Homosexuality In America,” -- or-- How I found out I was “gay” at age 16, 1964.

[Steve]

I'm not one of those people who are overly concerned with a post being too long to read. A message board... a help board based on words and experiences is by nature based upon words. The people who really need the perspective of time, who seriously need help, may want to know what I have to communicate. My words aren't the gospel by any means, but the collective POV from as many members as possible can go a long way to provide understanding for those people in need. This place wasn't something I had as a boy, but it might have made all the difference in the world to me. If the a singular thing like reading a book (further down) kept me alive, maybe we can collectively help someone else persevere. Our time here is worth the cost.

Thanks for taking the time to check out my confused questions Mike. These days I become muddled so often that the ceiling becomes the floor. The research I do online takes more research just to sort the facts from the fiction. Often I have to research places like the activist blog Bilerico, and The Gay Center.org, The Stonewall.org site (especially the UK site which gives great insight into our friends across the pond), and the APA (American Psychological Association) among others. Usually by the time I finish looking at at of them I've forgotten why I was looking in the first place.

I did wrestle with coming out. Like you Mike I had experience with other boys, but even while I was old enough to love the brand new toy in my pants, you're right, there was no social context in these encounters. We were boys just messing around, and we all knew by virtue of how it was talked about and the insults gay people received, that the discussion of "messing around" was the ultimate taboo.

I distinctly remember walking home from a friends home in the cold of winter with the internal debate going on in my head, "Am I that way? I must be that way. I don't like this. People can't know. Am I like this?" Like I said, in my gut I knew, whether I wanted it to be true or not.

I was lucky that by the time I started coming to terms with myself that there were fictional books I could read with positive portrayals of gay men. The movies were still massively depressing to watch (Boys in the Band), even if you did see the black humor and the reality of the characters.

Novels like The Front Runner probably saved my life. If I hadn't starting finding something positive to lose myself in, to take me away from small town hate, and vicious abuse, I would have lost what little hope I had. I balled myself tighter than Anne Coulter's embryo with those little tidbits of positive images and rode out my life. I'm sure I reread The Front Runner and The Fancy Dancer at least fifty times during those years.

Later there were other books, not all positive but at least realistic, like Dancer from the Dance, Faggots, Gay Plays (a collection of contemporary gay theatre plays and musicals). Bent was a hard f*cking book to read. I read Gordon Merrick's stuff like The Lord Won't Mind, even if I knew it was little more than Harliqueer romance.

I can't begin to imagine what it must have been like for you Mike. Novels like that just weren't around for you. The only option you had was to shut up and try to act as straight as you could, even if you couldn't readily know some of the behaviors that gave us away. I would have ended up like Jack Twist at the end of Brokeback Mountain.

I wonder reading your posts whether or not your parents knew internally, like the gut feeling I had inside that knew I was gay, about you. It certainly seemed like your father might have known at some level. They always say "mother's know", and maybe the intuitive ones do, but it doesn't prevent them from being evil, or burying their head in the sand and pretending life is wonderful.

No offense to Will (please, please, please), but my hatred of most cops still carries over from my youth. It was an unwritten rule in those days that even if you needed them desperately, gay people didn't call the police. The blue wall of silence was more like a fortress of steel in those days, when cops had each others backs, no matter the truth. They created more trouble by their attitudes toward gays than they were worth. There were/are more instances of police and the court system abusing power skewed in favor of white, heterosexual men than I care to remember. I don't want to create ill will toward men like Will, so I won't rant more than this. I know he sees the worst parts of humanity on a daily basis, and risks his life in the process. I can't paint everyone with the same brush.

Still, I think we all have a fairly good idea what would have happened to a police car, even a campus vehicle, being held hostage in the name of civil disobedience in this day and age. It wouldn't be pretty. Images of Tiananmen Square are brought to my mind.

And I have gone off, off, off topic without meaning to. And probably created ill will by doing so. I hope my POV has some merit. All of it relates to my coming to terms with my coming to terms gay saga. Please forgive me if I have offended.