This is my coming out story. Parts of it are still sketchy to me as it was a rough time and I think I blocked a lot of it from my memory. This is very autobiographical (well, duh), but mostly in that I kind of go back through my childhood as well to bring the story to the ending point. Anyway, you'll see.
I am my parent's first child. My sister was born three years after me and we both had very similar upbringings. My parents moved to East Tennessee about six months after I was born and I lived there until I graduated from high school and went to college (I don't really "live" there anymore (I say I live in Cookeville), but it is still home to me). My parents were Baptists, and attended First Baptist Church (FBC) of Clinton, a church that loosely associated itself with the Southern Baptists (though seemed to generally ignore most of what they said). My mom had been Catholic, but converted when she married my dad because she found she got more spiritually out of the Baptist faith.
My parents were never big on "you must be Baptist". I liked it at FBC, though, and had no desire to go to church elsewhere, though had I wanted to my parents would have encouraged me to find a church I liked. I had gone to church with friends before, both Baptists and not and FBC was the place I really liked. However, from an early age I did show an interest in interdenominational studies, which my parents both encouraged.
Thinking back I don't think I can remember the first time that I noticed I liked guys. Hindsight is 20/20 of course, and even if I could remember I know that at the time I would have ignored it. I guess it would have been about middle school or so. This was still the age where everyone had a girlfriend or boyfriend, but it was only because it was expected of us. The kids don't kiss then, or if they do they make sure no one knows about it. My male friends would start talking about the girls they thought were cute or they'd make comments about girls and what they thought was attractive. I usually smiled and nodded and let them keep going, the whole while not offering an opinion of my own. I guess I did find it odd that they were all attracted to girls and I was given the very strong impression I should be too, even though the whole time I didn't think the girls were cute, I thought the boys were.
In all this time I really didn't even associate the term or even idea of homosexuality with this at all. Somehow I'd gotten the impression from the church and from society that a guy dating a guy wasn't normal, but no one ever said anything about a guy liking a guy. I simply assumed it was a natural thing and would pass eventually and I'd start liking girls like everyone else.
It was in my eighth grade year that I finally had the term homosexual well emphasised for me. It was in Sunday School class one day and we were doing a lesson on the Ten Commandments. The teacher asked us if God were to rewrite the Ten Commandments for today, what would they be? (I have since come to realize that there is no need to rewrite them....which is why God hasn't....but that'd take me a while to go into.) Our youth minister, Steve, was in there and I remember him giving a new commandment He said "homosexuality", and he kind of cringed when he said it. I didn't really understand why and I thought it was a really odd thing to list! I late linked the word homosexual with being gay with men liking men and women liking women and it started to make sense.
For all that my parents encouraged me to pursue academics in all forms (and pursue I did, I was very smart, a gifted student even), I was surprisingly well sheltered and protected from the world at large. Through high school I began to notice that my attraction to guys was not changing. I also noticed more readily that being homosexual (or gay, as many put it) was not a normal thing to most people. There was this one guy in the band that everyone joked about being gay or at least bi. They made fun of him so much when he wasn't around and I didn't understand why they were so mean.
What I did realize was that I couldn't be one of them. You see, above what everyone else thought, the church's stance, I came to see, was that gay people could not be Christians. It just wasn't in God's plan. I knew wholeheartedly that I was a Christian and if that was so, there was no way I could be gay. I told myself, well, if I like guys, then it's just a phase (yes, I believed this for a LOOOOOONG time), I'll like girls eventually, so I'm not really gay, and I'll just pretend for a while until it becomes more natural. Maybe I just have to get the hang of it.
If I had known then what that would do to me.....
Have you ever noticed that if you tell yourself something often enough for long enough it begins to become real? I kept telling myself that it was just a phase, and trying to "like girls" that it became a shield for me. It was a wall I didn't know how to break. I would see guys and think they were attractive but I would barely even acknowledge it to myself. I began to totally overlook that whole part of myself. I realized that girls were not attractive to me, and soon I thought of myself as just something along the lines of asexual. My rationalization became that my sex drive had not kicked in like everyone else's. And when that excuse didn't work I came up with another and another and another after that. So many I forgot them all. Eventually I just became numb to all of it. I had been ignoring my true feelings for so long I could barely even acknowledge them to myself.
Most people at this point get online and share things like this with people on the internet that they can't see. They find chat rooms designed for other people just like them and they share and vent in that arena. For many people this works. Had I done this, I think it would have helped a bit. But as I said, I couldn't even admit these feelings to myself. If I couldn't do that, I couldn't even start to get myself into a chatroom about it.
And so it went. My life other than this was rather good and I enjoyed it a lot. I just did my best to ignore who looked good and who didn't (and I did a VERY good job of it, too) and went on with life, throwing myself into other things with such an ambition that I never really slowed down. I think this helped as well. I was always moving, always doing something or planning for the next big thing and it gave me time to not have time to see what was really going on.
In my senior year all the bottling of emotions began to be too much for me. It was about October of my senior year, in the middle of marching season. There was this guys that I really really had a crush on. I'll call him Alex (not his real name). Well, Alex and I had become pretty good friends that year. I didn't realize at the time that my feelings for Alex were more than just friendship, though. I thought at the time we were just really close friends and that was it (I was supressing HARD). Eventually, though, I couldn't take it anymore. I was stressed from classes and some of the activities I was involved in and (I realize now) my attraction to Alex.
Without going into details, let's just say that I really had an emotional fit for a few days there. For a while after that I thought I'd gone insane, though really I was just not in control of my emotions (why? becuase I didn't acknowledge what they were). Apparently, though, it was not the right time for me to come out to myself yet because after a few days of this (with a LOT of prayer to help me regain control) things kind of subsided. Somehow I just got over Alex and moved on. The rest of my senior year went well. I was sad that I was leaving, as I didn't want to leave a lot of my friends behind, but I think that happens to a degree with any parting. I started college in the fall of 1998 and things were going well again (though also very very supressed). It was around February of 1999 or so that things started picking up again. I had met Dan in the fall of 98 in our chemistry class and he hated his roommate. At the end of that semester he moved in with me (as my current roommate at the time moved out). (Note: this is for setting purposes, no I have NEVER been attracted to Dan; Amanda, you can have him with my blessing. ;-).) That spring we were both taking several classes togther and one of them was a sci-fi/fantasy class taught by Dr. Hood, the director of Honors at Tech. At the same time another friend of ours, Daniel (yeah, Dan and Daniel) was working with both of us to get a live-action roleplaying game started (TTULRA). We actually began the first game in January but were still getting a lot of things on it's feet.
Anyway, it was about February I guess when the three of us had gone to the Goodwill store to look for cheap things we could use for phys-reps in the game. In our search, we were wandering through the book section and Daniel picked up this book that was missing half of the front cover. He commented that it was really an odd title and showed it to me. I looked at it and read "Stranger at the Gate: To be gay and Christian in America". An odd title indeed (though now I realize just how much God was directing me to this book). He sat it down and walked on, but I stayed there, fascinated by this book. To be gay and Christian. Gay AND Christian. All this time I'd been avoiding my feelings because I thought they were wrong. If I acknowledged them, it made them real. And if they were real it meant I was gay. And if I was gay, I couldn't be a Christian, or so I thought. But this book intrigued me and I bought it for 99 cents.
I was afraid to show it to anyone and hid it, reading it only when no one was around or when no one could see it. The pressure of my attraction to guys was building up again at this time as well and I began to be a less than pleasant person to deal with. Dan will attest to a lot of this. There would be times he would leave the room because he knew I was about to explode.
Let me back up for a moment. I mentioned the sci-fi/fantasy class, but went no where with it. There is a reason I mentioned it. I think the sf/f class was also putting some pressure on me. For two reasons. Reason one was the work we were doing. Dr. Hood went through the things we read and did in ways that really forced us to look at ourselves. This was something that subconsciously I did NOT want to do, though it was probably one of the best things for me (gnothi seoaton, know thyself...did I spell that right?). The second reason was because of someone in this class. I'll call him Jared (because in this case, that's his real name). He was my latest crush and I had it bad for him. But of course, I didn't really realize this at the time. However, all the pressure from things going on began to break at my defenses again. Bit by bit I began to see that I WAS attracted to Jared and wrestled with the consequences of what this meant.
All this while I read the book. For spring break, Dan invited me up to visit his family in northern Virgina, outside of Washington DC. I thought it would be fun and accepted. While we were up there I had the book and was reading it when there wasn't much else going on. At one point I made the mistake of taking it with me somewhere we were going (I love to read and often will take books with me places, even if I know I won't get a chance to read it). His girlfriend, Amanda, asked me what I was reading (she always was the curious type) and not knowing a better way out, I showed her the title and tried to pass it off as a "mildly entertaining autobiography I just found once". I must have sounded really stupid about then.
Well, I didn't know it at the time, but this is what started to tip Dan off to what had been bothering me all these months. However, this was the middle of March and it would still be another month before things finally came to a head.
We got back to Tech and things resumed as normal. I was even more irritable at times and more depressed and a lot more of my friends began to notice something was wrong, though no one really seemed to know what (or if they did, they didn't want to say it). It was about the second week in April that I began to see things for myself. I had finished the book and by the time I got to the last page I knew the truth, but still didn't want to admit it.
That Saturday was the newbie Big Sib retreat which I went to (since I was a newbie Big Sib, go figure). At one point during the retreat we were put into dyads, or pairs where we were supposed to talk, share, and bond. I ended up with Dana. We sat in the lounge for a while, just shooting the breeze when at one point she picked up on something with me and asked directly "Are you happy?" I paused and she continued. "Because you look like you're trying to hide something. Like you want to appear to be happy because you really aren't. Ao, are you happy?" I looked at her. "No," I said. She suggested we go elsewhere to talk.
We moved off by ourselves. I told her that I was bothered by something but wouldn't really say what and she didn't force it. But she did tell me "Shawn, maybe you're going through whatever this is for a reason. And maybe that reason is because you are strong enough to handle it on your own. But maybe someday you'll meet someone who isn't strong enough to handle it and you'll be there to help them through it becuase you've experienced it already."
The next day I finally admitted to myself that I was gay. I also started to admit to myself that I was attracted to Jared. But the depression actually got worse with this realization. I may be able to admit to myself that I'm gay, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about it. Two days after this (Tuesday) Dan approached me at one point, knowing that things were about to get out of hand. I still remember his words and my responce.
"Shawn, something's been bothering you lately. Do you want to talk about it?"
I thought for a moment. I knew I could trust Dan with this, but I still wasn't ready to say it in words. "Yes," I said, "but not yet. I'm not ready to."
"Well, when you are, just tell me, I'll listen."
It took me until the following Sunday to be ready to talk. We were both lying on our beds, across the room from each other, studying our own various things. It was about seven o'clock or so, getting kind of late, but not really late for a college student. I got done with something I was doing, put it down and said simply, "I'm ready to talk now if you'll still listen."
He said nothing for about two seconds, then closed the book he was reading, sat it on the floor, and said, "Go ahead. I won't say anything unless you want me to."
It took me the next two and a half hours to tell him. I drew it out to no end, so terrified to actually say the words "I'm gay", even though I knew I had to. Actually, in the end, he had to say it for me. I think he was getting the impression that I was going to have a hard time doing it myself and helped me out a bit. I also told him about Jared. Dan was so amazingly understanding and I couldn't have asked for a better person to come out to first. The best part was in the end when he told me three things. He was still my friend. He didn't think any differently of me. And God still loved me.
Throughout the next two weeks I came out as well to a few other close friends. I told Lori and Alex (real names, this is not the "Alex" from above) at the same time on a long drive when we all kind of needed to talk. While I was packing to go home at the end of the semester I told Angie. I told Amanda on the phone when she called once for Dan and he was gone. But the key point was in telling Jared. I knew I had to do so before I left for the summer. I had been going to church with him most Sunday mornings lately and at the encouragement of Lori decided to tell him as we got back on Sunday.
I ended up telling him in the truck on the road coming back to Cookeville (his church was in Livingston). I had rehearsed a bit what I was going to say, but it failed (I've found it always does). I was forced in the end to just say it directly before I could chicken out. He had kind of guessed before then, but wasn't sure until I told him. Surprisingly enough, he took it very well, even the part about me being attracted to him.
But there's one final part to this very long story. Did I mention that I was also dating someone at the time? I was. Her name was Shelley. She was a freshman in high school my senior year, so we didn't really get to see each other a whole lot. But we had become good friends in a musical we were both in right before I left and she asked me out the day before I moved to Tech in the fall to start classes. Since we'd been such good friends I said yes.
I loved Shelley, and still do. But not romantically. I love her (and always have) as a very close friend, almost like a sister. I knew that I was going to break up with her, but I didn't want to do it because I didn't want to hurt her. I arranged to go out on a date with her the evening that I got back and was going to tell her that night. The evening was wonderful, a night I will always remember. After dinner and some time driving around, we stopped by this one river and I told her that I had something important to say. Well, I had told her that before and she suspected the end was near, but she didn't know why and she wanted to wait for me to tell her directly. We sat there a while and through long drawn out words I told her I was gay and we really wouldn't be able to go out anymore. We both cried some, but she was very understanding. She told me that she was beginning to think we needed a change in the relationship anyway because it was becoming less of a "dating" thing and more of a close friendship. I am very happy to say that we are still very good friends even now and last I heard she's dating a football player at the high school (Shell! Football players???!!!).
So that's my story. Long as it is, it was a long process overall. Of course, it doesn't end there. Actually, that's only the beginning. I had a lot more to learn (heck, still do), but that's for another story. If you want to know more, go on to the next sections, It's Effect and Year of Growth to see where the story picks up.