Nathan Scarborough, Arkansas

But my beloved had turned away and was gone.
My heart leaped up when he spoke.
I sought him, but I could not find him;
I called him, but he gave no answer.
The watchmen who went about the city found me.
They struck me, they wounded me;
The keepers of the walls
Took my veil away from me
I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
If you find my beloved,
That you tell him I am lovesick

The Song of Solomon

It's hard to begin writing this. In many ways coming to terms with who I am and how I love is a process I'm still in the middle of. I'm not who I was ten years ago, or even five...but I guess the salient thing is that I've never been who other people wanted me to be.

Shulamite. The Receiver of Peace. I don't know that that's an apt name for who I am now, but it's what I'm looking for. This book has always spoken to me, and these lines remind me of my condition. My parents are the watchmen. I grew up in a literate family, one highly involved in the church, and one convinced they belonged to a class of people chosen by God to guard "The Family" and teach the world the right - the righteous - way to live and love together. They've always felt more like police than teachers to me...but I speak their language, and in some ways my mind still runs in the ways they set for me.

That said, I think I'm incredibly lucky to have largely escaped guilt about my love. I could say "who I love", but I honestly believe the difference is more than the gender at which it's directed. My experience with sexuality isn't defined as much by the male bodies of the people I love, though I love them as well, but there's a sort of unique psycho-spiritual intimacy which I simply don't feel with a woman. I think in a lot of ways that may be a result of the conditioning I received as a child. Women are Different. Women are Other. Their difference was always the point emphasized, not their sameness. Female incomprehensibility was the butt of dozens of tired jokes. We're not even supposed to be from the same planet. The love I was taught men shared, on the other hand, was one of mutual understanding, shared perspective, and deep trust. Volumes have been written on the subject of objectification, how this "othering" of women leads to their abuse and marginalization, and Harry Hay has already written about how one of the truly radical things about same-sex love is that it cuts right past the subject-object dynamic implicit in "othering" and instead allows "subject-subject" relationships. Gay men certainly still objectify one another, but one of the few nice things about the taboo nature of the subject was that it allowed me to grow up without anyone attempting to civilize my heart of hearts. The tragedy of normalized sexuality is that everyone thinks it's their business to systematically prune and cultivate exactly how you relate to potential partners. Both the blessing and the curse of being raised with the assumption I was going to love women rather than men is that I was relatively free to fantasize and desire naturally, rather than having my lusts and longings clipped into some sort of monstrous socially-constructed topiary.


In Persian, there is a word for Love. Ishq. It comes from the Arabic word for "vine", and refers to a heart in which one desire has overgrown and choked out everything else. Originally it was only directed towards God, but in many cultures touched by the mystical schools of Islam it came to mean romantic love. One school of Sufis even used these sort of limerent longings as a spiritual exercise...observe beautiful young men so that the unrestrained longing you feel can then be turned towards God.

تیرا دل مجھسے نہیں ملتا || میرا جی رہے نہیں سکتا
غرض ایسی مصیبت ہے || کہ میں کچھ کہے نہیں سکتا
تیرے آگے میری آنکھوں سے آنسو || کیوں کہ چلتے ہے
جو تو دریا سے گڈرے ہے || تو پانی بہے نہیں سکتا


Your heart cannot be won by me nor can my soul bear this restlessness.
Need is a burden which cannot be revealed, therefore I remain silent.
Whenever you are before me my eyes fill with tears that are unable to flow,
Like an ocean that stands still at the sight of you passing by.

--Mirza Rafi Sauda

The first time I ever felt this for someone other than God was in seventh grade. I don't know how long it would've taken me to realize who I was without that all-consuming aspect to this love. As it was, I'd always been different, never really had any friends. I'm sure my lack of enthusiasm for male-gendered activity contributed to this isolation, but all I knew was that when a new boy showed up in seven of my classes I finally had the opportunity to build the kind of close friendship I'd always wanted. I followed him like a puppy. I learned how to dress normally, (I'd never worn a t-shirt prior to meeting him), started wearing my hair like his, and tried as much as I could to do everything with him. When he rejected my parents' God, I decided hell with him was better than heaven without. For him I gave up the person my parents had made me, and in a way he was what let me become who I am now. After almost a year, I was his best friend. He'd sleep on my shoulder on car trips, we'd fall asleep next to each other on the weekends. I remember very clearly one day (a very hard one for him) how upon seeing me his face nearly melted with relief and he started to hug me, then stopped when he realized we were in public. Writing about my feelings for him (as a friend, I then thought) in a journal I kept for my eighth grade English teacher was probably the first time I opened myself up to a stranger. In teenage fashion, I was defining myself entirely through my relationship with John, and I think my teacher was probably the first person I came out to, though I wouldn't quite have identified as gay at the time.

If only you were to me like a brother,

who was nursed at my mother's breasts!
Then, if I found you outside,
I would kiss you,
and no one would despise me.

I have so many memories of him. I made them deliberately, to hold me over when we had to be apart. Wrestling with him, laughing until we both cried...his breath on my face while he slept, an arm over my shoulders. I still smile about the deliberately casual way he laid down on a hillside under the stars one night so we could just lie next to each other and talk. It seemed like he was making memories, too. Maybe he was.

Even with all of that, I was terrified to tell John I loved him. I assumed the only way any of my male peers would accept me was if they were gay themselves. One day, over instant messenger, I confessed that I loved him. My hope was that he would admit he loved me to, that he'd also been too afraid to tell me. If he didn't, I knew he would shun me, be revolted and offended. I planned to kill myself if that rejection came. It never even occurred to me that a straight man could be indifferent to me loving him.

John already knew, of course, and took it very casually. He was the first person I told deliberately. He didn't want anything about our relationship to change...which was devastating to me, but I guess better than rejection. Watching him continue to have a normal life and start to date girls while still keeping me as his best friend and constant companion ripped me apart inside. I tried very hard to never show it, I smiled constantly when I felt like screaming. We still shared a bed when we spent the night with each other, and once I kissed his shoulder blade while he slept. I felt so incredibly guilty I immediately went to sleep on the floor, and confessed in the morning. He joked about it and barely cared. I'm not sure if he really was gay, or maybe if he just liked the attention. Either way being honest with him let me start to be honest with everyone...having lived through both acceptance and rejection from him, it was a lot harder to care what anyone else thought anymore. Apparently this fact showed up in my interactions with my parents, as I stopped taking their constant stream of homophobic commentary about things on TV lying down.

I remember clearly one day we were all watching some show, interrupted by a commercial for a stupid reality show called "Boy Meets Boy." My dad, who rarely batted an eye at any kind of televised violence or depravity, muttered "How low can you get?" I nearly yelled "Religious bigotry is pretty low." and stalked out of the room. My mother caught up with me in twenty minutes or so. "Are all of your recent comments about homosexuality of a political or personal nature?" she asked in a low voice, once we were alone. "Both" I said, and she cried. She warned me not to tell my father, that she would break it to him in a few days, and I went to my room. Later on my father, concerned about why my Mom wouldn't stop crying, found out. He didn't kick me out, like I expected him to, but told me I needed to start behaving because he was afraid my Mom was going to kill herself. My younger brother had already attempted suicide at age nine (thanks in large part to the social isolation that resulted from our move to Arkansas because "God told" my parents to come work for an evangelical family organization) and I was deeply upset about this threat. I interpreted it as anger, at the time, but fear probably played a very big part as well. If there was guilt, the other two emotions were so huge that I didn't notice it at the time. They offered ex-gay "therapy", (an 'ex-gay' man is one of the regular financial supporters who enable my parents to work without a salary for the evangelical nonprofit like they do), but didn't force me into anything (thank God). I don't think they had the energy.

Our relationship has gotten a bit better in the years since then, but it's still not something we can talk about without my parents looking like they're about to burst into tears. The thing I miss most is that I used to be able to tell my mother anything, and I've lost her as a confidant and an advisor because of her discomfort with something that's such a huge part of my emotional life. I asked, once, if I could introduce any serious boyfriends and let them have some input (on the condition they accept the gay aspect of the relationship without question), and I was told I could have them over for dinner and they wouldn't be rude, but that actually being friendly or kind would probably be too hard. I'm more distant with my father, and he's developed heart problems over the last year. I'm kind of afraid he'll die without ever really talking to me about this. I woke myself up one night a few months ago by walking myself out of bed. I was dreaming I was walking across the room to slap him for refusing to talk to me...I've never walked in my sleep or acted out my dreams in any way before, but the combination of his health problems and his aloofness had evidently really gotten to me.

Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you:

Do not stir up or awaken love
until it so desires.
For Love is as strong as Death.

Come tenth grade year I was assigned to read "A Separate Peace" over Christmas break. I was isolated from him and all of my friends, out of state visiting my grandparents. I read the book in one sitting, completely rapt at the erotic tension between two male schoolmates, and that night I completely lost my will to live. I spent hours trying to cry softly enough no one would hear me, and that was the first night I went to sleep imagining razor blades slicing over my entire body, as a distraction from everything else...I fell asleep fantasizing about that, instead of John, for almost a year. I went back to school maybe one day in five after that, eventually stopping completely, and barely left my room for six months.

John didn't come around. Honestly, I think that helped. Without him to define me I basically had no identity at all. All I did was write...hundreds of hours, thousands of pages of stream of consciousness writing uploaded to different blogs. I met people from dozens of countries, practicing nearly every religion. In the process I began engaging with people in ways I'd never done before. I'd left nearly everything behind and was starting to be authentic and honest about who I was for the first time in my life. I remember pouring a glass of lamp oil I thought would kill me one night, and just staring at it for a while, then writing instead. My therapist told later me the only reason I wasn't institutionalized during that time was that he was afraid I wouldn't trust him if he committed me, and that I'd outsmart the nurses, get out, and kill myself later. It was a near thing, but in losing so much of myself I had room to create myself again from scratch. Despite dropping out of high school I've learned and learned more than the majority of people my age, and that experience along with the compulsive writing helped me get into college without the traditional prerequisites, and has opened a lot of doors for me. Even so, I've been in college for five years now and I'm only slightly more than halfway done.

I've still periodically broken down, afraid I'll never be loved, afraid I'll never live authentically...I'll lock myself in my room for a few days and then move to a different state. It almost always follows on the heels of some rejection. I feel like there are so few of us, so few chances at happiness, so many too afraid to ever come out, and I guess that's really discouraging. I walk around with the assumption if people near me knew who I really was, they wouldn't want to be around me. I run away, in a sense rejecting everyone before they have a chance to reject me...or worse, hold me at arm’s length without rejecting me outright...but each time I've started over I've gotten a bit better at not assuming that isolation is inevitable. After seven years I'm almost to the point where I can tell strangers in public without my voice shaking. When I'm in different cities I can meet and relate to guys without being overwhelmed with anxiety...and now I think I'm starting to get to that point even here in Little Rock. There's still a lot of anger, but not as much despair anymore. My low points are higher than they used to be, I'm getting stronger, and the fear is losing. I'm not sure I'll really be done with the coming out process until that fear is completely gone, but lately I can actually imagine that happening some day.

My dove in the clefts of the rock,

in the hiding places on the mountainside,
show me your face,
let me hear your voice;
for your voice is sweet,
and your face is lovely.