My coming out story is a complex one. It’s hard to determine
where to start because coming out for me was six years in the making. I guess
that I will just start when I started to notice that I was different than other
boys. This occurred at a young age for me, maybe eight? I’m not entirely sure.
But I noticed it at a young age. I was always wanting to play house, Barbies,
My Little Ponies, etc. with the neighborhood girls. I enjoyed that aspect of
make believe over toy guns, wars, and sports. That’s not to say that I didn’t
enjoy going for bike rides, roller blading, catching lizards, and typical boy
activities with the neighbor boys. I guess that I had a good healthy mixture of
doing both activities, but I was never as close to the boys as with the girls.
I remember feeling different and awkward at times around the boys. As I grew
older, most of my best friends were girls. I loved spending time with them and
they tended to be more tomboys, which allowed me to be both feminine and
masculine. It was a great way to grow up and helped be cultivate both my
feminine and masculine sides.
I developed my first crush in fourth grade. His name was
Robert. He was popular, cute, and sweet. He was one of the only popular boys
who were nice to me. He would invite me to play sports with them and he would
sometimes sit with me at lunch. I enjoyed his company and would think about him
a lot. At the time, I thought that I just really wanted to be his friend and to
become popular; however, as I have looked back, it is so obvious that I had a
crush on him. I used to fantasize about hanging out with him and nobody
else—being best friends. I had a crush on him for many years and other crushes
developed too. They tended to be the popular boys who were the most attractive
at school.
In seventh grade, I started to explore my sexuality. I
discovered pornography and learned very quickly that I didn’t like straight
porn. Within a couple of weeks, I found and was watching gay porn. This
occurred throughout all of my teenage years with my parents catching me a
couple of times, but I lied my way out it. This was the first step of my coming
out process. This is when I first questioning if I was gay, but I remained in
complete denial. I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want that to be the
reason why I was different than the other boys and why I felt that I was the
only Mormon who felt this way. As I grew up, I was angsty when it came to the
topic of my sexuality. I would punish myself with scripture study, prayers, and
service in order to get rid of the gay. I did everything that I could so that I
could understand myself or change. I was in denial. I didn’t want to be gay,
let alone different.
Over the years, I started to realize that I wasn’t going to
change and that God wasn’t going to change me. This was when I was about
sixteen. I started to be ok with the fact that I am gay. I started to call
myself gay in my head. I didn’t really know what it meant though. I knew that I
liked men and fantasized about them and I knew that I this was part of who I
am—nothing that I could do would change that fact because I already had gone
through it. My crushes became even stronger and I started to joke with friends
by pretending to be gay at times. I almost ended up confessing my big secret to
a guy friend, but I couldn’t do it. As I started accepting myself, I became
happier and started loving life again.
I graduated from high school without coming out, but I came
close to coming out to some friends a couple of times. When I entered college,
things changed drastically for me. I didn’t feel the pressure to hide anymore
and I was ready to reveal my secret.
0 comments:
Post a Comment