Note: If you have not already done so, be sure to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of my coming-out story so this part will make sense a bit more.
My Coming-Out Story, Part Four: Personal Exposure
When I returned to the States from my abbreviated time in Europe (see earlier posts for context), I bounced around aimlessly for a bit before finally landing in northwestern Illinois in May 2003. It was that month when I would finally begin to make choices that would help me to move in a new direction away from the cycle of frustration I had been in for so many years. I would indeed begin a new life. But, as with any new life, there is inevitably some birthing pain.
When I moved into my new Midwestern apartment, I did two things almost immediately. First, I found a new church to attend. Call it force of habit or whatever you will, but I had attended church my entire life, and the thought still had not occurred to me that not attending church could ever be an option. Instead of being an active participant in a pastoral role, however, I took much more of a spectator's position in the new church, not really wanting to attract any more attention to myself. And second, I decided I really needed to figure out this whole "gay thing" through some method other than by going to church people for advice or by just ignoring it and hoping it would go away.
The problem was, I had no idea how to meet gay people. I was two months away from my 28th birthday, and I was still one of the most sheltered people you would ever meet. I had never knowingly associated with another gay person. I had never entered a bar of any kind (much less a gay one) except once in Wisconsin to call for assistance when my car broke down in a blizzard. I had never danced. I had never tasted alcohol, smoked a cigarette, or done drugs. And yes, I was a virgin (to all sex, straight or gay-- I never even had a romantic kiss!).
Fortunately, technology was advancing quite nicely by this point, and I remembered something I had observed when checking my e-mail on Yahoo. I saw this fascinating site called Yahoo Personals, in which you could say whether you were a "Man seeking a Woman" or a "Woman seeking a Man." But, amazingly enough, you could actually change the option to be "Man seeking a Man." Simultaneously terrified and aroused, I went to the site and, for the first time ever, saw personal ads for gay men.
I looked at the ads and pictures for a week or so, and finally, I worked up the courage to reply to one. Looking back, I am amazed at my good fortune in that first tentative contact. Any of us who have been on an online dating site know that, when you are contacted by someone with no picture posted (which was the case with me, as I was terrified someone I knew would find out I was on a gay site), more often than not, the person is ignored. But the guy that I e-mailed actually responded. He was a handsome college student, just a couple years younger than me, and he was at a university about 45 minutes from where I was living. And, to show you how blessed I was to meet this particular guy, a quick fast-forward to today, November 2006, finds that that same guy is one of my dearest friends and lives just a few doors down the street from me here in Chicago, nearly two hours from where I was living when I first e-mailed him!
When my friend responded to my e-mail greeting, I explained to him a bit of my situation, that I was completely new to all of this and absolutely terrified (I think I worded it as "kinda nervous"). He kindly corresponded back and forth with me several times, but it being May, he was just finishing school and was, in fact, graduating. So, in early June, he moved two hours away to Chicago, before we ever had the chance to meet in person. But, by that point, we decided we did want to meet, and so one day we arraned to have dessert in one of the Chicago suburbs about half the distance between us. I had a great time and was amazed to find a normal, attractive, masculine gay guy who I got along well with! I was thinking that he must be the only one of his kind, and I just got lucky!
That first meeting was followed up only a couple weeks later by the night that would change everything for me. June 27, 2003. Friday night. Pride weekend in Chicago. Exactly one month before my 28th birthday. My new friend invited me to drive into the city and stay at his place. He would then give me a tour of gay Chicago. I had to leave Saturday afternoon for a business trip to Dallas, but I agreed to hang out with him on Friday night and see what it was all about.
Now, try to picture this in your mind. As we left his apartment to head out to the gay clubs of Chicago, I was braced for the most extreme situations I could imagine. Because my exposure to gay people was essentially what I saw on the cover of Focus on the Family magazines, I naturally assumed that my friend and I would be the only two gay guys there who were not dressed in women's clothing, and I was certain that these "gay clubs" would be full of men having sex together. I had never been in any bar or club, so I didn't even have straight clubs to use as a reference point in my mind.
So, when we walked into Spin and Roscoe's and I saw these places full of handsome guys, some of whom even smiled at me, I was completely overwhelmed. I experienced a range of emotions that night that I have felt very seldom to that intensity. It was that same night that I tasted alcohol for the first time, that I was knowingly around more than one gay guy at a time, that I danced for the first time, and that I stayed the night at another gay guy's house for the first time.
It was at some point when I was with my friend on the dance floor at Roscoe's, awkwardly attempting to dance but having no idea how, that I experienced something that probably all of us who have come out have felt at some point. Bonnie Tyler was singing "Total Eclipse of the Heart", a song I had never heard before but knew I instantly loved. And it hit me. For the first time in my life, I was real. This was me. I wasn't suppressing what I knew I felt. I wasn't trying to be what everyone else expected of me just to keep them happy. I was just being who I was. And it was the most freeing, most satisfying, most relieving feeling I had ever had. For a moment, I just closed my eyes, and soaked in the sound and atmosphere, and I knew nothing would ever be the same for me. To this day, when I hear "Total Eclipse of the Heart", I feel a little bit better and smile a bit more.
That weekend began a summer of exploring this new world that had opened up to me. With perhaps only one or two exceptions, I would drive two hours to Chicago every Friday night and go out with my friend, then drive home Saturday evening. I could not have asked for a kinder, more easy-going, more patient friend than he. We got along famously, and he would let me go out and explore on my own, always keeping his door open to me anytime I needed a place to go.
Oh, and I won't kiss and tell and say with whom or when or where, but by the end of the summer, I wasn't a virgin anymore. And I found out I am a big fan of kissing.
Summer began to wind down, and near the end of August, I concluded that I needed to be honest about who I was with the people in my life. The very first person that I came out to was my roommate, a very hot straight guy. If all my other conversations went as well as that, I would have been the luckiest guy ever. My roommate could not have been more supportive. I think he knew the difficult times that were going to be on my path soon, because he went out of his way to make me comfortable and to let me know I could be real around him. He knew that I thought he was hot, and I think he loved the attention. The first time I met his girlfriend was when I arrived home to find the two of them making out on the couch in the living room. My roommate introduced me to his girlfriend and then told her, "Eukolos wishes it was he who was on the couch making out with me!" He would walk around the house after a shower wearing only his towel and say, "Eukolos, I bet you wish this towel would fall off, don't you?"
The next situation, however, did not go as well. I knew that, if I was going to be real and stop faking, I would have to change churches, because the church I was attending took a very clear stance against homosexuality. However, I naively hoped that I could leave quietly, explaining to the pastor that I appreciated his kindness to me, but that I needed to move on. Well, after writing a very kind, non-judgmental letter to the pastor, he completely freaked out, and as I mentioned in part 3 of this story, he told me he was going to pray that God would kill me, then he kicked me out of the church.
That was the breaking point for me. In a short time, I had seen unconditional acceptance and kindness from my gay friend in Chicago (and a growing number of other gay guys I was meeting there), but then I had seen flat-out mean-spirited and angry responses from church people. I figured that, since every church experience when I was real about my sexuality had been so bad, I no longer wanted anything to do with church. So in September 2003, for the first time in my 28 years of life, I stopped attending church. And I decided to move to Chicago.
By the end of August, I knew the inevitable could not be postponed much longer. I needed to tell my family. And it happened that our entire family would be gathering in Los Angeles in mid-September for my cousin's wedding. So, since it was only a couple weeks out and my parents and brother and I were going to stay a few days after the wedding, I thought that would be an ideal opportunity to explain things to them.
Well, once again I am a bit long-winded. If I have not built up enough anticipation for this next part of the story yet, I don't know what will. But to do this justice, I will have to extend the story a bit further into another post, which I will attempt to write quickly.
However, if your patience will indulge me a bit further today, let me conclude this post by sharing something that has been foundational in my life ever since 2003.
On September 10, 2004, I got my first tattoo. For many years I had been fascinated with tattoos, and in recent years that fascination had grown into an interest in getting one myself. However, after having observed many tattoos, I determined that, were I ever to get one, it would have to be very meaningful and significant to me, something that I won’t mind having on my body when I’m in my 70's. As cool as I might think it would be to have the Tazmanian Devil on my forearm in my mid-20's, I knew he wasn’t going to make the cut.
As I explained in this post, major life experiences culminated in September 2003, resulting in my moving to Chicago, Illinois, and beginning a new chapter in my life. During the following year, a number of lessons started to gel in my head that would become guiding principles for me in the days to come. At their core, these lessons were about kindness. Beginning early in 2002 and continuing through the fall of 2003, as I grew in my determination to resolve the issues concerning my sexuality and my faith, I saw extremes both of kindness and unkindness. Sadly, much of the unkindness came from those with whom I often aligned in my faith, but gladly, I saw amazing kindness from those with whom I found common ground in my sexuality. While my pastor (whom I had previously considered to be a close friend) called around to “out” me to people he did not even know and told me he would pray for God to kill me, some of my new gay friends surrounded me with kindness and showed me unconditional acceptance at a time when I desperately needed friends. In particular, two or three of my friends in Chicago, all of whom are Asian incidentally (perhaps signs of an incipient rice queen tendency?), helped me make it through that very difficult time in my life.
So, in September of 2004, I decided to get a tattoo to represent and remind me of the lessons I had been learning and the principles to which I would hopefully adhere as I continued on my journey.
I wanted every aspect of the tattoo “experience” to be significant. First, the timing of getting the tattoo was almost exactly one year to the day from when I had come out to my immediate family. I selected a tattoo that included Chinese characters as a tribute to my Asian friends who had been such an amazing help to me. The characters are the word “kindness” which, translated literally (assuming I have been told correctly), is “good at heart.” In 2004, this became the goal to which I determined to be most dedicated--to be a kind person, someone who indeed strove to be good at heart. The tattoo was both a reminder to me of the hurt that can be caused by unkindness and of the help and hope that can be infused by a kind word or action.
In addition to the characters, I included a small rabbit. This was partially a continued tribute to my Asian friends, as I was born in the Chinese year of the rabbit. But also, the rabbit is a symbol of kindness in some Asian cultures, so it seemed to fit with the theme of the tattoo. The location of the tattoo is over my heart, to illustrate to others (and to remind myself) that kindness is something that I endeavor to keep close to my heart.
More than two years later now, I can say that the tattoo has accomplished a good purpose in my own life. Because of its location, I see it every day as I get dressed, and although it may not always be a conscious thought, it is at least a subconscious reminder to me that I should strive to be a kind person. And, although I know I fail more often than I care to admit, I have been encouraged to see that, many times, my natural reaction to a difficult situation (one in which many would tell me to react in anger or to write someone off), is an almost-instinctive urge to show kindness. I say this fully aware that I have far to go before I could consider myself to be a wholly-kind person. But I hope that someday, as I continue this journey, people will be able to look back at my life and see acts of kindness scattered along the way.
Well, stay tuned shortly for what will hopefully be the last part in this story that is beginning to make Tolstoy jealous for length.
Today's Holiday:
- Travelers with Disabilities Week (Nov 26 - Dec 3)
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