This is me in high school making a funny face at my sister. I never thought of myself as straight, and I never tried to be straight, but I was terrified of anyone finding out that I liked boys. I avoided the topic of sex. If the people around me started discussing sex, I would clam up. If asked about sex, I would give vague, noncommittal answers. I’m sure a lot of people suspected, and I was bullied and some were rude to me--I never really fit in--but I didn’t come out in high school. In the early ’80s, that was very rare, especially in West Virginia. When I was growing up, I never met a single person who was out. Not one.
Things changed when I went to WVU in Morgantown. I was away from home and WVU was a large school--over 20,000 students. When I was living in Oak Hill, I couldn’t go anywhere without running into someone who knew who I was. I felt observed in Oak Hill. But in Morgantown, I was anonymous. That gave me the freedom to start looking for a community within a couple of weeks after I arrived.
I went to a service at a local MCC. I attended GLM meetings, Gay and Lesbian Mountaineers. I joined a support group for gay students at the counseling center. I went to the gay bar. I met gay people and became friends with a number of them.
But even though Morgantown was the most liberal place in West Virginia, most were still not out in a general sense. We were out to each other at WVU, but we usually didn’t reveal ourselves to straight people. It was like belonging to a secret society. We referred to each other as “family.” Knowing someone was “family” meant you could be open. “Is she family?” “Don’t worry, he’s family.”
I knew I was different from other boys at an early age. When I was a toddler, I wished I had been born a girl because people, especially my father, seemed to want me to be like other boys, but I wasn’t.
I stole a kiss from a boy in second grade. I came into the classroom from lunch, and he was sitting on the first row. We were the only two people in the room, and as I walked past, I bent down and kissed him on the forehead. I thought he was so cute and sweet, so I wanted to kiss him.
When I was eleven, all the boys around me started talking about sex, and that fired up my libido. I tried to imagine having sex with girls because that’s what the other boys talked about. In my fantasies, I was surrounded by a group of boys and one girl. After a while--a few weeks, a couple of months--I realized that I was really interested in the boys and the girl in my fantasies was just a token. She was there because I thought she had to be there. After that, the girl disappeared, and it was just me and the boys.
That’s when I knew I was gay. I can recall sitting out on our back porch and thinking it over. I wasn’t interested in girls in that way. I wanted to have sex with boys. Boys who want to have sex with other boys are gay. I was gay.
I accepted it immediately, and I relished my attraction to boys. I liked being attracted to boys. I liked that feeling. I liked the sexual fantasies. I liked looking at their bodies and imagining what they looked like naked. But I didn’t dare tell anyone.
By then I was already a fairly private, secretive person because my mother was seriously mentally ill and my father did his best to ignore me. My mother was unpredictable, so telling her anything, anything important, seemed scary. And my father would have a fit if I asked for help with anything more complicated than a hangnail. My father had already made it perfectly clear that he was hugely disappointed in me for not being the kind of boy he expected, and I imagined he would never even want to be in the same room with me if he knew I was gay.
So I kept my mouth shut, and I already knew how to keep my mouth shut. I realized I was gay when I was 11, and I didn’t tell another living soul until I went away to college at 18. Seven years is a long time to keep a secret like that, especially when you’re young. Seven years is an eternity when you’re young. All during that time, I was terrified of anyone finding out my secret. I was even afraid of falling asleep if my parents or my sister was in the room because I thought I might say something about a boy in my sleep. I was afraid of falling into a coma or getting a fever because I thought I might reveal who I really was. I was always on guard, so tense and stressed out.
Living like that for so long did something to me, and I don’t know how to fix it. I’m not sure it can be fixed. Most people instinctually want and need friends and family around them. But I’m kind of like a stray dog. I keep my distance. I shake and quiver with the desire to be touched and loved, but my fear of abuse is greater than my need to be loved.
Most of us have heard the questions. "Why are you like that?" "What made you gay?" It's as if we're being put on trial. However, our feelings don't need to be explained or justified, and the questions usually don't represent intellectual curiosity but an assertion that the questioner has a right to determine if we are permitted to feel what you feel. The questions come from a sense of entitlement.
They do try to make you think they are the "normal" ones and the "decent" ones. And they would have you believe that you need to explain yourself to them to their satisfaction.
A couple of years ago, someone I had known sense 7th grade wrote me a private message telling me about her trip to Key West. She complained about the way the gay people there acted, not bothering to hide who they are. She complained about the gay bars with go-go boys dancing on the tables. And she said gay people have an "image problem" and that they present themselves in a way that "decent" people (meaning people like her) don't like.
It really pissed me off because she thought she had a right to talk to me in this way. I thought I was one of her oldest friends, someone she admired and respected, but apparently she thought that because I'm gay, I need to meet with her approval.
She had to go all the way to Key West, Florida, to find a gay bar with go-go boys, but back home in WV, there is a straight strip club fifteen minutes from her house. And I know some other things I won’t mention here. Let’s just say she is hardly a saint, but she would have me believe that she is one of the "decent" people that those like me need to answer to.
We are no longer friends.
When I was in high school, I wanted to write a story about two boys who fall in love and then run away together after they graduate. I started several times, but I could never make it go anywhere. Of course I was young, so my writing abilities weren’t well developed, but the main reason I couldn’t do it was because I had nothing to draw from except for my nascent desire to have a boyfriend. I didn’t know any boys who dated boys. There weren’t any gay couples in the books that I read, and there were very few in the movies I saw. I wanted to tell a sweet, romantic story about two boys, but I couldn’t imagine how it would work. I had the ambition for several years, but then I got older and I didn’t want to think about high school so much anymore. However, the basic concept has always stayed with me.
Not long ago, I decided that now was the time for me to write this story. I just finished the first draft of chapter 4. The story starts in 1983, and it takes place in Fayette County, West Virginia, which is where I grew up. The boys go to school at my old high school.
One of the reasons I couldn’t get the story off the ground thirty years ago is because I couldn’t imagine a romance between two boys being allowed to flourish. The boys would have been hounded, mercilessly attacked, and their parents would have stopped them from seeing each other. So I knew that these boys needed privacy, a lot of privacy.
Shannon’s parents have recently divorced, and Shannon ends up living in a house left to his mother by her grandparents. It’s been abandoned, more or less, for twenty years. Shannon lives there most of the time alone because his mother travels quite a lot.
The house is large, rambling and isolated. I imagine it to be something like the house in this picture, except with a wraparound porch. Glen and his parents just happen to live nearby. The two boys become friends, and over the course of the summer between their junior and senior years, they fall in love in this big house cut off from the rest of the world.
I think there’s a significant difference between clever and cleverer-than-thou. I’m talking about clever as in witty, informative, ingenious or thought-provoking. I suppose one could say that a bank robber who escapes punishment is clever, but I mean the kind of clever that is helpful, entertaining or charming. When you say or do something that makes someone smile, something that requires intelligence, talent, thought and insight, that’s clever.
I think many of us try very hard to be clever, but we often fall into the trap of being cleverer-than-thou…the kind of clever that’s mean, that’s meant to put others in their place, the kind of clever that aims to prove we’re better. I suppose you could say it’s the difference between being smart and being a smartass.
When I catch myself trying to be cleverer-than-thou, I don’t like it. I think it’s ugly. Most of us need to be built up, not torn down.
When I was young, I used to think life would have been so much simpler if I had been born a girl. I wouldn't be expected to do all those "guy things", and I wouldn't catch heat for "acting like a girl." When I was older, I also wished I was a girl so that I would be attractive to hetero boys. Now I realize that what I was being taught about what a boy "should be" was simply way too narrow.
In the 1990s, I lived in a little third floor apartment on High Street in Morgantown, West Virginia, home of WVU. I lived a solitary existence during those years. I was no longer in school, I had already been declared disabled, and it would be years before I was on the internet. I was in my late twenties, but I felt old. When I walked around, I would recall things that happened to me in that town when I was younger and still full of hope. I was 27 and full of nostalgia, longing for times gone by, as if I was 87.
My apartment wasn’t exactly the lap of luxury, but it had huge, high windows and a great view. Across the street was the old Warner Theater, The Hotel Morgan, and the old post office. I could watch parades from my apartment, and I often watched people walking up and down the sidewalk. One day, I noticed a young man with a pack full of books on his back coming from the downtown campus and heading toward a residential neighborhood across the bridge below my apartment. I was immediately drawn to him because I intuitively recognized that we were kindred spirits. He was even shorter than me, and I could tell from his appearance and the way he moved that he was gay. There was something else, too. He walked with a kind of determination to get home as quickly as possible. He kept his gaze down, and he never turned his head to the left or right even for a second. This little blond man was terrified, and he made his way down High Street as if he expected to be attacked if he so much as looked at anyone crossways. I could sense his pain and loneliness.
I noticed him again not long after that, and soon I realized that he was showing up at about the same time every day, so I began to watch for him. As he passed my apartment, I’d wonder about him. I imagined that he, too, probably lived someplace alone and that he hardly ever talked to anyone. I longed for us to become friends. I imagined waiting for him down on the steps in front of the old post office and calling to him as he marched past. But I knew I would never do that. One day he stopped coming, and I never saw him again.
I worked for Wal-Mart for a while when I was in my mid 20s, and I can recall being in the break room with a few co-workers one particular day. Someone mentioned something about visiting California, and this one guy who was maybe a little younger than me said he would never go anywhere near California. I asked him why, and he actually stood up, rubbed his behind--it was a rather nice little behind, too--and said, “I don’t want anyone going in back there.”
I found the comment, and the accompanying gesture, so ridiculous that I almost laughed at him. I didn’t bother explaining to him that gay men, as a rule, are not rapists and that most men in California are straight just like everywhere else.
I got the sense that what he was afraid of was that being around openly gay men would be tempting to him and that he might actually have to admit he was, on some level, interested in the idea of being with a man.
Sometimes, not always, but sometimes there is something to that Shakespeare quote "the lady doth protest too much.”
I imagined that I lived in a quaint little cottage in the woods, and a beautiful young man came to visit. He showed up at the door wearing old-fashioned clothes and asked if he could take a bath. He was not at all shy about letting me watch him, and I wasn’t shy about looking. I found him to be beautiful, and admiring him seemed natural, at least in this alternate reality. Then I was distracted. Maybe another thought interred my consciousness or maybe I heard a sound from outside, and in an instant, the young man was gone and I was once again alone in my drab apartment.
To varying degrees, I’m attracted to all sorts of people, but I realized I am primarily, almost exclusively, attracted to men when I was eleven, and, by and large, attracted to a specific type of man--youthful, slim as apposed to muscular, not very hairy, more pretty than handsome, sweet and softhearted as apposed to what we think of as traditionally masculine. Soon it will be forty years since I noticed this about myself. I’ve experienced no fluidity. Time has gone by. I have matured. My body has aged. But I’m still basically the same person I was when I was young.
If I was a vampire and lived hundreds of years, I might notice some fluidity, but in the next twenty or thirty years, I don’t expect to see much.
This month’s Bel Ami calendar picture features models Jack Harrer and Andre Boleyn. They are nude, but they’re not doing anything sexual. The picture depicts intimate friendship. They are in front of a piano in a well appointed room. Andre is seated at the bench with his hands on the keys, and Jack is leaning down behind Andre with one arm around his chest and one hand on the keys. Andre is smiling, and both of them seem relaxed and at ease. I think I would have passed out if I had seen this gentle, sweet homoerotic image when I was 16.
