Homo Hermit

I figured out I was gay when I was 11. I was gay before then, of course, but that’s when things fell into place, and I knew what I was, and I had a name for it. I can remember sitting on our back porch by myself and reasoning it out. I liked boys. I didn’t like girls. Boys who like boys are gay. I’m gay.

From that moment on, I was sure I was gay. It was exhilarating. I began having graphic sexual fantasies about boys, and I had crushes on them. I didn’t try to rationalize what I was experiencing or explain it away. I was gay, and I knew it. I was a boy, and I wanted to do things with certain boys. I dreamed of everything from being close to them, to kissing them, holding their hands to putting their private parts in my mouth. I had those feelings. I accepted those feelings, and I enjoyed those feelings. I began to have crushes on movie and TV stars like Shaun Cassidy from the Hardy Boys, one of my favorite TV shows. I can remember getting a magazine when I was in the sixth grade through the Weekly Reader. It was given to me in home room at the start of the day, and it had a picture of Shaun and Parker Stevenson on the cover. Shaun was standing up, and he was wearing tight jeans. A lump in his crotch was clearly visible, and I can recall sitting there and staring at that lump. I imagined what Shaun’s penis looked like. I wanted to see it, and I wanted to suck him. I wanted that more than anything.

But I knew I couldn’t tell a living soul, so I kept it a secret. I enjoyed my feelings, but I never dared tell anyone what I was experiencing. I lived in fear that I would let it slip out by accident. I even began to fear taking naps on the sofa in the living room because I was afraid I’d say something about boys in my sleep. I was afraid of falling ill and becoming delirious because I thought I might say something about boys and someone would hear me and know. That seemed far worse than being deathly ill.

I was always a shy kid, but I became increasingly nervous around people. I feared giving myself away, and it wasn’t that I was merely afraid of saying something. I feared someone would come to the conclusion that I didn’t talk or walk or move or act like other boys. Those gender expectations were strongly enforced, and if you stuck your toe out of your assigned gender box, someone was always ready to pounce. So I lived in terror. I was always on guard. And I kept my distance from others at a time when I should have been learning social skills.

I kept my secret until I went away to college seven years later. Seven years to a young person is like an eternity. When you’re 18 and look back to when you were 11, that seems like ancient history, and I had spent all that time hiding from everybody every minute of the day.

Of course, I had a lot of expectations and hopes about finding a community, and of course life wasn’t suddenly heaven on earth when I found others like me. But something else happened, too. I had been in survival mode for years. All of my emotional energy had been spent simply surviving, and suddenly I was given a certain amount of space. I had some amount of breathing room where I could finally let my guard down a little. And what happened then? All of the anger, rage and sadness I couldn’t deal with when I had to get through the day without acting too queer came flooding into my consciousness. It was overwhelming, and it nearly killed me.

The feelings of uncertainty and insecurity were deeply ingrained, and the feeling that being too open and unguarded around others was dangerous, that became like second nature. And my emotions were always erratic, and they could quickly become extreme. I tried to get over it. I tried so hard. I went to doctor after doctor. I took drug after drug. I even tried electroshock. In the end, I had to accept that too much exposure to other people was dangerous for me. I had to accept that I wasn’t going to lead a “normal” life. I needed to be by myself most of the time.