I’m ready to start living.

Base: Cafe Coming Out Forum
Date: Sun, 14 Jan 1996 02:43:10 GMT
From: Unknown (anonymous)

Nathan, I just read the letter you wrote about your experiences 
growing up.  That’s quite a letter.  Who am I?  My name is 
Brian and I live in North Dakota.  Do you know what kind of 
gay scene exists in North Dakota?  That’s right, none.  Here I 
am, 19 years old.  I have never dated in my life, be it male or 
female.  I have come out to three of my closest friends and my 
sister, but I still haven’t told my two older brothers or my 
parents.  Though by now, I’m sure they are suspicious.  I guess 
that I’ve been waiting for the right time, however I’m starting to 
think that one may not exist.  How and when did you come out 
to your parents?  Was it a positive situation?  I know I will 
soon, I just have to muster up the courage to tell them.  I am 
reluctant because I fear they will reject me and throw me out of 
their lives.  I don’t really expect that to happen, but the thought 
still lingers in the back of my mind.  I just hope that in the next 
couple of months I can have the strength to finally break away at 
the shell that has held me in for so long and actually be myself 
to everyone around me.

It was interesting reading your letter.  I swear it was like reading 
about my own life.  I also lived in Wyoming as a child.  When I 
was kindergarten age I also had an experience like yours.  I lived 
in a small town with less then 2,000 people.  My mom would 
frequently watch the children next door.  They were close to my 
age, one girl and a boy.  I remember one day my mother went to 
go do some grocery shopping and left us at home by ourselves.  
We wandered into the bathroom and were making faces into the 
mirror.  Then, I don’t remember how it started or why, but we 
started to take each others clothes off.  So we stood there in the 
bathroom, naked, letting our eyes discover our bodies.  We then 
proceeded to pile in to the dry bathtub basin.  Like you had 
mentioned in your letter, we knew nothing of sex and 
intercourse, yet our bodies assumed several positions and we 
explored each other’s body with our hands and mouths.  Sex, 
I’m speaking male/female, meant nothing to us.  I licked and 
sucked both of them as they did to me.  We loved it, and we felt 
free.  Then we heard the far off sound of my mother slamming 
the kitchen door and we scrambled out of the bathtub and 
quickly put on our clothes.  We were pretending to dry our 
hands on the towels as my mother came into the bathroom to 
check up on us.  It isn’t that we felt ashamed really, we just 
didn’t want anyone to know.  It was something that was sacred 
and private to the three of us.  In the weeks and months that 
followed the three of us repeated our secret game whenever we 
were left by ourselves.  Things were great, but then it all ended 
abruptly.  I moved.

I went from living in Wyoming in a town with less then 2,000 
people to a town in Ohio with about 35,000 people.  I was 
starting the second grade.  I was never really all that interested 
in sports and that concerned my parents.  They always thought I 
should be playing football or baseball out in the neighborhood.  
They hated that I didn’t go out for little league or that I wasn’t 
intent on joining the hockey team in third grade.  One day in the 
middle of my third grade year I was outside playing in my yard 
and two boys, about Junior high age, came into my yard and 
started throwing chunks of ice at me.  One hit me in the face and 
I started to bleed.  I went crying into the house with blood all 
over my hands.  My mom had seen the whole thing from the 
window in the living room.  I was confused when she told me to 
go outside and stand up for myself.  I refused.  She said that she 
wasn’t going to let me move until I went back outside and stood 
up for myself.  I pleaded with her to let me go wash off my face.  
I didn’t want to go back outside.  I was scared to go back 
outside.  I wasn’t going to go outside.  My mom became angry 
with my obstinence and said “Do you want to be a Sissy?  Well, 
do you?  Is that what you want the other kids to think about 
you?”  I didn’t understand.  Why was she saying this?  Here I 
was with blood smeared all over my face, crying, refusing to go 
outside.  What was the point? All I wanted was to go to the 
bathroom and wash off my face.  When my father got home that 
evening my mother told him about what had happened that day 
and he was ‘extremely disappointed’ in me.

They decided that for my own good they would sign me up for 
karate lessons so that I would learn to defend myself.  I didn’t 
want to take Karate, but that didn’t seem to matter.  So every 
Saturday for three hours I would attend Karate lessons.  I hated 
it.  I did everything in my power in order to fail, to show my 
parents how miserable I was.  In over a year, while the other kids 
in class had managed to attain several levels of belt color, I 
managed not to improve at all  (The worst my instructor had ever 
seen—I overheard him say one day). Finally my parents relented 
and took me out of Karate lessons, since in their words I was 
just ‘wasting their money.’  By now it was the fourth grade.  
One day I was outside during recess when this boy, Mike, came 
up and started to push me around.  His friends were telling him 
to kick my ass.  He started punching me, and I was doing 
nothing about it.  His friends started to snicker and laugh.  A 
small crowd had started to gather by this time.  People were 
laughing and pointing and I could hear murmurs of people 
calling me a wimp and a Sissy.  Mike was still hitting me, when 
I started to feel this suppressed anger.  It was growing more and 
more intense.  My mother’s voice echoed in my mind—‘you 
want to be a Sissy’?  The kids voices in the crowd that seemed 
to be growing louder and louder—‘He fights like a girl’  
Suddenly I was overcome by the anger.  I was not going to be 
made fun of. I was not going to stand here and let this happen to 
me.  I would prove to my parents that I was not a sissy.  Before I 
even thought about it, the anger was released.  I kicked that kid 
with every ounce of pent-up anger in my body.  It was one of 
those moments when your adrenaline is pumping and for a brief 
second you have superhuman strength.  I mimicked a kick I had 
seen in Karate and hit him square in the gut.  The next thing I 
knew there was a silence.  Mikey was doubled over on the 
ground and he was coughing up blood.  His face was red and he 
had tears in the corners of his eyes.  Nobody made a sound.  I 
could hear the blood pumping through my ears.  One of the girls 
in the crowd ran off to get a teacher.  Mike was clenching his 
fists into his stomach to stop the pain.  His knuckles were white.

I was not feeling high.  I was not proud of myself.  I felt sick to 
my stomach.  He had bloody lips and there were strings of blood 
that drooled from the edge of his mouth.  This wasn’t what I 
wanted.  I felt horrible.  I hated knowing that I caused and 
inflicted this pain.  I vowed then and there never to strike 
another person.  And to this day I haven’t.  It turned out to be 
much more serious than anyone had thought.  An ambulance 
was called and he was taken to the hospital.  Mike got extremely 
sick and had to have surgery to have his appendix removed.  
Several days later I remember sitting in class and the teacher 
explaining what was happening to Mike.  That was the first time 
any of us had heard the word appendix.  The class made a get-
well poster that afternoon.  I felt extremely guilty.  I never 
wanted to feel that way again.  My parents were overjoyed when 
they learned that I had had a fight and was to receive two days 
suspension.  “Way to show it to him,” my dad said.  “See, 
doesn’t it feel good to stand up for yourself?” my mom chimed 
in.  When they learned that he was going to have surgery they 
said it served him right, although they still called Mike’s parents 
and feigned their concern.   The rest of my fourth grade year was 
fine and pretty much uneventful.

Then came the downward spiral.  We moved again.  This time to 
Chicago.  Actually it was a suburb of Chicago.  It was a huge 
change.  I was at the age of entering adolescence, and puberty, 
and that awkward age where you are neither a child nor a man.  I 
had never really given much thought to my sexuality.  Hell, it 
was the fifth grade.  Suddenly I was the new kid.  I was 
constantly being bombarded with name calling.  I had never  
heard the words faggot and fairy.  But that was what everyone 
had been calling me.  I didn’t even know their meaning, so I 
asked my sister, only she just laughed at me.  I finally did learn 
what they meant.  I didn’t understand.  I was just being myself.  
I was never called things like that before.  I didn’t think that I 
was, and I ardently denied it when kids would ask if I was a 
fairy.  I withdrew.  I felt extremely self-conscious.  I didn’t make 
friends.  School became a living hell.  I dreaded going to school 
and pleaded all the time to stay home.  As the year progressed, 
so did the harassment.  The name-calling reached an all time 
high and I even started to receive physical abuse from the kids at 
school.  I didn’t tell my parents or my family.  They wouldn’t 
have understood.  I made up stories about falling off my bike to 
explain the various bruises on my body. The only recluse I had 
during the day was after school.  We lived by the edge of a 
woods and everyday after school I would wander into the woods 
about two miles until I reached a clearing.  And there I would 
sit, and mostly just think.  Often times I would look at the birds 
and dream about what it would be like to fly.  If only I could fly, 
I would think to myself, then all of this would be behind me.  
Oh, the places I’d go.  In my mind I made up an alternate life for 
myself.  I dreamt how I had all of these friends, how great 
everyone thought I was, how good I was at sports, how I was old 
(25) and strong and handsome.  The fancy cars I drove and all 
the money and riches I had.  And then it would start to get dark 
and I realized I would have to go back home, to reality.  Man, 
how I hated that.  I hated me.  I hated life.  I became totally 
immersed in my own made-up reality.  I didn’t want to live in 
the real world.

By the seventh grade things had subsided a bit.  I had managed 
to make a few friends, though I wasn’t myself when I was with 
them.  The name-calling hadn’t ceased but was slowly becoming 
less prevalent.  It was about this time that I confirmed to myself 
that I was indeed gay.  I didn’t like to face that truth, but there 
was no way around it.  I decided that I would keep it to myself.  
During my seventh grade year I spent hours making myself into 
what I wasn’t.  I altered the way I walked and moved.  I changed 
the way I spoke, and the words I used.  I would sit in front of the 
mirror in my bedroom and practice expressions.  I learned how 
to smile, walk, and talk so that nobody would expect I was a 
queer.  This carried on into the ninth grade.  People who had 
made fun of me before had lost interest or became too busy.  
Everyone started having their own life and forgot that they 
should torture me whenever they saw me.  By the end of ninth 
grade I had made many friends and was beginning to like myself 
again, something I hadn't done since forth grade.  Then, you 
guessed it, we moved again.  Only this time I really didn’t mind.  
When I arrived in North Dakota I desperately tried to hide the 
past and become my learned, practiced self, the one who was 
accepted and thought of as normal.  So I suppressed myself.  I 
filtered the things I said before I said them.  I paid close 
attention to the way my body moved and the clothes I wore.  
Nobody ever suspected, and I never heard any negative 
comments.  I had finally fit in.  I had a lot of friends, though 
they never knew me.  I had so much fun, though inside I was 
miserable.  I had been accepted and I didn’t want that to end.  
My parents were oh so proud of me.  “I had finally come into 
my own,” my mother said.  By this time my brothers and sisters 
had moved out of the house and were either in College or were 
starting their own lives.  My parents were constantly traveling 
and I often had the house to myself.  It was during these times 
that the truth would tug at my insides.  I was growing tired of 
living this lie. 

I wanted to be myself again, but that meant losing the pseudo-
acceptance of my “friends” and everyone around me.  When I 
turned eighteen I started to become impatient with the lie.  I 
wanted my life to change, but I never got around to doing 
anything about it.  Then one weekend when my parents were 
away I decided to go to the Adult sex store in town.  I had knots 
in my stomach, and I looked at things for quite some time before 
I finally reached up on the shelf and grabbed a movie, a 
homosexual movie.  I went to the counter expecting a strange 
look, but he seemed unaffected.  As I walked out of the shop I 
felt exhilarated.  I had been honest to myself for a change and I 
loved it.  At that point I decided that the lie was going to end.  
Since then I have constantly pushed the borders of my true self, 
though I would still classify myself as ‘in the closet’.  When I 
moved into the dorms this year I was disappointed to find that 
my roommate was extremely homophobic.  He constantly rattled 
me with faggot jokes, and would tell me things like AIDS 
standing for Anal Injected Death Syndrome.  It wasn’t a good 
environment.  And since the living arrangements were finalized, 
there was no chance that I would tell him and deal with his shit 
for the rest of the year. So I’m hiding myself from him and 
everyone else for the time being.  But this is just temporary.  As 
soon as I have my own apartment, sometime this summer, then I 
plan to come out completely.  The day when I become free, 
when lies dissolve, when I no longer have to look over my 
shoulder, when I can be myself, is fast approaching.  I’m 
anxious and ready for it to begin.  I’m ready to start living.

1. Untitled (Unknown)