This is an important anniversary for me.
Ten years ago this week, I finally accepted that I was gay.
I had struggled with my sexuality for years — doing mental gymnastics, filling page after page in my diaries and journals, arguing with myself, talking with therapists. I didn’t know whether I was gay or straight or in between or whether I should be gay or straight or in between. I spent year after year analyzing myself, trying to think my way to the answer. It was like trying to argue a symphony.
In July 1998, I was 24 years old, living in the Glee Club house while working as a research assistant to a law professor for the summer. It was the summer after my second year of law school at UVa. Most law students did such jobs after their first year of law school; after the second year, you were supposed to work as a summer associate at a law firm somewhere. But my interviews hadn’t gone well, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my degree, and at the last minute I’d found this mind-numbing research job. Stuck in Charlottesville for the summer — again. I hated the job and I wondered what the hell I was doing with my life.
I was living in the house with several other guys, including my gay friend Jim, with whom I’d privately shared my confusion a few months earlier, after I’d fallen hard for a straight guy — harder than I’d ever fallen for anyone before, so hard that I’d had to tell someone. It had been five years since I’d had a gay friend that I could talk to about these things.
Now, one summer night several months later, Jim was sitting in the living room, talking with another guy who lived in the house, a straight guy, about what it was like to be gay. I sat there and listened. I couldn’t say anything, because the other guy didn’t know about me. It roiled me inside; I was living in the same house with a gay friend of mine and I was feeling all these things so intensely about my life and I didn’t know what to do about any of it.
A couple of nights later I was doing a writing exercise from The Artist’s Way. I was working my way through the book that summer, trying to get in touch with my inner creative self. In this exercise, I was supposed to write about my ideal day. As I wrote, I found myself dreaming up a boyfriend and including him in my fantasy.
It hit me.
In my ideal life, I had a boyfriend.
It was an epiphany. This was what I wanted. This was what would make me happy. After all the years of confusion, all the pages and pages of tortured logic, the answer turned out to be comically, painfully simple.
This is what I want. And it’s okay.
That day or the next, an image came into my head: I was standing on a flat rocky plain, watching the enormous sun rising in the distance as it turned the sky a mixture of deep purple and orange and red. I would be going toward that sunrise. I would have a happy future after all.
That night, I went out and bought a book by Michelangelo Signorile, Outing Yourself. It was time. I was ready.
While I occasionally had doubts over the following weeks, nothing could shake that initial epiphany. I’d forever changed. I knew who I was and where I was going.
Last week I pulled out my journal from that time, because I wanted to make sure I had the right date.
Saturday, July 18, 1998
9:30 pm
This evening I bought Michelangelo Signorile’s Outing Yourself. I think I am realizing that I am gay. That seems strange, to just be realizing that, because I am no stranger to my sexuality. For at least seven years I have known myself. Over the last seven plus years I’ve had various experiences, not necessarily sexual. August 1991: I wrote it in my diary. April 1992: I came out to Kirk. [etc. etc. etc.]
Over the past seven years, and more, I have gleaned information from books, newspaper and magazine articles, TV segments, TV programs and TV movies. Furtive glances, shows watched in solitude, things read alone. Therapy. Talking with people. I’ve identified myself as “not straight,” “non-straight,” even “queer.” Possibly “bisexual.” But I have had the hardest time really figuring out what I am.
I haven’t wanted to deal with the responsibility…
I wrote on for a couple more pages and ended by saying I was gay.
I wrote again the next day.
And then the next.
And then that week I discovered gaycollegeboys.com, which led me to IRC, or Internet Relay Chat. Gay chat rooms.
I didn’t write in my notebook for six days.
After that, I didn’t write in my notebook for a whole month.
I was too busy living.
So it’s been 10 years. In 10 years I’ve had lots of gay sex and lots of gay dating and lots of gay heartbreak. And I’ve fallen in love.
If anybody had told me 10 years ago that in 2008 I’d be living fully out as a gay man, living in Manhattan with a man I love, my partner of four and a half years, a man whom my family embraced as one of their own — well, my head would have exploded.
Happy Gayversary.
