I'm out
Well, I've done it. I told my parents that I'm gay. It was actually easier than I thought it would be. This past weekend I went to go visit my family, and while at home my mother asked me, "do you pursue women at all?"
When she asked me that question I knew the answer, but I wasn't quite ready to tell them the truth. But it made me think. On the way home I contacted my friend Erik and he encouraged me to come out to my parents. I resisted, but he ultimately convinced me. He said it would give me, "the strength I needed right now." He was absolutely right. For far too long I have lived a split life.
I cannot tell you how difficult it is, unless you already know, to live two lives and try at all costs to keep them separate. I had my life, the part of me in which I was true to myself, and the other part at home where I hid who I was. I have to say being gay is not who I am, but it is a major part of who I am. It does not define me as a person, and I've always disliked other gay people whose entire identity was based on being gay. But, being gay implies a whole range of implications. For one, it means that I have to deal with society that rejects part of me. It also means that basic assumptions about me cannot be made. My boss assumes, incorrectly, that I date women. So she gives me advice about dating women, which is totally irrelevant in some cases.
So let me tell you about my life as a gay person. In the seventh grade we began PE classes in which we had to change clothes but not shower. It was then that I noticed I was attracted to a few other guys who were clearly more developed than me in the course of their puberty. I would joke with other guys to sort of feel my way to see if they too have such feelings, but usually ended in ridicule, and I had to joke off what I said. My split life began high school. Because Waterford did not have a high school at the time, everyone in Waterford had to take the bus to Riverbank high school. Suddenly my social arena doubled in size, because now I had two cities full of people. One of the first things my new friends in Riverbank asked was, "are you gay?" I was startled by this question. I had always known I was less masculine and more feminine, opting out of sports and into books and science and music. In my mind I thought, "I'm not gay, I'm just different, and everyone at Waterford knows that already." But the ideas remained and the seed has been planted, "was I gay?" The more I thought about it the more realized that I was attracted to guys, and that I didn't know what to call it. Certainly I, the good son of a Christian family who always attended Sunday church, cannot be gay. Gay people, I was taught, were evil. Gay people, were to be ridiculed and make fun of. Thus, when I realized I was gay, I fell into a very deep depression. It was the worst depression of my life. Here I was, 14 years old, not a person in the world I could turn to for fear of rejection, at the lowest point in my life. There were times that I thought about suicide, but I knew life wasn't completely worthless. I held onto hope and dove into coping mechanisms. I read science books for fun, focusing on the fantastic world about us and how it worked. I turned to computers and learned how they worked. I became addicted to Star Trek. I was latching onto things that made logical sense; things I could understand completely, things that could be explained. I could not explain why I was gay. The family atmosphere on Star Trek Voyager began to represent for me my ideal family. They did not reject people who are different than them, but rather embraced other cultures. I latched onto them as a way to cope.
Shortly thereafter I began meeting other guys online who are gay my age. I wrote an e-mail to one guy who was a few years older than me and at the time, our computer was known to crash all the time. So I got into the habit of copying and pasting long typed e-mails to memory, in case AOL crashed. So one day I sent him an e-mail and had copied and pasted part of it. The next day my mother was upset at the computer, and in a fit of rage she smashed the keyboard, accidentally pushing control V. My e-mail, mostly complete, appeared on her screen and she read it all. She printed it out and when I came home from school that day she asked me what was. I denied everything. I was incredibly afraid. I felt like if she knew, she would reject me and ridicule me. She didn't believe me, because the next week I was taken to a Christian counselor. My parents brought me to discuss my obsessive behavior with Star Trek and, "other things." The first session was okay. The counselor mostly tried to make a working relationship with me, and at the end said that we would have more sessions. The next week my parents sat in with him and he said that the next week we would discuss the other things. The following week, I absolutely refused to go. My parents literally drive me kicking and screaming as a 15-year-old into the car. I was crying immense amounts of tears and I shut down emotionally. When we arrived at a counselor saw how distraught I was didn't talk about the "other things." The following week we went to Mexico and when we returned we found out that the counselor was going through divorce. My parents dropped the whole issue.
My first encounter with another gay person was at music and drama camp, also known as MAD Camp. His name was Spencer, and he was the most feminine male I ever met. I was drawn to him, not because of his femininity, but because it was the first time meeting someone like me. I remember that week as one of the funnest weeks of my life. Back home, however, word got out at church that I'd been hanging out with a gay person at camp. Again my mother asked me about this incident and I lied. I wasn't allowed to go to camp the next year.
A few years went by and my parents ignored the situation. I had dated two girls in early high school, and found that I just was not into them at all. I dated a few guys in high school, and found them to be 10 times more exciting than girls.
Then I moved to Davis. I was off to college and I couldn't have been more excited to finally be out on my own and free. My split life became divided even further. I was now able to fully live my life and be okay with being gay. I went through an intense struggle in college over my faith and my sexuality. I was part of the Christian club known as campus Crusade for Christ. Early on I informed them of my sexuality, and they saw it as my struggle. At the time, I probably thought it was my struggle as well. I was tearing myself apart. They were days where I would accept being gay, and meet other guys like me, and then I would go home and begin to feel guilt. I would vow to God that I was no longer going to be gay, and I could rest easy. But it ended up never sticking. I would always begin to feel very alone. One of my good friends who I had earlier dated and noticed my conflict and told me that I was tearing myself apart and that I needed to choose one or the other. He said, either I should be gay all the time, or completely suppressed being gay. For the first time in my life I decided to be okay with being gay. My conflict ended overnight. My depression and within a few days. I finally felt like a complete human being. I no longer felt broken.
One problem still remained. I still had not figured out my faith in all of this. So in order to be sane, in order to be able to go to school and be successful, I decided that I didn't need to worry about my faith for awhile. I shut out God. I quit campus Crusade for Christ. What ended up happening was I became somebody who I was no longer proud of. I began to lie more. My morals as a person went down the drain. And then a few years later I realized I was missing a major part of who I am. So I began to really examine what my faith has said about homosexuality. I began to realize one key ideal was more important to Jesus than any other ideal. "Love your God with all your heart soul and mind... love your neighbor and your enemies." That was the general ideal expressed throughout all of Christ's teachings. I figured, if I were a Christian and followed Christ, then I would love my God, my neighbors, and my enemies all the same. All the other details, all the other comments seemed to fade away in the light of that realization. Everything else in the Bible is simply gods love for us. A father or mother will set rules for their children to protect them. That is what the Bible is to a lot of people. But others tend to take these laws and rules meant for our good, and they take their literal meaning as ways to suppress anything that does not line up with their own vision of the world. My aunt once told me that Jesus never spoke about gay people. She said, "if being gay was such a horrible sin, don't you think Jesus would have mentioned it?" I was astonished by this. I didn't know that this was the case. I was sure that so many people claimed it was such a terrible thing in the Bible, then it must be true. The more I examined it, the more I realized the truth on this matter. Jesus never mentioned it. I also began to realize that the Old Testament was God's early law. Jesus came to say that the new law was one of love and that the old law was superseded by the new.I found it interesting that modern Christians could pick and choose which of the old laws to obey and which ones no longer applied to them. There are many laws in the Old Testament that many Christians would never even consider obeying. They would say that Christ came to bring the new law of love, and that those laws no longer apply to them. So why can they do this and I cannot? I began to take this a little bit further recently. Thinking of being gay as a sin was something that has always bothered me. Something so incredibly natural to me, as finding my fellow man attractive, can hardly be a sin. Sure, it is different, it is not the majority, but that does not make something a sin. The more I read about homosexuality and the Bible, the more I came to realize that my beliefs have changed. I do not view the Bible as most fundamentalist Christians would. They view every word in the Bible as fact. They don't try to interpret what the culture of the time would have seen it as. They don't examine the historical -- critical approach to reading the Bible. For instance, if somebody says that you are out on left-field, you take that to mean that the person is saying you are crazy. It is clearly a baseball cultural reference, which refers to a ball being thrown very poorly in a baseball game. Now imagine somebody reads this statement 2000 years from now in the year 4009, and baseball has been completely removed from the face of the planet. It would have no idea what that phrase really means. so how can we take the Bible literally, 2000-5000 years after the events have happened. It seems our only choice, is to examine the culture in which it was written historically. Then, using what many historians and theologians agree upon, we base our framework of thought about the Bible. When you do this, many historians agree that the very idea of a modern homosexual who lives a monogamous loving lifestyle did not exist in the past. Any reference to those in the past, is a reference to heinous people who committed serious acts against the current culture. Before I get too far into this my point is I have come to realizations about my faith that allowed me to reconcile my faith and my sexuality.
I'm Christian, I'm gay, and I'm human. We all have several identities. We can be American, Californians, Sacramentans, white, black, male, female, human, Christian, country, urban, et cetera. I have found away from myself to allow all of these identities to flourish within me without one causing psychologically undue suffering.
What's so interesting now is that my split life that I have lived for nearly 12 years is finally one life. It's not completely put back together yet but in the coming months and weeks I will be doing that. I'm not yet fully comfortable being completely out, but it's something that was necessary to be a better person, no matter who I am inconveniencing with the knowledge.
And even though I could go on and on, I will leave this blog here. I'm finally starting to live. It took one courageous act of honesty to tear down my deepest fears, and now that it's done, I realized the fear was nothing but the power that fear can have over us. So to all of you reading this, if there is anyone out there who fears what others will think of you, don't let fear take over your life and split it in two.
When she asked me that question I knew the answer, but I wasn't quite ready to tell them the truth. But it made me think. On the way home I contacted my friend Erik and he encouraged me to come out to my parents. I resisted, but he ultimately convinced me. He said it would give me, "the strength I needed right now." He was absolutely right. For far too long I have lived a split life.
I cannot tell you how difficult it is, unless you already know, to live two lives and try at all costs to keep them separate. I had my life, the part of me in which I was true to myself, and the other part at home where I hid who I was. I have to say being gay is not who I am, but it is a major part of who I am. It does not define me as a person, and I've always disliked other gay people whose entire identity was based on being gay. But, being gay implies a whole range of implications. For one, it means that I have to deal with society that rejects part of me. It also means that basic assumptions about me cannot be made. My boss assumes, incorrectly, that I date women. So she gives me advice about dating women, which is totally irrelevant in some cases.
So let me tell you about my life as a gay person. In the seventh grade we began PE classes in which we had to change clothes but not shower. It was then that I noticed I was attracted to a few other guys who were clearly more developed than me in the course of their puberty. I would joke with other guys to sort of feel my way to see if they too have such feelings, but usually ended in ridicule, and I had to joke off what I said. My split life began high school. Because Waterford did not have a high school at the time, everyone in Waterford had to take the bus to Riverbank high school. Suddenly my social arena doubled in size, because now I had two cities full of people. One of the first things my new friends in Riverbank asked was, "are you gay?" I was startled by this question. I had always known I was less masculine and more feminine, opting out of sports and into books and science and music. In my mind I thought, "I'm not gay, I'm just different, and everyone at Waterford knows that already." But the ideas remained and the seed has been planted, "was I gay?" The more I thought about it the more realized that I was attracted to guys, and that I didn't know what to call it. Certainly I, the good son of a Christian family who always attended Sunday church, cannot be gay. Gay people, I was taught, were evil. Gay people, were to be ridiculed and make fun of. Thus, when I realized I was gay, I fell into a very deep depression. It was the worst depression of my life. Here I was, 14 years old, not a person in the world I could turn to for fear of rejection, at the lowest point in my life. There were times that I thought about suicide, but I knew life wasn't completely worthless. I held onto hope and dove into coping mechanisms. I read science books for fun, focusing on the fantastic world about us and how it worked. I turned to computers and learned how they worked. I became addicted to Star Trek. I was latching onto things that made logical sense; things I could understand completely, things that could be explained. I could not explain why I was gay. The family atmosphere on Star Trek Voyager began to represent for me my ideal family. They did not reject people who are different than them, but rather embraced other cultures. I latched onto them as a way to cope.
Shortly thereafter I began meeting other guys online who are gay my age. I wrote an e-mail to one guy who was a few years older than me and at the time, our computer was known to crash all the time. So I got into the habit of copying and pasting long typed e-mails to memory, in case AOL crashed. So one day I sent him an e-mail and had copied and pasted part of it. The next day my mother was upset at the computer, and in a fit of rage she smashed the keyboard, accidentally pushing control V. My e-mail, mostly complete, appeared on her screen and she read it all. She printed it out and when I came home from school that day she asked me what was. I denied everything. I was incredibly afraid. I felt like if she knew, she would reject me and ridicule me. She didn't believe me, because the next week I was taken to a Christian counselor. My parents brought me to discuss my obsessive behavior with Star Trek and, "other things." The first session was okay. The counselor mostly tried to make a working relationship with me, and at the end said that we would have more sessions. The next week my parents sat in with him and he said that the next week we would discuss the other things. The following week, I absolutely refused to go. My parents literally drive me kicking and screaming as a 15-year-old into the car. I was crying immense amounts of tears and I shut down emotionally. When we arrived at a counselor saw how distraught I was didn't talk about the "other things." The following week we went to Mexico and when we returned we found out that the counselor was going through divorce. My parents dropped the whole issue.
My first encounter with another gay person was at music and drama camp, also known as MAD Camp. His name was Spencer, and he was the most feminine male I ever met. I was drawn to him, not because of his femininity, but because it was the first time meeting someone like me. I remember that week as one of the funnest weeks of my life. Back home, however, word got out at church that I'd been hanging out with a gay person at camp. Again my mother asked me about this incident and I lied. I wasn't allowed to go to camp the next year.
A few years went by and my parents ignored the situation. I had dated two girls in early high school, and found that I just was not into them at all. I dated a few guys in high school, and found them to be 10 times more exciting than girls.
Then I moved to Davis. I was off to college and I couldn't have been more excited to finally be out on my own and free. My split life became divided even further. I was now able to fully live my life and be okay with being gay. I went through an intense struggle in college over my faith and my sexuality. I was part of the Christian club known as campus Crusade for Christ. Early on I informed them of my sexuality, and they saw it as my struggle. At the time, I probably thought it was my struggle as well. I was tearing myself apart. They were days where I would accept being gay, and meet other guys like me, and then I would go home and begin to feel guilt. I would vow to God that I was no longer going to be gay, and I could rest easy. But it ended up never sticking. I would always begin to feel very alone. One of my good friends who I had earlier dated and noticed my conflict and told me that I was tearing myself apart and that I needed to choose one or the other. He said, either I should be gay all the time, or completely suppressed being gay. For the first time in my life I decided to be okay with being gay. My conflict ended overnight. My depression and within a few days. I finally felt like a complete human being. I no longer felt broken.
One problem still remained. I still had not figured out my faith in all of this. So in order to be sane, in order to be able to go to school and be successful, I decided that I didn't need to worry about my faith for awhile. I shut out God. I quit campus Crusade for Christ. What ended up happening was I became somebody who I was no longer proud of. I began to lie more. My morals as a person went down the drain. And then a few years later I realized I was missing a major part of who I am. So I began to really examine what my faith has said about homosexuality. I began to realize one key ideal was more important to Jesus than any other ideal. "Love your God with all your heart soul and mind... love your neighbor and your enemies." That was the general ideal expressed throughout all of Christ's teachings. I figured, if I were a Christian and followed Christ, then I would love my God, my neighbors, and my enemies all the same. All the other details, all the other comments seemed to fade away in the light of that realization. Everything else in the Bible is simply gods love for us. A father or mother will set rules for their children to protect them. That is what the Bible is to a lot of people. But others tend to take these laws and rules meant for our good, and they take their literal meaning as ways to suppress anything that does not line up with their own vision of the world. My aunt once told me that Jesus never spoke about gay people. She said, "if being gay was such a horrible sin, don't you think Jesus would have mentioned it?" I was astonished by this. I didn't know that this was the case. I was sure that so many people claimed it was such a terrible thing in the Bible, then it must be true. The more I examined it, the more I realized the truth on this matter. Jesus never mentioned it. I also began to realize that the Old Testament was God's early law. Jesus came to say that the new law was one of love and that the old law was superseded by the new.I found it interesting that modern Christians could pick and choose which of the old laws to obey and which ones no longer applied to them. There are many laws in the Old Testament that many Christians would never even consider obeying. They would say that Christ came to bring the new law of love, and that those laws no longer apply to them. So why can they do this and I cannot? I began to take this a little bit further recently. Thinking of being gay as a sin was something that has always bothered me. Something so incredibly natural to me, as finding my fellow man attractive, can hardly be a sin. Sure, it is different, it is not the majority, but that does not make something a sin. The more I read about homosexuality and the Bible, the more I came to realize that my beliefs have changed. I do not view the Bible as most fundamentalist Christians would. They view every word in the Bible as fact. They don't try to interpret what the culture of the time would have seen it as. They don't examine the historical -- critical approach to reading the Bible. For instance, if somebody says that you are out on left-field, you take that to mean that the person is saying you are crazy. It is clearly a baseball cultural reference, which refers to a ball being thrown very poorly in a baseball game. Now imagine somebody reads this statement 2000 years from now in the year 4009, and baseball has been completely removed from the face of the planet. It would have no idea what that phrase really means. so how can we take the Bible literally, 2000-5000 years after the events have happened. It seems our only choice, is to examine the culture in which it was written historically. Then, using what many historians and theologians agree upon, we base our framework of thought about the Bible. When you do this, many historians agree that the very idea of a modern homosexual who lives a monogamous loving lifestyle did not exist in the past. Any reference to those in the past, is a reference to heinous people who committed serious acts against the current culture. Before I get too far into this my point is I have come to realizations about my faith that allowed me to reconcile my faith and my sexuality.
I'm Christian, I'm gay, and I'm human. We all have several identities. We can be American, Californians, Sacramentans, white, black, male, female, human, Christian, country, urban, et cetera. I have found away from myself to allow all of these identities to flourish within me without one causing psychologically undue suffering.
What's so interesting now is that my split life that I have lived for nearly 12 years is finally one life. It's not completely put back together yet but in the coming months and weeks I will be doing that. I'm not yet fully comfortable being completely out, but it's something that was necessary to be a better person, no matter who I am inconveniencing with the knowledge.
And even though I could go on and on, I will leave this blog here. I'm finally starting to live. It took one courageous act of honesty to tear down my deepest fears, and now that it's done, I realized the fear was nothing but the power that fear can have over us. So to all of you reading this, if there is anyone out there who fears what others will think of you, don't let fear take over your life and split it in two.