COMING OUT AND COMING TO TERMS....

Ever since the time I could remember, I remember having feelings of being gay. I didn't even know what gay was but knew I was different from the other boys. My mother used to tell me growing up that when the other kids called me gay it was because gay meant happy. Funny, when I was crying about this and every other thing connected to it, happy isn't exactly the emotion I would have chosen. To say I have Issues would be a very low key term to describe my relationship with my mother.

When I was young I played all sports: football, soccer, basketball, baseball and loved gymnastics. I was good at all these very different sports but my heart belonged to gymnastics. Out of these sports I was the best at gymnastics and felt very good about myself being able to excel at this sport that I loved. Of course the area that I performed the best was the floor exercise. I was the only boy in this area of the sport so again I stood out.

I was a very skinny kid growing up and that just added to the ridicule. I found myself attracted to other boys and without discussing it with my mother (which wasn't an option anyway), knew it was supposed to be wrong. I lived in a house where you didn't talk about sex at all. You would think by being the last of 5 kids, sex was something that would be known. Think Again!

I don't know what I hated more, knowing I was gay but denying it and not acting on it, or the fact that I didn't want to be different and thought I was the only one. It just seemed that I was the only one and felt that I was doomed to live my life trapped inside a lie. I had no exposure to gay people growing up. Gay people were talked about in hushed whispers and viewed as perverts. Even growing up outside Atlantic City we were still very small town in our morals.

When I was in High School we used to take class trips to New York City. That was my big chance to sneak away from the class on our free time and go to Port Authority and buy gay magazines and take them home and masturbate. I felt very dirty about doing it but knew it was only an escape and that I wasn't hurting anyone. But it did hurt someone. It hurt me. It hurt me because I wanted the life I read about in these magazines and I desired the men in the photos. I felt I would never be able to have this life so it was a small escape to a world of fantasy but hurt twice as much when I was brought back to the reality that I felt I would never have that freedom.

I dated girls while in High School and College but never very successfuly. In High School I became very good friends with Maggie. She was my best friend. I was very close to her and slowly in little bits I would make comments about good looking guys. I also became friends with a girl named Keely. Keely was very open to me being gay and we would talk about it for hours. Keely took me to my first Gay Bar. I was still in High School and had never been to a bar let alone a gay bar. When a guy came up to me and whispered in my ear exactly what he wanted to do to me if I let him take me home I was shocked. I didn't know anything about gay sex and was just shocked at the suggestions he was making. And yet I was turned on at the same time. Very mixed emotions and not knowing how to deal with it.

Once I got to college I started to open up a bit about my feelings towards men. I was very active in the dance department and met my, still to this day, best friend Amy. I still tried dating girls and had some very interesting sexual encounters but never to my liking. Although the girls I was with sexually said I was VERY good at pleasing them. What can I say, I'm an oral kind of guy :) I had now been exposed to more of an excepting gay lifestyle and learned more than ever that the small town minds I grew up around were wrong and that I didn't have to feel dirty and ashamed about my feelings. It was a slow evolution to say the least.

Right before Christmas break my senior year of college I had been talking to some of my friends (all girls) at a bar and said that I have no luck with girls and many offers from men that I may soon take the men up on their offers. I had been working at a restaurant with many gay men and we would go out after work to bars. I had come close to kissing one of the men I was out with one night and inside I was a mess. I couldn't go through with it. I freaked. At home, during Christmas break, I had a really hard time. My house at school was robbed, I was having many problems with my family and just felt so totally lost and alone. I went to the local gay bar that I frequented and ran into a guy that I had met through a mutual friend. His name was Bernard (true name, I kid you not). Here was this man who I knew briefly and trusted somewhat and was interested in me. I agreed to go home with him.

I wasn't nervous at all. At that exact point in my life it felt like the most right decision, the most honest decision, I could make for my life. It felt like all the waiting was for this moment. I was glad I had waited because I now knew I was ready and before to have made this choice would not be right. Having never kissed a man before, the first kiss was like an explosion of my soul. I was 23 years old and it was like I had just been born. I felt very accepted and safe. Bernard could not believe that it was my first time because I was so at ease and seemed to know EXACTLY what to do and do it well he added. I ended up dating him for a month.

When I returned to school I told everyone I had met a great girl and had a very good self image for the first time in my life. Well, because I was in a very safe environment with my friends I slowly told them that the girl I had met was actually a man and that I was gay. I have the most wonderful friends in the world. They were very supportive and loving towards my coming out and still to this day support my decision. As time went on I told more people outside of my close friends and was met with great responses. I am very lucky to have never lost a friend over me coming out.

Being gay was / is still considered taboo in my family. I didn't talk about it to my family. It was one of those unspoken things growing up that if we don't discuss his being gay then he isn't. Well, the only people I recently had conversations with about my being gay in my family were my father and one of my sisters. They just said they wanted me to be safe and happy but still I don't think they wanted to hear about the boys I was dateing so we just didn't discuss any of that. Right before I moved here I found out my sister had been having private conversations with my mother and another of my sisters about all the private things I had told her over the course of time. I felt very betrayed by her and also that she had been telling wrong information about my life and being gay to my family. The phone call with my mother was one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do. Knowing that this woman does not approve of gay people and then having to have a Phone conversation with her son confronting him about it. I'm still a little uncomfortable thinking about it.

I now live in West Hollywood, CA. I am now to the point that I am my own person. I am not a bad person for being gay. I still have the same good morals I was raised with and can apply them to current times. I no longer feel dirty like I was taught to for being gay. Being gay isn't something that controls my life. It's not an occupation, it's just an aspect of my life and who I am.

As time goes on I feel better about my life and the decisions I have made. I had no say in being gay or straight. That was just the way I was born. I made the decision to be true to myself and my emotions and feelings and now can actually say I love myself and like the person I have become. I'm not finished with the project that is my life but I can finally close that chapter in the book. Happiness is something I am starting to know and my self worth grows every day. Now, when I think back to when my mother said Gay meant Happy, I smile and say to myself yes it does.