I moved to a small village of a few thousand people when I was ten. We had more churches than stoplights and the main source of entertainment was a bowling alley. There weren’t exactly a lot of places for a little future gay to look for guidance. And what sources I had were dire: I heard news stories detailing the AIDS epidemic and the murder of Matthew Shepard. In the process of learning that I was gay and accepting it as a fact, I became firmly convinced that if anyone ever found out – I would be killed. But through the magic of the internet I found out that not all gay men die horrible deaths, as I’d previously believed.
I began to come out to my friends, and they were overwhelmingly supportive. For some reason though, I chose to keep it from my parents. I had no reason to think they would react negatively, but I thought it would be safer to wait until I was in college. I’ve never regretted a decision more.
My chance to come out to the two most important people in my life was taken from me.
I started dating my first boyfriend when I was seventeen. His mother must have thought very highly of me, because she thought I was the reason her son was gay. She thought if she got rid of me, he would go back to dating girls. In one particularly unnerving phone call, she mentioned her Italian family and threatened to have me “taken care of” if I ever talked to Dave again. Well, she didn’t handle me Godfather-style, but she did toss one hell of a wrecking ball at my life.
I had a part-time job at the local grocery store at the customer service desk. One night, while finishing up my closing duties, I started receiving a lot of increasingly irate phone calls and visits from my mom and dad. By the time I finished work I was terrified. My hands and legs were shaking wildly. I went home and sat down at the table with my mom. Dave’s mom had called. My secret was exposed.
The resulting fight is something that will haunt me forever. My parents, who’d always loved me unconditionally and who never laid a finger on me became monsters. A table was thrown at me. I narrowly escaped my mom and ran to my best friend’s house. On the way I tripped and hurt my arm. My dad found me and demanded that I return home. While I struggled to get my shoes on because my arm was numb he told me he would drag me down the stairs if I didn’t hurry. He began to count backwards. Worse than the physical violence were the words that were said. They said they hated me, that they had no love left for me, and that I would never know what it was like to be loved. My entire world was crushed in just a few short hours. I’d lost everything.
After the fight, we tried to move on but it was tough. I couldn’t sleep, I could barely eat, and I certainly couldn’t pay attention in school. After a few months I couldn’t take it anymore, so while both my parents were working I loaded my boyfriend’s car with all my possessions and moved in with him. We were seventeen and nineteen years old. We were a high-school drop-out gay couple living on the tips he made pumping gas.
My relationship with my parents today is entirely different. My dad is apparently quite the eye-catcher in the bear community, and he uses that to get free drinks for me and my friends at Sidetrack. My mom writes letters to politicians thanking them for supporting the gay community. They’re amazing.
If I’d come out to them on my own terms, I think my story would have been radically different, but I’m not sure that I want it to be. The past decade has been interesting for me in ways that most people will never know, and I’m happy with the outcome. We’re only as strong as the fights we’ve faced and we’re only as happy as the lows we’ve lived. That makes me one strong, happy queer.
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