The question I am most frequently asked is when did you know you were gay?
I think I've always known I was gay. I can remember being very young - as young as four - and having sexual thoughts about boys, usually older boys.
Growing up I knew I was differnt from other boys. The other boys would talk about girls and the things they'd like to do with them, but I had no interest in girls at all.
My best friend and I had fooled around for years, he was always introducing new things for us to do. I can't remember when that started exactly, I think I was eight or nine years old. However I remember him teasing me saying that I liked men, while he professed liking only women, even though he was doing things with me.
When I was about eleven years old I began to realize that he was right. I enjoyed our times together. As time passed I started asking him to do sexual things with me more and more often. I think that's when I really understood who I was.
I realized what gay really means, it means to be someone who has sexual thoughts and feelings for someone of the same sex. I realized that I was gay. I thought I was a monster.
Young boys can be cruel, insulting each other was a pass time for many boys, the meanest insult I can remember was to call someone gay, to say they were a queer or faggot.
Because we were taught to be gay was to be evil. Gay people were demons, baby-rapers, and perverts. After all didn't the bible condemn gay people? Aren't gay people going to hell?
A short time after I realized that I was gay my family moved to another state. Here was a chance for a whole new start, A new town, new friends, perhaps I'd change, that my feelings would fade. My feelings never did fade though. I still liked men, I thought of them when other boys were thinking about girls.
Because everyone talked about being gay as wrong, as being a sin, and evil I kept my feelings hidden. Having to hide who I was and how I felt made me very unhappy. For years I hated myself, I wondered how god could allow me to be gay. How I could be someone everyone hated. How my own god could hate me.
I wrestled with my sexual orientation for years. Finally when I turned sixteen I could not hide my feelings anymore. I had fallen head over heals in love with one of my friends. Trying to hide how I felt but trying to be close to him was tearing me up.
That's when I started the self-discovery process of Coming Out.
