6/9/25

One day, in the early 2000s, I was sitting on the sidewalk just outside my house, along with two of my neighbors and my big sister. They were at least four years older than I, and at the time, hanging out with your sibling and their older friends was objectively the coolest thing a child could do. We sat, and talked, and joked. Eventually, the jokes turned less funny and more earth-shattering as my sister began confiding in her friends how annoying I was. I followed her around like a puppy, I didn't have any friends of my own, and worst of all, I "played with Barbies". 

In 5th grade, as I began coming into my own - in my own way - I found a checkered scarf I was quite fond of. I wore it to school for a few days, using it as a hood, wrapping it around my neck, playfully nipping my classmates in the leg with it at recess. During gym, I had brought it with me, and as we gathered our things at the end of class, I placed it back atop my shoulders where it belonged. At the time, my school was so small that we had had a conjoined gym period with the two grades below us - an annoying bunch of kids who seemed much cockier and louder than I or my friends were at their age. One such annoying kid that I had already found a dislike for asked me, "What's up with that gay scarf?".

 When the pandemic struck, I was right in the middle of a strong gym-rat kick. I weighed about 175 pounds, went to the gym for 2 hours a day, and my faster metabolism required that I ate more than my stomach would ever have the need for today. This to say, the gym closing hit me harder than the school's, and I decided to take up long-distance skateboarding to quench my need for exercise. I would skate for upwards of 3 miles every day, finding small paths and bumpy roads I had never encountered before. On a few repeated occasions, I would make it back from some cornfield a few miles East of my house, and find myself on Main St.. As I passed my favorite Mexican restaurant and debated ordering takeout, I wet splat struck my shoe out of nowhere. Before my brain could even question whether or not today called for rain, a white, four-door Jeep brimming with High School jocks spitting at me screamed "faggot" just in time for me to make eye contact with them as the continued down the populated road.

 My Dad did social justice work for most of my life, and my mom had her girlfriends from time to time. I never questioned their acceptance of me or debated how telling them would go over. But somewhere amongst the sit-down talks to educate my sister and me about Martin Luther King Jr., the lectures on not using the R-word, and the hush-hush conversations of my Uncle's "roommate", it became impressed on me that conversations on the queer side of diversity were not ones my family were as well versed in having. There were safe-sex conversations, dating conversations, rules on who could sleep over and what gender they could be, but even when I reached the age my sister was when she had them, they never came up for me. My sexuality was something that I was made abundantly clear was blindingly obvious, yet my family tried so hard to avoid adding to it, it came off as something taboo, rather than something to be unashamed of. 

My oddness in the way of other boys my age was not missed on me, but the guilt I felt for it was a learned attribute after years of observing differences in the way I was treated by those around me. By the time I concluded that I was as gay as I had been told, I felt the only way to resolve the emotional turmoil would be to find someone who had gone through this phase already, and might be able to shed light on the path I was currently embarking on. My sister was the one who had found the messages in which I, embarrassingly, texted Conner Franta, asking for advice and telling him that my family was not ready to have that conversation. Rather than discussing with me what I was feeling, it became an argument in which the word "gay" was never once uttered, and it focused prominently on messaging people I didn't know, rather than the impact of the words I had written. In a stroke of panic, I doubled down and decided it would be better to confess to a lie - I didn't know what being gay meant. It seemed a safer option over having my big "coming out" moment derive from a conversation about social media safety. 

It wasn't until around the age of 16 that I finally opened my mouth about the topic again - this time, with my aunt. The bridge had been thoroughly burned with everyone I actually trusted. My sister was too far gone, 2 years into college and a few dozen miles away; she didn't need to be concerned with such issues. My mom, whom I told everything to, already knew, despite us never needing to talk about it, so it felt jovial to try to start now. My dad was a tricky object to hurdle, and it felt as though it would do more damage to my state than good had I brought the conversation up to him. So, deep into my first gut-wrenching, life-altering crush, I decided to confide in the only other non-friend I trusted. She was picking me up from school and taking me to work, and I attempted to beat around the bush of my issue without getting too much into it. But given our lack of previously established secrets and the amount of prodding occurring, I laid it all out. I told her how he had a girlfriend, how "telling him" - as is so often recommended - would only ruin our shortly budding friendship. I told her how much it sucked to see my sister get to have the high school relationships I craved while this soul-churning crush was bound to be as far as I got. Shortly after, the entirety of my family knew. Every aunt, uncle, grandparent, parent, sibling was aware of my sexuality before I even fully adjusted to what my sexuality was. 

The experiences I garnered in my earliest traversal through discovering my sexuality left a rickety bridge to continue my journey down. Despite never allowing it to cross into my view of others, my view of myself became a beaten and battered version of the once assured and confident little boy who didn't know there was anything different about himself. The only way to build myself back up was to never fall too far - what a waste to take hate and ignorance and put that back out into the world. I continued to surround myself with people who aided me rather than those who would ever make me feel as though the reproductive organs and their relationship to who I happen to find attractive were any kind of factor in our companionship. College was the most formative time for that development. Though there continued to be many bumps along the way, the time I spent alone, without the trouble of worrying about the conversations arising merely from my peculiarity, allowed me the necessary time to process it in the way I needed to. 

The queer experience centers largely on experimentation - experimenting with who you like, what you like, who you are, how you identify. There is a dilemma in queer youth that results in many younger kids leaving home as soon as possible; moving to big cities or more populated areas, and attempting to begin this process sooner rather than later. I think this dilemma is why I felt the need to move away so badly, and why, despite my opinions on where I moved to, it served me so well. Had I stayed home, I never would have met the people I needed to - good and bad - to have the perspective on the rest of my life that I now feel has been well earned. I'm excited for what the future has laid out for me, and I don't know what that future would be, or what it would look like if I had stayed closer to home. 

 Within the last four years, I have gathered some of the worst queer romantic relationships I would have previously thought to be impossible. There have been ones with boundary issues, consent kinks, 30-year-olds who seem less mature than my youngest friends. But the positive side is the beautiful people I continue to associate with today. The people who have experiences with what its like to crush on someone who will never see you the same way; to come out to you parents because you have to eventually, rather than because you want to; to be in with the cool kids but always know that there is an unspoken boundary placed between you and them. And it's these people, far more than any experience I could have doing the gayest thing one can do, that have rebuilt that little boy still yearning for some kind of recognition. 

The queer experience has very little to do with sex - in fact, I would argue that sex is the smallest factor in ones queerness. Rather, being queer is about the culture you associate with, the community you befriend, the people you hold close. It's about knowing your mere existence is controversial, but also knowing that it means nothing with who you are and what your values are. It's about finding camaraderie in places nobody would imagine you could find it, and crafting your community of like-minded people. It has nothing to do with who you date or where you put what, and everything to do with the person you are, and the people you keep close.