My Coming-Out Story, Part Two

My Coming-Out Story, Part Two: Sorta Like a Lesbian Pollyanna

Note: If you have not yet read Part One of my coming out story, I would highly suggest you do so (by clicking here) before continuing. Otherwise, this part will make even less sense than it will for those who have read the first part.

A quick reiteration from the first part of this story.... Lest I appear to have an over-inflated view of the significance of my own coming-out story (since I am dividing it up over the course of four posts and going into extensive background information), allow me to restate that this is the first time I have ever written out my story in a disciplined manner, so I am doing this for my own posterity and will include this in my personal journal. I do hope that you will find it to be entertaining, though, as I share some unique experiences I had.

Part one ended with my ultra-conservative Baptist Republican parents determining that Los Angeles was the Gomorrah to San Francisco's Sodom and deciding to pluck my brother and me from the fire (they didn't notice we were already flaming) and move us to the wholesome, values-driven Midwest.

The way they went about telling us brothers that we were moving from everyone and everything we had known since birth and going to a place where snow fell from the sky was classic. During spring break in 1988, we flew to Chicago to visit some friends who had moved to the northwest suburbs the year before. At least this was the cover story. One day, while my brother and I thought our parents were driving us to lunch, we instead pulled up to a newly-completed house. This, our parents said, was our new home. I kid you not. That was the first inkling we had that we were leaving California. Within a week of our return to California after our "vacation," my dad had flown to Chicago to start a new job, and when school was done a couple months later, the rest of us joined him.

My parents said that the move was to protect us boys from the bad influences of California. Ironically, about a month after we moved to the suburbs of Chicago, I saw a pornographic magazine for the first time. It was a Playgirl magazine, and someone had put it behind the MAD Magazine that I had intended to read. Now, by this time I was in high school and was self-aware enough to realize I felt emotional connections to guys and attraction toward them, but I had never really seen guys naked before. If this sounds unbelievable, remember the first part of my story, that my entire life was centered around the church. The church school I attended frowned upon guys seeing each other unclothed, even in locker rooms, so the few times I saw another guy naked were so fleeting that it didn't register. So, looking at that Playgirl, something clicked in my head that finally made sense. The feelings I felt around guys were physical. And if the mental connection wasn't enough, my body made it very clear, requiring me to quickly hide the porn and buy the MAD Magazine to use as a shield in front of my pants.

Shortly after this, I asked one of my new Chicago friends (who I thought was quite cute) if he had seen guys naked. Turns out that Chicago church people haven't become quite as paranoid, because when I started attending my new church school that fall, I found what my friend told me to be true, that community showering was the norm after Phys Ed class. So there I am, not only just beginning to be aware that I am gay, but also never before having ever been around naked guys, when suddenly my entire class is naked in front of me after getting all hot and sweaty on the soccer field. I thought I would die (and didn't care where I would go). It took almost a month before I could walk into the shower room without a large washcloth strategically placed until I could stand under the coldest water I could tolerate.

Well, the conversation with my cute friend must have caught his attention, because not long later he brought up the subject again. I was so overwhelmed with what was happening, that I honestly do not remember exactly how things developed, but I do know that he and I ended up touching and groping until I came with a guy for the first time. That began ongoing encounters that lasted for nearly 4 years til I graduated from high school. Both of us were so sheltered that we did not know there was even anything to do beyond jerking each other off, but we knew we liked that a lot and did it at every opportunity.

This created a problem. Suddenly, I found myself on the express train to hell. Every time I sneaked away with my friend, I was certain I would drop dead within moments. After all, I was committing the worst possible sin, being gay. I knew there was something horribly wrong with me, but I didn't know what I had done to be this bad of a person. I would daily lie flat on my stomach with my arms outstretched begging for forgiveness and for God to fix me.

If it seems that the answer should have been obvious to me, that I wasn't a person whose evil character brought this judgment of homosexuality upon myself, keep in mind again how sheltered my life had been to that point. All of my life-forming influences had been from my church and parents. My TV-watching was strictly limited, consisting essentially of Little House on the Prairie and Captain Kangaroo. But I had never been confronted before with anything that would make me doubt those influences in my life. After all, the vast majority of what my church and parents taught me was essentially good stuff. It is a worldview that, while sadly blind in certain spots, is overall not a bad system. I was taught respect for others, kindness, honesty, playing fair, being willing to sacrifice my own comfort for the good of others--all things that I try to honor to this day. My parents demonstrated a love for each other that I hope to emulate in any relationship I have--a love that messed up on occasion but admitted fault, asked for forgiveness, and above all, stayed together. Obviously I see the glaring blind spots now, but as a high schooler, all I saw was that my life had been pretty decent compared to others I saw who didn't follow the rules and guidelines I was given.

So I thought the "gay" problem was with me. But, as I finished high school, I thought that going to a Christian college would help me figure out the problem. Surely, this was just a temporary thing, and now that I was going into college, I would find a nice girl who I would be attracted to, and we would have the same perfect life my parents seemed to have. I said goodbye to my jerk-off buddy on graduation day, and I never saw him again. The next fall, I left for school with a determination that I would never do such a thing with a guy again. And, for 10 years, I never did.

But that will be explained in Part Three of my coming-out story. Click here to read.

Today's Holidays:

• National Traffic Directors' Day (USA)
• Plan Your Epitaph Day
• National Men Make Dinner Day (USA)