I figured out I was gay when I was 11, but before that, I was completely uninterested in sex. Boys would tell me things, and I simply didn’t get why they wanted to talk about that, or why they had naughty expressions on their faces when they talked about that. Then I got it. It all hit me like a ton of bricks. It was like a light had been turned on.

I never really believed it was wrong in any kind of deep moral sense. I knew most people despised it, and that had a profoundly negative effect on me. I felt rejected, unwanted, unworthy. But wrong in the sense that murder is wrong? Never that.

The only person in my family who had a true interest in my inner life--my thoughts, attitudes, ideas, feelings--was my mother, but because of her mental health, her reactions were wildly unpredictable. And since everyone else made it pretty clear that they didn’t care, or that they would use personal information to ridicule me, I was already quite used to being secretive by the time I realized I was gay. It came naturally to me. I was very guarded, and between the ages of 11 and 18, I locked up almost all of my private thoughts.

As a result, I was desperately lonely. Nobody really knew me. I didn’t let anyone get too close. And even though I pushed people away, a great part of me believed that nobody knew me because I wasn’t worth knowing. I didn’t even know myself, and I worried that I wasn’t a complete human being. I was so used to holding things back, sometimes it seemed blank on the inside. I was also terrified, filled with anxiety. I lived in fear of someone finding out I was gay. I feared my home life would become intolerable, or even more intolerable than it already was, if my family found out. At school, I feared for my physical safety.

The only time I ever wanted to join a church and become a Christian is when I’d watch Billy Graham on TV, but it wasn’t the faith or the theology that appealed to me. It was the sense of community and belonging that Graham seemed to be offering. I wanted that. I didn’t have anything like that, and I desperately needed it. So I’d sit there and I’d promise God that I’d stop thinking about boys. But I never kept the promise for more than a few hours. I didn’t even try. I didn’t really want to stop thinking about boys because merely thinking about them gave me tremendous joy. I could count on that joy, and I did. I relished it.

I don’t know how I managed the stress. I’m sure it would kill me now. I’m not exaggerating about that. I think that if I had to go through a week of that now I would die of a heart attack. But despite the stress, I never wanted to give up my feelings for boys. I instinctively knew that my feelings were real and meaningful, something essential, and I found the claims of fundamentalist Christianity to be suspect.