respect for me, so everybody else hardly goes noticed when they pitch a fit.
Being gay isn't about fitting into the stereotype that the paradigm of society has conceived. It's about finding yourself and expressing your colors the way you want. I'm just like everybody else. The only difference is that biologically, my sexuality doesn't lend well towards procreation. I feel like that's not really important though. There's plenty of others populating the planet to make up for me. It's about time this world learned that difference isn't a cancerous thing that need be removed, but an opportunity to gain knowledge and skills from those differences. It's time we all cherished what made us unique.
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