My Story (The Gay Years), Part 2

Here's part two of my gay story. Look for the tag "my gay story" if you want to read more.

I remember the first time I actually associated myself with the word "gay." It was my senior year of high school, and I was driving to school. Now, mind, I live five miles from the very edge of town, which means that it was a good half-hour drive from my house to the high school (and that's without heavy traffic). So, I had a good deal of time to think about heavy things, especially since ... well, I get ahead of myself. Let's go back a little bit further.

I enjoyed my freshman year, I think. My family moved from Colorado to Arizona when I was about a month into eighth grade, and I went from a Catholic school class of twenty to a public school eighth grade of five hundred. I'd never used a locker; I hadn't picked out anything but a uniform to wear to school for years; I came from a house in the country where phone lines just weren't something we had and usage of the Internet was a birthday and Christmas treat. My assimilation into the new city took the entire year, though I never really enjoyed it; my algebra teacher, on the very last day of school, told me that even though I'd only come a month into the year, I'd always felt like the new kid to her. Gee, thanks.

Freshman year, then, was a welcome change for me. All the middle schools in town were funneled into the single public high school, so my eighth grade class tripled in size and everyone started over. During my freshmen year, I explored a lot - I took drama, I took video productions, I took computer-drawing architecture class, I took geography and biology and gym and geometry and I felt well-rounded. I had a few obsessions with boys in my classes, mostly in my gym class, but like with Wil Wheaton I didn't really want to kiss them or have sex with them or anything, I just wanted to (1) be them or, failing that, (2) be friends with them. Hopefully, best friends. But I was smart, and I was slightly naive, so I made a lot of friends, especially with sophomores in my biology and geometry classes.

No, I'm not leading into some sordid affair with an older boy. High school was an asexual time, but I think the ring affair was a turning point. It wasn't enough to send me into a full-strength sexuality witch hunt, but it was also more than enough to let me know that if I kept operating as if things were "normal," it wouldn't turn out well for me. How exactly I knew this, I don't know, but I knew inherently and obviously that dating girls (or, at least, admiring them) was a prerequisite for normal behavior, and it wasn't something I was going to do because I couldn't. I wasn't gay by association, either; you'll remember that I started the movie club, and it attracted something like an 80% female population, and no gay men. I was surrounded by girls all the time, and I spent my after-schools and weekends with them. No one questioned me.

During my freshman year, I had two great male friends, Mark and Riley. Mark I met in gym class, but sat next to in a couple of other classes, and he was the closest thing I had to a best friend during those first two years. We'd hang out, outside of school, even though we lived across the county; he'd sleep at my house, we'd play video games at his. Normal things, boy things, but I noticed his smile in a way that none of our other male friends did. He drifted, after freshman year, into a group of boys who were mostly good-looking but who, maybe more importantly, wouldn't keep him up all night during sleepovers talking about their hopes and fears. I didn't drift with him.

Riley, on the other hand, ended up in a co-ed group I was minimally a part of. The group kind of self-destructed after high school and Riley turned out to be bisexual himself, but in high school he was the poster boy for alternative sports - he was the undisputed champion rock climber, hiker, biker, you name it. He was more fun to be around than Mark, but again I lost him to the evolution of cliques; in the group he became a part of, webs of crushes, dates, relationships, and sex were the norm. I had (what I wouldn't admit were) crushes on some of the boys, including Riley, but I didn't want to date the girls and so I didn't become a part of that group either. I lost both of them, sadly, and I don't blame that entirely on being gay. Well, not in so many words.

Around my junior year, I stopped talking in class. I hated the way my voice sounded, see, and I thought that I didn't have anything to offer, anyway, so I just stopped speaking up. At the same time, I think I was getting close to depressed, and I ballooned to almost 200 pounds by my senior year. Maybe that doesn't sound like a lot, since I'm six feet tall, but I'd been the fastest kid for several years growing up; I had a lot of track ribbons; I'd played soccer and baseball. I wasn't a fat kid, even if I wasn't on any of the sports teams, but hating one part of yourself doesn't seem to stop at that one part. Yeah, I hated my voice, but I also came to hate my fat (which, of course, flourished in that hatred); I hated my skin, which I deemed too white; I hated my eyes, and invested in violet contacts because I wanted to show that I was different, outwardly, even if there wasn't any name for the specific species of difference that I felt. I was the smart boy who had friends in different groups, who was in that club and somehow always surrounded by girls, who hung out with the anime girls at lunch. I was an oddity, but I was a nonthreatening oddity.

And then senior year, and for the first time I thought, well, could I be gay? It's important, I think, that no matter how much I hated my voice or whatever else about my body, I was not opposed to the idea of being gay. Honestly, it was almost kind of a relief, because it explained why I didn't like girls, and it gave me permission to go on not liking them. The only problem, then, was that I had no idea how to be gay. I was rapidly approaching the blimp version of me, and the only gay males in my life (and not even really in my life) were two theater boys that Rachel knew.

The first, Hugh, was a skinny kid with a rat's face who didn't look like he'd yet passed puberty. He had braces with rainbow bands, if that gives you any idea. He didn't so much walk as he sauntered. He wore white capris with startling regularity, and gaudy sunglasses. He received notes calling him faggot and cocksucker in his locker (that last according to Rachel). I was confused: I didn't want to be gay like that. I didn't even like capris.

The second guy, Bobby, was less obvious, but only just. He wore tight jeans and gelled his hair to perfection. He wore glasses for no reason other than he thought that they filled out his face. His favorite shirt was luridly pink, quite tight, and said "I'm SO over him!" He had money, too; one of my friends asked him to the prom our junior year, and while he went with her, he was annoyed that she'd only asked him three weeks in advance, because that was apparently not enough time to fly out to Rodeo Drive and try and find a nice suit. He seemed a bit more normal, in an eccentric rich kid way, but I still didn't really know. I wasn't like Hugh or Bobby, really, but I still liked guys. I didn't like them, though, so where did that leave me? They were gay; I didn't like them; so I couldn't be gay.

Then, graduation. I would be walking with Rachel, of course, and the day of graduation, I met her at her house to get ready. Her other best friend, Dani, was also there, also getting ready, and Dani had invited her walking partner over to get ready with us. His name was Shawn, and apparently he was good friends with Dani and so an ostensible friend of Rachel's, but I'd never met him. I ... well, the first time, I saw him, I didn't know what to say. He was gorgeous. If I didn't believe in love at first sight, it was only because I hadn't seen him before. Cheesy, yeah, but you have to realize that I'd started to admit to myself that I was gay, but that I had no idea what to do next because a few crushes-not-crushes and two flamers made me think I didn't have much of a future as a gay man.

Later that day, Rachel's dad drove me and Rachel to meet up with Dani and Shawn before the ceremony. Rachel took it upon herself to explain Shawn to me, since I seemed to be interested in him. She didn't pick up on romantic interest, certainly; Rachel wouldn't know I was gay for another year or so. But the conversation went a little something like this:
RACHEL: So, Shawn. You know he's gay?
ME: What? No. I didn't pick up on it.
RACHEL'S DAD: Oh, Rach, he can't know that yet. He's too young.
RACHEL: Dad, it's his life! Of course he does.
RACHEL'S DAD: He can't know yet.

Paraphrased, but it definitely stuck in my mind. If Shawn couldn't know that he was gay, and he was so beautiful and had had, as Rachel later told me, some actual boyfriends, how was I supposed to know? I was smart, I was overweight, I had braces, and I didn't like Will & Grace. I couldn't be gay. It just wouldn't be allowed. I knew enough about gay men to understand that certain things were acceptable, and certain things weren't. Maybe you could grow up to be Nathan Lane in The Birdcage, but you couldn't be fat without being entertaining, just like TV had taught me that you couldn't be an overweight black woman without being sassy. I didn't fit into the stereotype, so I didn't know where I did fit.

I escaped high school with my diploma and the honor cords and pins of more honor societies than anyone else in my class. I'd've forked them all over in a moment for five minutes with a good telepath.