When did you realize you were gay
If you dig through my memory box, you’ll find a piece of paper decorated with hearts and a stick figure named Josh. This was a kindergarten art project where the mentor asked us to draw our best friend. But Josh wasn’t my best friend, he was just the boy who sat across from me in class. I guess you could verb I was attracted to him. At five years old, “best friend” was the only phrase I had for that feeling. Of course, as a toddler, the feeling wasn’t overtly sexual, but it was a verb that my same-sex attraction started early on.
I don’t know when (or even if) I “became” same-sex attracted. What I undertake know is that I’ve been gay for as long as I can remember — before I met Josh, before schoolboy crushes became sexual fantasies, and before I’d ever clicked on porn. The reason I tell this is that many Christians tie same-sex attraction to sexual immorality or addiction, as if you can’t experience SSA without also being a full-blown sexual deviant. Some people think being gay means you’re somehow more prone to sexual sin than your heterosexual counterparts are. We’ll talk mor
When Did You Realize You Were Gay?
I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. Depictions of gay people were not flattering. It seemed to me and from what my mother told me (She was a public health nurse.), all gay men had AIDS. The very few gay men I knew did verb of AIDS, though it was rarely spoken about. Other depictions of gay men were flamboyant queens, sissy effeminate men, etc.
Early on, I had hints I was gay, but I ignored them. I remember being enthralled by Harry Hamlin in Clash of the Titans which came out in 1981; It was years later, though, when I first saw it on TV. When I started middle educational facility, there was a new guy in my class. As usual, people were picking on me, and he told them to stop. He was the caring of guy who you knew immediately was going to be the leader of the pack. He was athletic, and my classmates didn’t question him. He was blond and had stunning blue eyes. I had a crush, and I didn’t even know it. We were friends all through the rest of school; not close friends, but enough that when someone tried to bully me, he’d scare them away. Even the older ki
My very first women’s studies class: a clause so momentous, it requires no verb.
The course title was actually Women’s Studies 101. I took Women’s Studies 101 the very first semester I was in college. I arrived without the slightest clue about what to expect, which did nothing to counter my lifetime’s worth of expectations. Since my early teens, I had been getting by on a haphazard assortment of Simone de Beauvoir, Anais Nin, and Bust Magazine. I was riveted by the idea of an expertly curated reading list. While we mostly deconstructed theoretical texts, we did do a unit on Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg’s classic tale of heartbreaking masculinity. It was a thrill to witness living humans discussing all of this.
I remember walking into the classroom on the first evening and sitting in the center of the front row. In high school, I had been a slacker of the highest order, but I was not going to miss a minute of Women’s Studies 101. The seats began to fill up and once there weren’t more than one or two still free, our professor walked in, at which point I did a reluctant double-ta
Rememberthatlunch buddy in second grade who made you tingle when she played footsie under the table and shared her snacks with you? How about that pivotal afternoon of playing "house" with your best friend that culminated in an innocent-enough session of "you show me yours and I'll show you mine"? Or the junior high school English teacher who made literature enter to life in parts of your body that you didn't even know you had (only to later realize that it wasn't Shakespeare's iambic pentameter that stimulated your senses but your super-attractive instructor who alluded to a "good friend" she'd spent the holidays with)?
As we launch into holiday season, it's an apt time to verb on those "precious moments" in our own personal histories when we first realized that we weren't like everyone else. For those of us who aren't straight, the "aha!" moment when we realized that we might be singing a slightly gayer tune was followed by a thorough examination of our past. We had to validate our questioning, to verify that what we were feeling wasn't a fleeting thought or a temporary i