When My Heart Kept Changing the Story

Yesterday, I mentioned that while catalogs, department store underwear sections, and advertisements for men’s underwear fueled many of my earliest fantasies, there was one boy who seemed to dominate my imagination. I thought I’d take a stroll down memory lane today because those memories aren’t really about teenage lust. They’re about a young man trying to understand feelings he didn’t yet have the words to describe.

I remember the first day of seventh grade. Some of the boys in my class were picking on me. I don’t remember exactly what they said, but it was probably about my voice, the way I moved, or simply because I was different. There was a new boy in our class that year, and he stepped in and put a stop to it.

We were never best friends, but I always admired him. He was handsome, athletic, blond-haired, blue-eyed, and seemed to have the effortless confidence I wished I possessed. Looking back, I like to think he admired something about me too. I certainly wasn’t athletic, but I was smart, and I hope he respected that. Whether that’s true or simply the way memory softens over time, I don’t know. What I do know is that people didn’t seem to bother me when he was around, and he was one of the genuinely kind people I remember from those years.

For a long time, I didn’t understand why he occupied so much of my imagination.

My fantasies almost always started the way I thought they were supposed to. I’d try to imagine being attracted to a girl, because that’s what I believed normal teenage boys were supposed to do. Somehow, though, those daydreams always drifted back to him. Every single time.

The strange thing is that I knew almost nothing about being gay. Everything I had heard came from playground insults, whispered jokes, and the cruel stereotypes that were common in the South during the 1980s and early 1990s. I didn’t have positive role models. I didn’t know any openly gay people. I certainly didn’t have anyone telling me that it was okay if I happened to be one of them.

Instead, every fantasy ended with shame.

I’d lie awake afterward feeling guilty, wondering what was wrong with me and why I couldn’t make my mind work the way I thought it should. I may have been a good student, but when it came to understanding my own heart, I was completely lost. Looking back, I wish someone had simply told me that it was okay to like other boys. It wouldn’t have erased every struggle, but it might have spared me years of believing there was something broken inside me.

It wasn’t until college that someone finally gave me a different way to think about it.

One of my psychology professors, who was also a clinical psychologist, allowed us to submit anonymous questions for class discussion. One student asked, “How do you know if you’re really gay?”

His answer was simple. He asked us to think about our romantic and erotic dreams. When we dreamed about someone we desired, was it a man or a woman?

I don’t know that there’s any single question that can define a person’s sexual orientation, and I wouldn’t claim that his answer applies to everyone. But it applied to me.

In that moment, I realized something that had been true for years. No matter how hard I tried to imagine girls, my thoughts always found their way back to boys. More specifically, they had almost always found their way back to one particular boy.

That realization didn’t magically erase years of guilt or fear, especially after growing up in a conservative religious environment where being gay was presented as sinful and where the AIDS epidemic was often spoken about with more condemnation than compassion. But it did give me permission to admit something to myself that I’d been trying very hard not to see.

Sometimes the hardest person to come out to is yourself.

Looking back now, I don’t remember those fantasies with embarrassment. I remember them with compassion for that confused thirteen-year-old who was simply trying to understand himself with almost no guidance at all. He wasn’t broken. He wasn’t choosing to feel the way he did. He was just beginning the long journey toward understanding the person he had been all along.