My Story (The Gay Years), Part 3

Thankfully, after high school comes a wonderful experience called "college."

The promise of such a place was palpably exciting. I may have had to spend a summer alone, but this summer, I was determined not to waste my time. If I was going to be gay, then by god, I was going to be gay. How did such gaiety manifest itself? Well, I was going away to the city for college, so I headed right on over to gay.com and created a personal profile. I talked to some older college kids who fascinated me, but they were mostly in other awkward boats - one only liked men twenty or so years older, while another - call him 27, because that was part of his screen-name - was intriguing, friendly, helpful, but balked immediately when I suggested we meet when I got down there.

I wanted to know why, of course. 27 told me that he was a grad student, very close to graduating, and that he worked in the university's registration office and they were looking to hire him after he graduated. He couldn't let them know he was gay, or he'd be putting his "certain" position in jeopardy. He couldn't meet me, he couldn't see me, he couldn't do anything but chat online.

Was he feeding me bullshit? It's possible. Meeting strangers off the 'net can turn skeazy, or so the media tells me, but I was honest and so I believed him. Besides, he had no reason to lie, and he'd picked the perfect lie if he was: I was absolutely ready to believe that his office wouldn't hire him back if they knew he was gay. I talked to him a few more times, then I moved down there.

I knew right away that the school wasn't for me. My roommate was a hobbit-lookalike basketball player from New York who was nice enough but who had impromptu parties in our tiny room way too often. One of the girls who showed up at a couple of those parties, Daphne, was absolutely beautiful and ran with the track team; she actually initiated conversations with me and was in one of my classes. One of the few things I regret about leaving was not seeing more of her, because I think we would've become good friends and she's the kind of friend I would've needed back then. With Daphne, I could have admitted that I was gay, and she wouldn't have had years of recorded high school memories to compare me with. She was having trouble with the transition, too; she was typically pretty in the Southern California way, and while she was radiant, she was perhaps worse off than I was as the ugly kid, because people expected frumpiness and average things from me. Daphne was assumed, at least by me, to be too pretty to be afraid. When I saw her in class, and she confessed how nervous she was, I saw another side of her. I saw myself mirrored in her, really, although my uncertainty probably didn't come from the same source.

Once I decided that I was leaving that school, I spent a lot of time wandering around, giving myself a tour (I told myself), looking for something (I told my friends, though no one ever heard what). I ended up, most days, on the top floor of the library, surrounded by huge glass windows. One day, I was there during a general class block, quite alone. I sat up there for a long time, writing out diaries to myself, trying to figure out how I'd made such a big mistake, what I was going to do next, what I should/could/would do. I wish I had the diary, but after writing for hours (that were probably only minutes), the class period ended and the walkway five stories below was filled with a the post-summer throngs. There I wrote the turning point: "There are a lot of gorgeous guys here."

It didn't make me want to stay, but I cried a bit over that page. Here, at last, inescapable truth! I knew that I was gay! I had written proof! I was admissible in a court of law! It was beautiful and terrible at the same time, but I'd learned what I needed to learn, and I left the library. I spent my remaining few days with my friend Kelly and my old friend Riley. Remember him? He must've been going through a transformation, too, even if neither of us talked about it then; we just rode our bikes around downtown a lot, he looking for natural food stores and whatnot, me just content to follow.

I returned home that weekend and enrolled in the community college. I got a job hosting at the hot new restaurant downtown, thanks to my friend Jennie. But, while things didn't seem quite so rosy as they had during the summer - I wasn't going to live in the big city, I wasn't going to find a lot of gay men - I had taken a very important step: I had told myself that I was gay. I hadn't changed, but I had.