For a long time, I struggled with finding out who I was. There has not been a day where I was attracted to girls, at least not one that I can remember. It’s always been guys. I’d been taught that men loving men and women loving women was wrong, the most heinous thing anyone can do. I was taught that it was right up there with some illegal offense, which is crazy, when you think about it. I had all these feelings inside, feelings that left me confused and feeling like I was something…wrong.
I grew up with my grandmother. I resented my parents for a long time because I felt like they didn’t want me, especially as I learned that I had sister thirteen months younger, and later, a brother four years younger. It was only a couple years later that I learned that it was the best thing that they could do at that time. Our home was nowhere near baby friendly. A leaking roof in every room, overgrown bushes, rusty nails and galvanize strewn about the yard, all because it was what my dad could afford then. To keep me safe and to give me a better situation, at least until he could get the house under control, my parents sent me to live with my grandmother.
My grandmother was a typical old school Catholic grandmother. She was a “Saturday Catholic”, so she dressed me up and ensured that we got to church super early Saturday evening. She taught me about the love of Jesus. She taught me to pray. She enrolled me in my First Communion class, then Confirmation. She pushed me to be a reader at church and then an altar boy. At my grandmother’s, I was the spoiled child. I was the firstborn child of any of my grandmother’s children, the first in the generation of grandchildren and the firstborn boy. I was the apple of everyone’s eye. I had my own room and I got everything I wanted, simply because I never asked for much. I just…got.
I used to always feel like I was a girl because I was taught that it was only girls that liked boys. I was taught that boys played with trucks and girls played with dolls. Being at that impressionable age, I had these feelings inside, so it was only natural that pre-teen me would think that I was a girl. I remember I used to play in her closet and vanity. She was a diabetic and slightly overweight, so she could never wear six inch heels. She never had big feet either, so my feet fit perfectly into her 2 inch wedges when I was about eight. I raided her closet for blouses that fit me like dresses. I pulled my penis back to hide it and slipped my underwear up, giving the illusion that I had a vagina. I dipped my fingers in her makeup and applied it to my face. I remember that I would look in the mirror after I was “prettied”, twirling this way and that, looking at my pretty dress and painted face and still felt ugly. I felt wrong. My mother scrubbed my face raw one time when she caught a tiny hint of makeup on my face when she came for a visit one day. The last time that I ever played dress up, I sat in front the mirror in a floral blouse with blue eye lids and red lips, stared at myself and cried. I scrubbed my face, neatly packed her blouse and shoes back and put on a pair of my shorts and a Superman t-shirt and looked at myself, my real self, in the mirror and felt at ease. I knew then that I was not meant to be a girl.
My neighbor at the time was a boy of my age who went to a different school. He was my first best friend. We went to each other’s birthday parties, exchanged gifts for Christmas and had many play dates. My grandfather had a garage that was fairly large when you’re two feet tall. My friend and I would sneak in there or in my room and would play a game that he invented that was called “Measure.” It’s silly to think about now. We would simply strip our shorts and compare our penises. That felt so natural to me. It stopped feeling natural when his mother found us one day. His mother wrung both our ears and dragged me to my grandparents. They sent him home and my grandfather then chased me around the house with a broomstick. Legitimately, my friend and I never saw each other again.
I was 10 years old when I developed my first real crush on a boy in Primary school. I had transferred from a public school to a private one in third standard. The well to do’s went there as well as the rare mix of the barely scraping by. My best friend at the time was my sister because nobody else would talk to us. I was just on the cusp of puberty. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him, even If he was awful to me. He had long eye lashed and a mole under his left eye. His body was going through the changes, filling out his chest and calves and thighs. I tortured myself with dreams of him and me. And this was all before I was 12. Suffice it to say, we were never friends and he continued to torment me. Girls tormented me, making up a stupid rhyme that spoke about my femininity and how I thought that I was the best thing since sliced bread. I had no safe haven. The teachers did not care and all told me to toughen up. Instead of toughening up, like they suggested, I just became recluse.
Secondary school was much worse. I became even more of a recluse. I had left my grandparents’ and moved in with my parents in efforts to get to know them better. I was again in a new school with no familiar faces. I was twelve and still did not know how to really make friends. I sat in my seat and delved into academics, eventually placing first in the class that first term in first form and making honour roll. The teasing got worse as I was then known as that “nerdy girly boy”. I was tripped and pushed, thrown into garbage bins and tapped on the back of my head.
I tried coming to terms with my homosexuality as the word “gay” began to be flung back and forth as insults. Now that I knew what it was, I had many a sleepless night trying to feel at ease. I prayed and prayed that God would take these feelings away. I wanted to be clean, I wanted to be righteous, I wanted to be holy. I cursed the Devil himself for bringing that into my life.
My body finally began changing but not in the way normal boys did. I grew about half an inch and my chest filled grew and grew and grew, resembling female breasts. I was teased relentlessly for it. That, coupled with my femininity, earned me the female equivalent of my name. I again began feeling awful about myself. My self-esteem was at an all-time low. I felt like I had all these problems because I brought them on myself. I was not sporty so my ballooning weight did not help with the self-esteem issue. I later learned that my expanding chest was actually a genetic condition called gynecomastia. The lack of sports, of an active lifestyle really, contributed to the growth. Yet, I did nothing to stop it.
At thirteen, it was pretty much confirmed with my parents that I was gay. I kept a dream journal because at that time, I wanted to chronicle everything and create a tormented memoir of my life. I wanted to be cool. It was around the time I started having wet dreams. There was one boy in the other class that I found oddly very attractive. I had a dream about him one night, a very sexual dream that I just HAD to get down on paper so I can read it over. I described the dream in great detail. It just so happens that I spent a little extra time detailing, I guess, so I began to run a bit late. It was getting closer to the time where I had to leave to get to school on time. In my haste, I shoved the journal under my pillow and left. Of course that had to be the day my mother stopped complaining about the mess that was the room that I shared with my brother and decided to neaten it up. She believed that I had not made my bed correctly and remade it. In remaking it, she found the journal. I got home that day and found the journal sitting neatly on my freshly remade bed. I dropped my bag on the floor and sat on my bed, picking up the journal. I opened the pages and flipped to the last entry, where the words “GOD WILL FORGIVE YOU!” were written in red across the pages of that entry and others that were similar. I remember the feeling. I felt like I was a piece of glass that was hit with a stone and caused a crack. That crack lengthened and widened as I flipped pages, eventually breaking apart. I was scared. I couldn’t face my mother, nor could I face my father. I just couldn’t. I didn’t have to wait too long as my door opened and my brother entered, followed by my mother. She pulled me up and dragged me into her room, sat me down and proceeded to pray. She held on to my head as she cried, asking God do strip me of whatever demons were trying to wrestle their way into my life and to cleanse my sullied heart. My father sat there, his eyes not meeting mine. I felt his despair, his disappointment.
My faith wavered as I entered my teenage years, especially after that fiasco. I started questioning God and not the Devil. It was always “Why God? Why me? What curse have you put on me? Why won’t you change me? Don’t you love me, God?” No matter how hard I prayed, I still had these feelings. They would not go away at all. I stopped praying. I figured that God was either not hearing me or just not paying attention. All that I had learned about God’s love and his compassion went out the window. I delved even deeper into my school work and even joined some academic societies. I did anything I could to not be at home often. I became a darker person. Many times I would wish to die so that the pain of disappointing my parents and feeling worthless would go away. I was not sure that I could go through with life anymore. I just felt so…numb, helpless and undeserving of love. I felt worthless. I used pins to scrape my skin just enough to leave a mark that would last a day or two but not enough to draw blood. Because even in that feeling of worthlessness, I just could not give myself to courage to take my own life. I just wanted to feel some other form of pain as the emotional pain was too much to bear.
By the time I was fifteen, I was fed up. The few friends that I had were dwindling away one by one because I refused to talk. Looking back on it now, I don’t know what I was so scared about. Yes, sure, I went to a denominational school where that same “homosexuality is a sin!” spew but not all of my friends were religious. Being gay and attending a denominational school while living in an extremely Catholic home messed with my psyche. I was taught from an early age that “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” I was taught that I would grow up to be a “big, strong man” and that I would one day have a family, a wife and children. But I did not want a wife. I did not want children, at least I didn’t, and still largely don’t, think so.
The first time I accepted and admitted my homosexuality to myself and to anyone, I was fifteen. I was friends with this one girl. We’d been in the same class from first form straight till fifth. She wasn’t even my best friend at the time. I was chatting with her online one night about a project that we had had. I remember feeling stressed because I couldn’t concentrate as I was just so fed up of keeping everything inside. I wanted so badly to talk about the time I saw this one boy’s dick in the boys’ bathroom. I needed so badly to tell someone that I was crushing on my closest guy friend in the entire school. I messaged her, saying that I had something to tell her and that it was really important. I looked around my family room, where we stored the shared computer, to make sure that I was alone then I whispered the words as I typed them: “I’m gay…” The minutes seemed like hours as I waited with bated breath, watching the bubble with her name and ‘is typing’ appearing and reappearing as she erased and retyped her message. I was already pretty much friendless by that point and suffered from the lowest self-esteem that I told her that, fearing the absolute worst, I’d understand if she didn’t want to be friends with me anymore. Tears filled my eyes as I asked her not to say anything to anyone and told her that I was sorry that I had put her in that position. I breathed a large sigh of relief when she replied “Hold up, let me pick my jaw up off the floor.” I asked her if she really was surprised. I could see her now, in my head, throwing her head back and laughing as she typed “No.” She told me that she always suspected but was unsure and was waiting on me to say something to her.
By the time graduation came around, I was almost fully comfortable with myself. I had stopped trying to NOT use my hands when I talk. I stopped trying to “sound straight.” I stopped pretending to chase girls and I stopped trying to be one of the boys. I stopped trying to fit in. I started to be…me, flailing hands and everything. One of my guy friends told me that he knew that I was gay, telling me, “It’s okay. This school is filled with religious assholes. I’m not gonna be one of them.” I told one of my best friends, who told me that she’d love me regardless of whether I thought of myself as a king or a queen.
As I entered yet another new school for sixth form, I went in expecting not to know anyone but so much more confident in myself that I would be myself, wholly and truly. And I was. I met some of the best people that I would ever meet and the first set of people who I did not have to pretend to be anyone else around. They loved me for me and saw me as I was. Luckily, three of my friends from my old school showed up. We became closer. One guy I was friends with outright asked me if I was gay and I told him yes. Another was angry at me at first because he thought that a friend of mine who he was attracted to and I were together. I remember laughing in his face and just telling him that I was gay. Actually, I think the term I used was that I was “allergic to vaginas.” The things you say when you’re younger.
As I grew older and moved from situation to situation, I let my guard down even more and let people in. I became more of myself and began discovering who I was. I can’t say that that feeling of not knowing who you are goes away. Things happen where you question your decisions. Even now, in my mid-20s, I still struggle with it sometimes. I just have an inkling of what’s real and what’s not. Sometimes I feel like I HAVE to be that stereotypical gay guy, ultra-effeminate and flamboyant. But I’ve realized that I don’t have to pretend to be that guy; I already am. I’m more feminine. I like to think that I’m like half a pack of Skittles. I like things like women’s shoes and shopping and I talk with a drawl. I use my hands to talk and fling them around every which way. I clutch at my chest when gasping and I say things like “I cannot” and exaggerate my “oh my God’s” and whatever else. I’m just a little bit…extra. Ha. My voice is deep enough, save for the drawl, and I can actually grow a full beard and I know next to nothing about cars or anything handy. I’m deathly afraid of frogs and spiders and the like, and I scream when they come near me. The only time I’m ever into sports is when there are guys playing and I can just stare at their bodies or butts. I hardly have male friends, heterosexual ones, at least, because sometimes I get too attached and they tend to think that I’m pining after them and it ruins our relationship when I have to defend it.
I’ve made a conscious decision to keep the peace with my parents. As long as we don’t discuss my homosexuality, everything is fine. It’s a sacrifice that I must make in order to keep any semblance of peace and sanity at home. I’m so beyond blessed and grateful to be surrounded by such supportive, amazing friends who have told me that the love who I am now and that they love the fact that I am always myself in a society that expects you to be someone else.
Finding yourself is a lifelong journey. I am no longer one of those people who strive to be anyone other than who they inherently are.
Yes, I am gay. But that is not all there is to me. I am also intelligent, caring, able-bodied (for the most part). I like helping people. I love silly things like glitter and taking pictures, movies and hanging out with the people I love. I have a valid point of view and an opinion. I hurt, I cry, I laugh, I smile. I feel. I am a genuine, kind, welcoming individual with an open mind and an open heart. I am a human being. And I will not apologize for it.
The 'Coming Out' Stories 
Beautiful story!
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