My Story (the Gay Years), Part 1

Yep, here's my story. It's going to take quite a few entries, I think, but I hope I can cover the major points. If you want to find all the entries, the tag to search for is "my gay story." (I'm changing names, too, if you're curious.)

I'm not going to talk about elementary and middle school. Remember the Wil Wheaton story - yeah, I was different, but I didn't think "gay" until high school, so that's where this will start.

My dad has known this guy, Sam, since they went to nursing school together back in the 80s. They've been friends through all the years since, including both of their marriages. Sam's family has two kids - a daughter, Rachel, who's a year younger than me, and a son. For as long as I can remember, our families have been friends, no matter where we lived (and we moved around a lot). When we lived in Tucson, they'd visit; Rachel and I both remember watching the first season of ER at the respective ages of seven and six. When we lived in Colorado, our two families would go camping, and I remember when we were building our house in the country, when it was nothing but a tiered hole in the ground, Rachel and I and our brothers would have races up and down, up and down, a weird-ass little waterfall of kids

When we moved to this city, about the only good thing I could think of was that Rachel lived here. Not exactly "here," though, but about ten miles away - she would go to a different high school, at least until our sophomore year. Then, her parents decided, with help from Rachel, that her current high school really smelled too much like pot and teen mothers, and since my school had the better theater program (and she was so far into theater she came out the other side), she would transfer. She did. We ended up with first period English together, sitting one in front of the other. Well, it was a weird experience - your on-again, off-again friend-of-the-family is suddenly in school with you after close to fifteen years of knowing her, and ... well, it was weird. A nice weird, but still a bit strange.

We formed a movie club that year - the school had plenty of theater, but no on-camera stuff, so with me as the president and Rachel as the vice-president, we changed that. We were as close as we'd ever been and probably closer, thanks to seeing each other every day, and although there were places we didn't go together - I had advanced math and science, she had her advanced theater - we still had the measure of each other. And I knew one thing: My awkward elementary friend with the braces and chubby face was long past, and she'd become a bloomingly beautiful young woman.

That was a problem.

I didn't want Rachel to have a boyfriend. True, she'd had some her freshman year, and even the middle school emotional flings a couple of years before, but we were in high school. Things were getting serious. Nothing happened for the first semester of our sophomore year, but as Christmas got closer I decided I was pressing my time and my luck, and if I wanted Rachel to stay boyfriendless, I had to do something. I put together a list of what I wanted to buy my friends for Christmas, and Rachel got a special asterisk by her name, and no item. See, I already knew that the only thing that could even come close to sparing Rachel from male banality was a ring, gifted with pomp and circumstance by her best friend.

I went downtown and in and out, in and out, in and out of the cute little tourist shops. I forget exactly why I was looking for it, but I was determined that Rachel should have an opal ring. I think it was a pair of earrings that she said she liked, and I thought looked good on her.... Anyway, I found the perfect ring, and I made sure that the old lady running the store heard me say clearly that it was "for her." She heard, all right, and picked out the perfect (read: disgustingly obvious) heart-shaped pink box, wrapped the ring inside, and sealed the deal with some shiny silver ribbon.

I obsessed over giving Rachel the ring. Specifically, I wondered if it was good enough to just give it to her, and hope that she'd figure things out. Did I have to say anything at all? I thought about untying the ribbon and putting a note inside, but I decided against it. Why? I didn't really want Rachel, or anyone else, to be my girlfriend; I just wanted her to be unavailable to the licentious morons we went to school with. But I did want her to continue to be my close friend, and I was afraid that if she became someone else's girlfriend, that would change. But I didn't want to kiss her, and I didn't want to hold her hand. I wanted to go to the movies with her, yeah, but I already did that, and what if I was expected to hold her hand there? A girlfriend was just too much to take on, too much risk for too little return.

I gave her the ring the day before Christmas break, in our English class. Our friends assumed what I wanted them to assume - namely, that I was in love with Rachel. Hell, I didn't know what to think, or even if that was what I wanted them to think anymore, but there it was. She wore the ring, anyway, and that's what mattered to me. I don't know what happened to the heart-shaped box, but the idea that I might be gay (for anyone else) certainly didn't start there. Assumptions were made, I think, that Rachel and I tried dating/a relationship/what-have-you, but we were just too good of friends, or something. Her parents and I were left to shake our heads whenever our families would get together and the talk turned to social lives. I had lots of friends; Rachel had lots of friends. I had my school activities; Rachel had her school activities. There was a bit of overlap there, but when it came to significant others, well.... "My dad would love it if I dated you," she told me, once. But she had her boyfriends, and I had ... what? Nothing. No desire, even. And so I started to wonder.