Growing up in a Christian-conservative household didn’t exactly leave a lot of...wiggle room. We lived our cookie-cutter family of six - two sons, two daughters, and the parents - in our cookie-cutter house from the suburban sprawl of decades past, and we lived our cookie-cutter lives. We went to school, got good grades (with the exception of my brother), we had a few friends, we eventually went to college, and ultimately we end up with a minimum wage job regardless of which prestigious university we attended or what our major may have been. We were an American family. We went to church, we served our youth group, and we prayed when we sat down at every family meal. We were a Christian family.
I didn’t exactly have a normal childhood - and I don’t mean that in a good way. My sister - my oldest sister - went to the local middle school and had a few freak hellish experiences with obnoxious cliques and poor teachers which made her cry herself to sleep at night. Rather than address the issue, rather than be advocates, my parents decided to recuse themselves from the public school system. They maintained their stubborn streak for almost a whole decade. They never listened for new information, never cared about new principals or new teachers, never contemplated a return, and they most certainly never considered reversing their decision. In light of the fact that they never accepted any new information, I guess they couldn’t change their mind - even if they wanted to.
It was a lonely childhood. I stayed inside all day. I did my work. I learned a few things here and there. Tuesday and Thursday I had AYSO practice - a time when I would go and play soccer for two hours with kids I hardly knew and to whom I never spoke outside of those practices and the odd Saturday when we had a game. On Tuesday mornings, I attended Community Day - a sort of mental institution for homeschooled students subject to social neglect. We would have a little bit of time for an English lesson, a little bit of time for a math lesson, and a little bit of time for a science lesson. Then we went home before noon.
I didn’t much like anyone at Community Day. Sure, there was one kid named Kyle that I hanged around with, but I didn’t care for his company too much. It was more that because our moms got to know each other, we had to get to know each other. He was a year younger than me, and, as a result, his interests always took after mine. I had a childhood obsession with the fantasy of a world far away from this hell in Star Wars, and so did he. I grew to love dinosaurs and Jurassic Park, and so did he. I grew to resent him faster than I grew to be friends with him.
Community Day started in the third grade and continued through the eighth grade. Families came and went, but mine stayed. My brother moved out of homeschooling and into public high school when I was in the third grade. My sister moved into public high school when I was in the sixth grade. It was expected of me to follow in their footsteps and go to public school in the ninth grade - which I ultimately did - but I was hesitant. I had doubts.
I doubted that I could adapt to public school well. My siblings managed just fine because they had experience at least with public elementary school. They had made friends with whom they kept in contact, but I didn’t really have anyone I would like to call a friend. I grew up as a socially awkward kid, and to an extent, I still am. I would begin to sweat whenever an adult at our church spoke to me. I ran in the other direction when I was sent off to Sunday school. I could never converse with any member of my extended family. (I still can’t comfortably talk with any of my cousins, grandparents, uncles, or aunts.) I always asked my dad to order for me at restaurants.
Seventh grade gave me a few minor problems. The first was what I guess you might call depression. It was never diagnosed professionally or anything, but after several years of isolation, awkwardness, and the inability to express my thoughts - with one of my sisters seemingly always speaking for me - I began to very seriously contemplate suicide. It got to the point where I had the plan in place. Although there were no guns or ropes or drugs readily available, I got inspiration from an episode of NCIS where rather than be arrested, a murderer slits his throat. I knew exactly which knife I would use (the big meat carving knife, I figured, would be most effective to get the job done), and I knew it would just be a matter of time before I felt like doing it. I really don’t know why I didn’t do it.
Seventh grade also brought about the scariest moment of my life. After one particular day, I cried myself to sleep every night for almost two years, then I pushed myself into denial for another two years. I had never felt any kind of attraction toward any girl. I never really had a crush. One day at Community Day, I looked at a guy who was a year older than me, and I had the strangest desire - an impulse, really - to kiss him. I don’t know why I wanted to do it or where this desire came from, but I was scared. The number of gay people I had met in my lifetime until that point was equal to the number of unicorns I had ever encountered.
My impression of gay people was very much influenced by my Episcopal parents. Being so secluded, it wasn’t like I could very easily get alternative points of view. My parents both voted yes on Proposition 8 in California. Although it was ultimately struck down in court, Prop 8 banned same-sex marriage in the state. My mom complained with some frequency about the Episcopal church’s lesbian bishop in our diocese, and she avoided going to church whenever that bishop visited. When my sister was watching an episode of "Brothers and Sisters" which involved a gay character in an argument with his significant other, my mom simply remarked, “If they can’t be happy being gay, then they just shouldn’t do it.” Yes, I grew up in a homophobic family where being gay was seen as a lifestyle choice. But of course, my parents didn’t see themselves as hateful. They said that everyone is God’s child so we should love everyone, even when we seek to ruin their lives on earth with discrimination and persecution before they go to Dante’s seventh circle of hell.
I couldn’t be gay. I just couldn’t. My parents would hate me. I would hate me. My sister might think it’d be cute to have a gay brother so that she could tease me about boys, but that’s about as supportive as my family would get on the issue. I couldn’t bear the thought of being different. I was already different. I was already a social cripple. I was already afraid of others. I couldn’t bear to be afraid of myself. But I was. So for every day until sometime in my freshman year of high school, I cried myself to sleep. I just couldn’t be different. I knew I was straight - of course I was straight - but even the idea of being gay haunted me.
Freshman year was hell. I was quiet. I was awkward. I had one of those horrendous pubescent moustaches that grew before I learned to shave. My parents got me to sign up to play soccer for the school team. I never said a word in any of my classes. I never raised my hand. Whenever a teacher called my name from the random popsicle stick method of “volunteer” selection, my forehead began to perspire and my voice cracked. My Honors English class was my first source of freedom. Most of the people in my class were stupid. I mean just stupid. They were nice people and everything, but when the teacher pressed them about a theme in whatever story we were reading, their face conveyed a dumbfounded vacuousness. We never had multiple choice tests in that class. They were all timed writings. We would walk in, a prompt would be on the chalkboard (our teacher had an allergic reaction to whiteboard markers), and we had the period to write. After our first test comparing an article “Can Animals Think?” with a very interesting short story about a man hunter (the name escapes me, but I do recall there was a radio drama performed by Orson Wells of the story), the teacher read out my response as the “definitive answer.”
I was shocked. I was proud. I was confused. Maybe there was some point to everything afterall. Maybe there was something I could do. Growing up, I was terrible at games, I was a mediocre soccer player, I lost at every game of Monopoly and chess I ever played (save a few rare occasions where my siblings felt sorry for me), I had no artistic talent, I couldn’t play an instrument, I never had a real hobby. But maybe there was something I could do right.
I gained a bit of a reputation for myself freshman year as the awkward, quiet, but intelligent kid in the corner of the class. Eventually, by the end of the third quarter, I started eating lunch with some people from my biology class. I originally ate lunch with my sister until she became annoyed with me, at which point I ate lunch alone. I was so pathetic that the principal would occasionally make excruciatingly painful smalltalk with me. I didn’t call these people with whom I ate lunch “friends,” but it was progress of a kind.
Even if I didn’t really have any skeletons in my closet, I definitely was. I was so far in the closet I didn’t even know it. My social development was hindered by the recurring nightmare I was forced to live. There was one guy, [redacted], in that group from my Bio class that I started to hang around with, that drove me to the edge of insanity. I was inexplicably attracted to him. He was nice. He had a more reserved and mature personality than most people in our grade. I knew I wasn’t gay, but I couldn’t help but like him. In addition to [redacted], I was further forced into a confused self-loathing because of the locker room. Guys on the soccer team, for the most part, were typical good-looking jocks who had difficulty maintaining a 2.0 GPA. They teased each other about being “fags.” They joked around, slapping the occasional butt as a congratulatory sign of camaraderie. Being athletic guys, they bore no qualms about stripping down in front of others. I quickly became embarrassed and ashamed. I avoided the locker room at all costs. I felt ugly - not just because of my comparably twig-like body (I’ve been compared to a Holocaust survivor), but because I just felt different. I couldn’t understand it.
With sophomore year, I started to come out of my shell. I began to call people “friends.” I began to express myself, although I still never raised my hand in class - even when I had the answer. My whole year was culminated in a defining moment for how I live my life. We had a chemistry teacher who, as nice as she was, was a bad teacher. We had difficulty understanding everything we were having thrown at us; after our homework assignments, our tests seemed like complete non sequiturs; we would have a quiz given to us on Wednesday, then, without any class time to review the quiz, we would have a test on Thursday; semester grades were due at the end of January, and none of our test grades had been put into the online system since October, leaving us with no clue how we were doing in the class. I posted a two paragraph note on the online messaging board we used for class communication. In it, I expressed my concern about the gradebook not being updated. The next day, I was the talk of the campus. I was congratulated for “sticking it to her.” The teacher pulled me aside and asked me why I never talked about it with her in person before posting on the site, even though we had discussed it as a class and she never seemed to get the message. Ultimately, I had a series of meetings with the principal, and at the end of my sophomore year, the chemistry teacher left the school.
With this instance, I began to establish myself as a person. I established myself as someone who stood up for what he believed. I’m an advocate for advocacy. It was a proud moment for me. Here I was - homeschooled twerp who had a history of crying himself to sleep every night and contemplating suicide - doing what everyone else wanted to do, but never did because they couldn’t muster up the courage. I may seem arrogant, and maybe I am, but I’m proud of the fact that I wasn’t content with complaining. Rather than whine about a problem, I asked how to change it.
I had done very well for myself academically in those first two years of high school. I was ranked with the very top of my class, I had received a somewhat impressive score for a sophomore on the PSAT, and I had passed three AP tests (one of those I prepared for by self-study without ever taking a class for it). I took pride in being a bit of a braniac. I signed up for four AP classes - Chemistry, Biology, English, and History - in my junior year, which proved to be a bit of a mistake. It wasn’t that the work got to be too much, but my life changed dramatically over the course of the year, and I ended up drowning in self-hate, self-pity, and self-loathing.
First semester was great. I ended with only one B, and I was perfectly content, seeing as how it was in AP Chemistry. Then in January, I began to die from the inside. I came across a quote by Richard Dawkins somewhere on the internet one day, and, having been amused by it, I looked for more from him. I had been pretty passive about my faith. Sure I was baptised when I was an infant, I was confirmed sometime in the summer following my sophomore year, I still went to church most every Sunday, and I probably identified as Christian, but I never really looked into the religion. The moment I did, my emotional and mental downfall quickly followed.
My faith, at first, was shaken. Reading and listening to new arguments to which I previously had never been exposed was a surreal experience. How had I never heard these things before? These were good questions that were being raised, valid questions. Answer: my parents. Growing up, the names Dawkins, Darwin, and Sagan were to be treated with thick rubber gloves and tongs, with our hands to be cleansed in holy water immediately after handling them.
After several weeks of listening to debates nonstop on Youtube, along with actually reading the Bible and various books my parents had on religion, I began to accept the label of “atheist.” This was uncharted territory. The number of atheists I had met in my life until this point was equal to the number of gay people I had met when I was in the seventh grade. My mom had a rule in the house that until we went to college, none of the children in my family could skip out going to church. My parents were both right-wing Christians, my sister worked with an Episcopal group during her time at USC, my other sister volunteered to help with Sunday school, and I, along with all of my other siblings, served as acolytes in the church. There was no way I could be an atheist.
It’s funny how my mom would tell me to sit still and be quiet as a kid in church so that I could hear the sermon. She thought it was important to hear the sermon so I would understand the Gospel more and so I would become as devout a Christian as her. As it turns out, the more I listened to the sermons, the less I believed in the faith. The pressure of hiding this from my parents built up to the point where it needed to be released. They had to know. I couldn’t keep going to church. If I was to truly believe in this faith, I thought, shouldn’t I be allowed the freedom to make up my own mind? Isn’t that the religious argument when it comes to the question of why evil exists? Because we have free will?
I wrote a letter to my parents. I didn’t go into detail about why I stopped believing (which turned out to be a mistake) in fear that they might think I was insulting them or calling them stupid for believing what they believed. I deposited the letter on my mom’s computer keyboard one day before I left for school. When I came home around 5:00 PM (I liked to stick around school after class got out because it meant I could spend more time away from my parents), there was no confrontation of it, other than my mom saying “Thanks for your note this morning” and blah blah blah about how C.S. Lewis had been an atheist and this was just a phase. To her, it wasn’t that I didn’t believe, it’s just that I had questions. To her, it was impossible for me not to believe.
That day was the end of the beginning. I had built up so much tension and anxiety over that issue. During my sophomore year, a friend asked me if because I spent so much time looking at history and comparing cultures if I was an atheist. I couldn’t answer. I avoided the question. I didn’t really understand what it meant to be an atheist. Like “Dawkins,” “atheist” was a dirty word in my house. It was my acceptance of this dirty word that pushed me over the edge and into oblivion.
My two years of denial were coming to an end. The routine of crying myself to sleep every night resumed. Though frightened as I was, I figured I was just a typical hormonal teenage boy and that this was just a phase (as it proved to be, though not quite in the way I had expected). I noticed things change. Every urge and impulse I had previously experienced became stronger with the possibility of two guys in the picture. I figured it was just a phase. As far as I wanted to know, I was straight.
I don’t know what exactly triggered it or why I asked it, but one day I just thought to myself “What if I am gay?” I was still attracted to [redacted], among others. In fact, all of my crushes in high school had been boys. At the time, I figured “oh those damn hormones again,” but I took note of the fact that there were a few girls who took interest in me, even asking me out, but I felt nothing. My guy friends told me I should go out with these girls, but I didn’t want to. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like these weren’t nice, intelligent, funny, good-looking girls (in fact, they were on all counts), but I just didn’t feel anything. Anything I felt toward them was nowhere near what I had felt toward [redacted] or any other of my male crushes.
Following that day, my life crashed. I ate very little, which wasn’t a huge leap to make seeing as how I had a very infrequent diet as it was. When I was lucky enough to be able to collapse in my bed for four hours of sleep following a monstrous night of homework and studying, I couldn't fall asleep. As tired as I was, I would lie there, just thinking “What if I am gay?” I couldn’t focus on any of my work. My grades tanked. I didn’t turn in five labs for chemistry, resulting in, as of the third quarter, a failing grade in that class because of missing assignments. I couldn’t do my math homework. I couldn’t keep up with the biology or chemistry readings. I was drowning. And my grades showed it. I hated myself every day for the same reason I had hated myself for the previous five years: I couldn’t be gay. I couldn’t be different.
The first semester of my junior year, although my transcripts depict a decent showing of my academic prowess, wasn’t without its toll. In November, around Thanksgiving break, I had myself a bit of a nervous breakdown which ended up with me seeing a therapist. I couldn’t talk to him. I couldn’t talk to my parents about how I couldn’t talk to him. I couldn’t talk to my parents about anything. He was old, nearing retirement, and self-absorbed. In April, I ended up getting the courage to cancel the biweekly practice of time-wasting.
I ultimately had no one to talk to. There was no way in hell I could talk to my parents about the possibility of being gay. After all they’ve done and all they’ve said about gay people, there was no way I would be accepted by them. You hear stories of parents changing their views when they find out they have a child or family member who’s gay. My parents would be no such story. They are the epitome of the homophobic, xenophobic, racist trip back to the '50s of the "Leave it to Beaver" Christian right-wing. They are wholly irrational people who, whenever they are legitimately challenged on an issue, will simply resort to the “because I said so” or “because I’m your parent” arguments. They listen to Rush Limbaugh, watch Fox News, and bash the President with an alarming fervor.
I couldn’t talk to any of my friends out of fear of ostracism. If I was gay, they could have rejected me. I could have lost the friendships that took so long for me to build. Once again, I would have been just that awkward freak in the corner without any friends. I feared losing my entire world simply because of who I was.
I ended up talking to a friend. This was one of my closest friends, and we knew practically everything about each other. It was a deep, honest, intellectual friendship. I mustered up the courage to talk to her about it. I told her that I didn’t know what exactly had been going on, but that for a while I had been attracted to guys. She was extraordinarily supportive. She was more than I could have asked for. At first I said it was “about an 80% chance” that I was gay. We talked it over. I felt like I could breathe for the first time in a long time.
Within a few days, I finally was able to say the words I had spent over a year trying to get myself to say in front of a mirror. I thought that maybe if I could hear it out loud, I would hear how ridiculous it sounded, and then I would be confident that I was straight. I was never able to say it. I was never able to say it out of fear that if I heard it, it might become reality. I spent so long wishing, hoping, and even praying that it wasn’t true. When I got out of the shower one night, I wiped away the fog in the mirror, looked into my eyes in the mirror, and finally whispered those words to myself. “I’m gay.” It was the first time I had ever said it out loud in my life.
My heart was racing. My blood was pumping everywhere. That was it. I was gay. I had been. I knew I had been. I knew for so long I had been. But for the first time in my life, I was able to admit to myself who I was. In a single breath, I went from carrying the burden of Atlas to being as elevated as Zeus. I began to cry. This wasn’t like all those countless nights I had spent crying myself to sleep out of fear. This was different. These were tears of joy. This is who I was. And I could be happy.
I wondered for the longest time why society started using the word “gay” to refer to homosexuals. It wasn't until that moment that I realized that after such a long, torturous, painful, and hateful process, it was impossible to not be gay, to not be happy, to not be elated.
If there’s anything to take from my story, I suppose it would be a rather simple theme to the life of any gay person: never run from yourself. As cliche as it sounds, you are who you are and you can’t change that. I realize now how hypocritical I had been. I was starting to build a life as a person who challenged things, who challenged the status quo, and who was always arguing for people to stand up for themselves and to stand up for what they believed. I advocated for confronting problems instead of avoiding them. When I finally listened to my own advice, when I stopped running away from who I was, I was finally able to truly be happy. I was able to be gay.