Coming Out Stories

Story 12

I started my seventh grade year at a new school (my grade school only went to the sixth grade) So I attended Jr High at a school just a little further from home than my grade school. There were more students, each subject matter was taught by a different teacher and we had different lunch periods for half the school. At some point shortly after the new year had started, I began to notice certain classmates more than others. I would catch myself looking at them for longer periods of time. The exact reason escapes me at the moment, but I recall noticing a few of my guy classmates and thinking 'wow he looks very interesting'. I did not quite know what I found interesting, but there were just many guys in my class that I wanted to get to know a bit better. As I found myself checking out guys in my class, I had several friends that started talking about girlfriends and dating and trying to impress so-and-so. Beyond that, the guys that I had started checking out had also started to talk about all the weird things they were going to try to get girls to like them. Things like pulling their hair, calling them names, etc. I never quite understood any of these 'flirting' behaviors, but it was amongst all of these things going on that I learned how queer I really was. At another point in junior high, a family member of mine dropped off some football player trading cards. I was not really interested in football, but the players on the cards were fairly attractive. I started to notice a correlation in players stats and found out that the ones I found more attractive happened to weigh more. While looking at these cards, I realized that many football teams had websites. This was around the time when 56k was a term, DSL was starting to become a term for 'fast internet' and NetZero was starting to make a name for itself. I found myself going to various football related websites to check out photos and to find listings of player stats. I remember feeling ashamed about what I was doing and started to save files onto various floppy disks and hide them throughout the house. I would include a few files that looked innocent enough and change the file extension of the images of football players' images so that nobody could open them easily. I then started finding websites containing images with football players modeling underwear, and after a bunch of random website visiting, came to find various web portals for gay men interested in larger bodied men. I vaguely remember at one point my mom finding out about one of the underwear model websites and her asking me questions. I immediately felt like I needed to hide my identity more and did so by learning more about browser history and how to hide my tracks (at least from my parents). I came across a few different web browsers that were different from internet explorer (Google Chrome, nor firefox existed at this time) and I resorted to using my own personal browser that managed all the sites I wanted to visit, but hid all shortcuts / traces of the browser from anyone else using the computer. Luckily this browser had a cool feature called tabbed browsing (at a time when no other browser did this). And I would open all of my gay related sites in tabs and then hide the window whenever a family member approached me. This went on for all of Jr high and was very alienating. I did not know any friends that were gay / interested in men that should not be according to society. I did the only thing that made sense to me at the time. I created a fake person, 'Edward Smith' and entered chat rooms with this entirely fake persona. He worked at a restaurant and went to college. He was undeclared and completely enthralled in hearing about others and hated talking about himself. I was 13 or so at the time. Because cameras and photos were not very popular in the dating scene, I was able to get by while only being asked 'what do you look like?' and not 'please send me your photo'. The most interesting thing to me at the time was how far away all of these people were. I probably learned more about geography from talking to people all over the world and the United States than I ever could have while in school. I learned about people's days, how they came out to their family, how they are living alone, with a friend, with nearby family, with their family, all sorts of variations and differences. There was no common thread, other than the fear of being misunderstood. The fear of being left alone and abandoned for being gay. Seventh grade wrapped up without me coming out, and eighth grade started with even more eye candy and more guys that I started to pay attention to. They never looked back at me, nobody ever seemed to notice that I had spent more time looking at the guys in our class than the women. My friends were too obsessed with finding out how to get laid and about the vagina for them to notice that I was not interested. After using several different methods to hide my tracks from my parents and hide my identity on the family computer, Christmas 2000 came around. My parents bought me my own computer as I had taken an interest in how they work and wanted my own. (Not to mention the family computer was starting to show its age and was slower than ever). It was a graduation, Christmas, birthday gift (and I did not care one bit, as it was the best gift I could have ever asked for). Suddenly I was able to use the computer in my bedroom. Suddenly, I had more disk space, it was faster, more RAM. By this point, I had grown a geeky personality and that side was as excited as the part of me that was hidden from the world. It was like two Christmas gifts, one for the me everyone knows, and one for the true me. Within the day of setting it up, the files and everything from the family computer were transferred over and the family computer was formatted. I now had more control and faster access to the me I was still just learning to understand. Jr high continued to fly by, and before I knew it, we had a class field trip to six flags. On the ride home, I remember talking to a friend that I had been interested in for some time about spending the night at his house. Once I got home, I gathered some Nintendo games and headed over to his place. He was definitely one of my first crushes. I don't quite know why he was, or what made me attracted to him, but he made me laugh, was generally a good guy. And he had just started playing football and was starting to bulk up a little. Throughout all of the times he spent the night over the summer, and the times I spent the night at his place, I never felt comfortable enough to tell him what was going through my mind. My parents threw a graduation party for me and I came across several generous cash gifts from family members. I used the money to upgrade my computer and with the upgrades, set up my computer to run two versions of windows, one version had everything that any normal about to enter high school student should be using a computer for. On the other installation, I had my bookmarks, favorite photos, chatting tools and other applications set up for my alternate me. Many chats later throughout the summer, I found myself starting high school. Yet again, a new school, even more students to mingle with. I was in several honors classes and had a very diverse set of classes and peers. I recall at some point, my brother had gotten into my room without me having enough time to completely hide everything on my computer. I had most things minimized and unfortunately the screen saver had started. The default screen saver was to use photos from the 'My Pictures' folder and present them as a slideshow. The screen went blank and slowly began to reveal a man wearing no shirt, hairy and stocky sitting upright in a bed posing for a photo. My brother noticed just as I did. I briefly freaked out, stopped the screensaver, accidentally opened another window that had more pictures in it, and eventually just shut down the computer and told my brother 'I think I have a virus'. He gave me a blank stare and just said 'OK...? I'm going to be downstairs'. At the time I shared the room with him and realized I needed to be more careful. I started locking the bedroom door and whenever I was caught with the door being locked, blamed the door for being faulty. The door locking got so bad that I locked myself out of my bedroom several times. Luckily, my brother moved into his own bedroom and I got the room to myself, which made it easier to hide my identity. I resorted to locking myself in my room more often as I became more and more comfortable with who I was. The only unfortunate thing was that I did not want anyone around me to know. I had grown too comfortable with nobody knowing, and preferred to keep it that way. Throughout high school, I diverted any talk of girlfriends and had been asked multiple times by my mom if I was gay. I would always tell her no, and then say that I do have some gay friends. (At some point during my sophomore year, one of my friends came out to me and another had come out as bi the following year) I was excited to finally have friends that were also interested in men, but found it weird to come out to them. I felt like I was so far into my own little world that I was emotionally detached from reality when it came to intimate relationships. I went through high school lying about having fake interests in various girls that all of my friends knew. It got to the point that I made fake blog posts about a love interest and combined random events from movies, literature, and video games and portrayed them as my own dreams and day-dreams. Unfortunately, a friend of a friend came across one such post, heard one of the 'rumors' about me being into one of her friends and started to freak out about how 'creepy' my blog posts were. This individual worked with my mom and told her about my blog. I remember my mom asking me about the blog and I just said they were just a bunch of words and writings and I did not have any intentions of doing anything stupid. She felt at ease and I continued on with my life, this time being a bit more reserved when it came to blog posts, and trying to find out the next lie to delay coming out. I had several other crushes through high school. Some caused me to join football, then leave. Others caused me to join various clubs and activities, but none of them made me feel comfortable enough, nor any mutual interest to make me comfortable talking about these thoughts with anyone. I finally was within a few weeks of graduating and I felt the need to come out. A friend of mine was struggling with telling his family and I was struggling with telling him. Finally a few days before graduation, I worked up the courage to tell him. He was happy for me, a little upset that I waited so long to tell him, but overall happy that I finally came out. Throughout the summer leading up to graduation, I came out to several other friends that were going to different colleges. Freshmen year came, and it was yet another new school with a lot of unfamiliar things. Not just a new school, but I was no longer living at home. I had a small shoebox of a living space. Luckily, I was able to share the dorm with one of the best friends I have ever had. It was just enough familiarity to make me comfortable with everything that was new and changing around me. I slowly had less and less conversations with random guys online and spent more and more time finding out about the LGBT community on campus. I was loving college, I felt like I was able to open up a bit more to a few people and I felt like I had the chance to become me. I was no longer feeling completely isolated and no longer living in the fear of rejection. Second semester started along with my RHET 105 class where I spent weeks looking in depth at the LGBT community. I went to various meetings, sessions, clubs, and read multiple books, articles, and editorials about LGBT life on campus. I wrote an extensive report and felt like I had the energy to come out to my roommate. I tried to tell him. I could not. I literally could not form the words. I told him I had something important I wanted to tell him and could not find the right words. I tried to figure out a simpler way of half coming out where I could tell him a story and see his response to see if now was the right time. It was right before we were going to bed and days before the last day of our first year at college. I ended up not telling him and we never brought up the awkward moment. Summer started, and I was able to get an internship on campus. I made many new friends and in particular became friends with someone I thought was gay. As my suspicion grew, finally he bluntly asked me. 'When did you first tell someone you were gay?' I was taken aback as nobody had ever been so direct and so suddenly after meeting me. It must've been based on our conversation or some other factor that he assumed I was gay, but I was speechless. I came out to him and we started to hang out and chat a bit more and I immersed myself in the local LGBT community. Summer came to a close just as I moved into the dorms for my sophomore year. Since I was working on campus, I moved in a week early and had started to practice how I was going to tell my roommate that I was gay. Finally, on the second day of classes, I told him: 'Javier, I'm Gay'. His response was simple: 'Really? I didn't know.' and we had a funny conversation about how he remembered the awkward conversation we had earlier in the year. He thought I was trying to tell him that I had killed someone or had cancer. We both laughed and I was happy that he did not care about my sexuality. I slowly came out to more classmates and friends. Nobody really seemed to care and some were quite surprised. I even had a few friends that were pretty homophobic, suddenly not care about it. The more interesting thing was that some friends were curious what my type was. Little by little, even friends started to point out guys that I had already been checking out. I remember one time getting up to leave lunch when my roommate said 'Where do you think you're going? Your dessert just arrived.' He then nodded in the direction of a guy I had a strong interest in. He was around my height and may have weighed more than myself and my roommate combined. Sophomore year got to be pretty busy as I had loaded my schedule up with many classes to try and be an over-achiever. I wanted to graduate early, save some money, and prove that I could get an engineering degree in three years. (I started college with a semester of credit). Spring semester 2007 was pretty stressful. I had a lot of classes going on, my brother was about to graduate high school, I came out to many friends. Through it all, I was wanting to tell my parents and everyone else. I was ready to be out, but I felt like I couldn't. I had a lot going on mentally, and at one point it became too much. I got home for spring break and my mom ended up in the hospital. She had a blockage in her digestive system that resulted in her being kept over multiple days and nights at the hospital. At the same time, I dyed my hair red (for some reason I felt like this would help in trying to come out) and I was ready to start the process). My mom was very sick and with everything else going on, it was very hard for me to focus on schoolwork. My grandma had visited us to help out while my mom was in the hospital and she was intent on rearranging things in the house and keeping me pretty busy. My mom got better, and we had a couple great days before I went back to school. I arrived with only half of my work done and still overwhelmed with what happened. I approached the engineering guidance counselors and mentioned what was going on. It was very late in the semester, but due to my course load and what was happening in my world, I was able to drop a class that had me at wit's end. I slowly recouped and finished the rest of my classes. The semester came to a close and I came home before starting my summer internship. My mom's birthday happened to be the same weekend. Around the same time, I was ready to come out, but wanted to try coming out to my brother first before my parents to see what he would say. I went to a grade school friend's house and we talked briefly about me telling my brother. We were in my friend's basement and I texted my brother who was just getting out of work. I told him to meet me at the friend's house and that he had to go. My brother kept trying to get out of going but finally agreed to show up. He finally arrived and we brought him into the basement where I told him 'I have something to tell you. I'm gay.' to which he exclaimed 'Are you serious? Am I on candid camera?' He started walking around the basement opening doors. I asked him 'What are you doing?' to which he responded 'Looking for Ashton Kutcher.' (A reference to the TV Show Punk'd) He eventually stopped, asked my friend if he was gay, and then said that he didn't know, but that he didn't care, I'm still his brother. I then asked him about telling mom (her birthday was the next day). He said it would not be a good idea and to give it some time before I tell her. I listened to my brother. The summer went on and I came out to more friends, met more people. I started talking to a guy named Josh. He was an interesting guy, we had many shared music tastes and seemed to never really be able to chat for more than a little bit (This was the first time I was chatting to guys online as myself, Edward Smith no longer existed). I was starting to feel very lonely after a long summer of dating no one and not really having any interests in those in my college town. Sometime just before mid-August, I pulled an all nighter, it was right before starting my dorm job on campus and I spent all night talking to guys in California. It seemed like there were more guys that I was interested in over there and for some reason I felt like I needed my mom's permission to go out to California. I called my mom early in the morning. She was at work and about to start her day. "Hi Mom!" several exchanges later: "Can I go to California this weekend?" "Why?" "To visit some people" "Are they college friends?" "No" "Then who are you visiting?" "Some guys." "Some guys?" I forget the next few exchanges, but it ended with: "Mom, I don't know how to say this, but, I'm gay." "..." "Mom?" "Dan, I'm about to start work, can we talk later?" "OK, I love you" "I love you too" I was never so relieved and nervous as that moment. I then had to get ready for my work-day and got ready. I worked the full day and at some point checked my voice mail. I had a missed call from my dad. He said: "Hi Dan, I just talked to mom. I want you to know that I love you and you're my son. You should come home this weekend and we'll go see a movie. We'll chat later. Love you. Bye' I immediately called him and after a short exchange, said that I would be headed home that night. I finished up my day working and then headed home. I briefly talked to my parents who were happy to see me. Then I finally got some well deserved sleep. We ended up going to see a movie. (I cannot remember the name of the movie, but I remember seeing a movie, and then when leaving the theater, seeing the license plate 'BEAR HUG' on one of the cars in the parking lot). Afterwards, we came home and my mom told me I needed to tell my brothers. We all sat in the kitchen and I told them. My older brother told my youngest brother 'We all thought you were gay!' Everyone laughed and then my youngest brother revealed that he already knew. My mom was upset that she wasn't the first to know. That evening, I told Josh I came out to my family, and we spent all night talking about it. At some point we did a video chat with audio and spent the entire night seeing each other and talking. The next night, we did the same thing only for twice as long. We had a great time and decided to set up a date. My parents drove me down to the dorms and helped me move things in. Then within the hour of them leaving, Josh and I met for the first time.

It got better. Josh and I would continue to go on many dates. He would continue to woo me as I would continue to woo him. We felt happy together. We felt like a couple. We complemented each other in a way that neither of us fully understood. Josh proposed to me on Christmas 2008. It was a wonderful surprise to which I said 'Yes'. We got married in 2009, moved into a house in 2010, and now live with our two wonderful basset hounds. I started my own company in 2012 and started working full time through it in 2015. I started a non-profit later that year that kicked off with Story.LGBT (this website) as its first project. Life got better in ways I never imagined. I hid myself from the world in the IT closet and attribute coming out as one of the best decisions I ever made. Life still has many bumps as it's not yet a perfect world and not everyone is so easily accepting. Through it all, you will find that those that are with you through it all are the ones worth spending time with and worth making memories with. I hope my story encourages others to come out and even if they don't have it as easy with an accepting family, they have a community that they are part of. Many others have had it way worse than any of us will ever know. Luckily, it gets better. As we leave our lies behind and live life true to ourselves, we will continue to change the minds and hearts of those who cave to homophobia.