I'm From Driftwood

by PJ Mintner

I’m a Kansan. I’m an education professional. I love watching How I Met Your Mother, and you can find me cheering on my alma mater on Saturdays every fall. I love barbecue and the Kansas City Royals. I’ve only cried in one movie: Toy Story 3. I’m an uncle (and love that title), brother, son, and grandson. I can be a listener, counselor, teacher, trainer, co-worker, best friend, and support group. I’m an unapologetic Democrat. I love my Republican friends (and there are many in Kansas). I’ve had wonderful success at work and in school, which I’m reminded of as I currently search for jobs everywhere from New York City to South Texas. I have been to 13 weddings in the last 12 months, celebrating my friends’ love.

In every way possible, I feel blessed. My sister uses me as an example to show her children what she hopes they will achieve. My brother relies on me as a godfather to two of his young children. My parents love me in a way that I can’t comprehend; I honestly think that if I committed a heinous crime, they’d smuggle me out of the country, no questions asked. And my grandparents have the most beautiful, wise souls.

My nephew, a kindergartener, told me once that the thing he really liked about me was this: “You’re not always there, but you’re there when it matters.”

As you can imagine, after this gem he went on to ask me if I could come to his tee-ball games. You have to love the wisdom and naïveté of children. You could say that the notion that my nephew expressed is my personal mission statement: Be there when it matters. All these things help define what I am and what my “piece of the puzzle” is.

I talk to my students about their “piece of the puzzle” all the time. When I’m working with students, I am always genuinely interested in their story — what important factors influenced them and brought them to the very moment that we’re meeting. There’s the story of the young man from the Congo who helped raise his brothers and sisters who needed financial support, so I allowed him to stay in my apartment for free for three months after I moved to a new place. Or the young lady who was studying for the LSAT night and day, whom I gave old, unused LSAT-logic-game books so that she could have more ways to practice. Or the two brothers and sister whose mother suddenly had a stroke, whom I had over for dinner so that they could take a break from taking care of her. That’s my way of being there when it matters.

It strikes me that through many of these kinds of experiences, I’ve rarely shared an important part of my own story. Of course, many people know what I’ve shared, but many don’t know this: I fell in love for the first time in college. I was a senior, and I met someone who turned my world upside down. It was that my-body-gets-numb-when-you-enter-the-room-or-accidentally-graze-my-knee-or-tell-a-bad-joke-that-I-pretend-I-don’t-like-but-secretly-want-to-laugh kind of love. For two years it rattled my perspective in every way possible. If I could have, I would never have changed it for the world. I (rather stupidly) changed educational goals and life plans, and I’m much better because of it, because as wonderful as the feeling I had being in love was, equally painful was the break up. I’ll never forget the night we shared Pablo Neruda’s poetry together — yes, poetry (we were nerds). And I’ll never forget the night that it all came to a screeching halt, or the pain that came with the end of our relationship.

The person in me who wants to help others struggled with this chapter of my story coming to an end. I had no idea how to help myself, but luckily for me, there were important friends who were there when it mattered. I have to thank my friends in Dallas, Cleveland, Lubbock, Kansas City, Wichita, and many other places. They taught me how to love myself and accept support from others, skills that are hard to come by for people like me. The direct impact they have had as I’ve picked up these broken parts of my life to contribute to my “piece of the puzzle” reminds me how loved I am.

I’m a gay man in a red state. I love Kansas and the understated beauty of the plains and flint hills. I love the humility and refined simplicity of Kansans. And, probably much to his chagrin, I love people like Governor Brownback. There are a lot of people who probably wouldn’t like me if they knew my whole story, or wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to love me, but my grandmother told me once, “I love all people. They’re people that I never thought I could love, but I love them because of the good they do, not the choices they’ve made. They’re there for me, and I love them.”

Grandma has been married to my grandpa for over 70 years and finds it in her heart to love everyone. I struggle with what she’d say if she knew whom I’d fallen in love with, but I know, at the end of the day, that she’d support me. The last time I saw her in her nursing home, as I began my job search, she told me, “Wherever you go, you’re always my grandson. Give me a hug. We all need more of those. Let’s hug. We can make up for those we’ve missed and need.”

It can’t be difficult to understand why people like Anderson Cooper and Steve Kornacki have made a difference to me. I love to write, learn, and think critically about the type of things they report about each day. I often find myself saying that I have to do something worth writing about each day. Mr. Cooper and Mr. Kornacki’s recent bravery helps me feel more legitimate as a person — and more comfortable telling my story. So I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart. Personal courage and professional goals are hard to reconcile sometimes. I have to thank them for being there when it matters for me.

But most of all, I want to thank my first love, because if he hadn’t broken my heart, I wouldn’t be here today, starting my journey toward being both privately and publicly gay, and more than just OK. I wouldn’t be moving to a place where I can share who I am with more than just my inner circle. I wouldn’t be able to privately acknowledge that I’m not only a gay Kansan but a productive citizen who helps others each day, hurts some days as I reflect on my past, and loves others without abandon. I think my story of falling in love isn’t that different from how my 13 friends who married the men and women of their dreams felt when they fell in love. And that’s why I think my “piece of the puzzle” is pretty normal and, in its normality, worth sharing.

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by Austin Yu

Over 15 years ago, I came out to my parents while in high school. Specifically, to my mom after a heated argument about whether or not I can go play miniature golf with a few friends over the summer. Specifically, with Rob, my cross-country teammate and otherwise blond Adonis. For one reason or another, my mom did not want me to go, and the abridged conversation went like this:

Me: I really want to go.
Mom: No.
Me: But I already told Rob that I wanted to go.
Mom: Tell him you can’t.
Me: But I love him.

And thus began my decade-plus long struggle for us to come to terms with the fact that I am gay, and that they have a gay son.

Through my later teen years and into early adulthood, we revisited the issue a handful of times. Not to say that it didn’t run as an undercurrent through every waking moment of our lives, we just outwardly addressed it a handful of times. Though some conversations may have started out peacefully and even with good intentions, all of them devolved into shouting, tears, and frustration. We approached the topic like a cold war, two diametrically opposed parties with tension brewing just beneath a veneer of calm, ready at any given moment to detonate and scatter the pieces of our quasi-happy existence into the great unknown.

We’d fight, endure a few days of silence, then resume our regularly scheduled repression. Through two significant relationships, I learned rather adeptly how to separate my romantic life from my familial one, how to tend to one while keeping an eye on the other, hoping to never let either know that they are essentially being compartmentalized, quarantined. East is East.

Then, 2008 rolled around.

On one nondescript Sunday towards the end of May, I decided that I would accompany my mom and dad to church. My parents have regularly attended church for years, and I knew that my mom appreciated my company there, even if my faith was conspicuously absent. That morning, we sat fourth row from the podium, right off the center aisle.

Little did I know that I inadvertently stumbled upon an entire “sermon” on the “sanctity” of marriage and how it was under attack by the homosexual liberals and their Prop. 8 shenanigans. How dare we?

I’ve heard enough of this kind of rhetoric to immediately pick up on where it was heading. The light bulb in my head was Pavlovian. The “pastor,” Bill, began talking about Rebecca and Isaac, the miracle of matrimony and childbirth, and how modern day times are constantly trying to reinterpret and redefine these tenets. I was like a dog, salivating at the sound of a bell; I knew what was coming.

I wriggled uncomfortably. My eyes darted around the room to see if anyone was nodding along, as church-going people are wont to do during sermons, I’ve noticed. Finally, it became too much to bear. I stood up, looked Bill directly in the eyes as he prattled on, grabbed by jacket, and stormed down the seemingly endless aisle with my head held high and eyes fixed on the door in the back. I let it slam as audibly as possible on the way out. Very diva.

Knowing I could not walk back into the church without it symbolizing some sort of defeat, I stood by the back door and listened. It was nothing but the usual diatribe, appalling and boring. When, finally, the service ended, I found my parents rather quickly. No discernible expression on their faces, and they said ‘hi’ as if nothing had happened, as if I had not disappeared in a huff just half an hour ago. This further fueled my simmering rage.

Bill walked over and schmoozed with them, and they smiled and laughed in return. The pit of my stomach was an active volcano of ire. Then Bill turned to me, extended his hand, and introduced himself.

I had but two milliseconds (nano, if I want to be dramatic) to decide what to do. Though the issue may be my war, this was not my battle, or my grounds. I could let Bill know exactly what I thought of him, his “sermon,” and my absolute disgust that he would turn a place of worship into his own political platform. But I could walk away from him, never see him again and never feel the repercussions of my actions. My parents, however, would face a different outcome.

So with my hands anchored at the bottom of my pantpockets and a stare that I hoped could melt glaciers, I said, “I know who you are.” His hand lingered in mid-air for a moment longer, and then he awkwardly excused himself.

My parents were livid.

I later discovered through my sister that they were mostly angry because I was rude to Bill. Unbelievable, I thought, though not entirely unexpected. It was safer for them to focus on trees when the forest was a great, and decidedly anti-great, unknown.

I fumed about it to Sam, my partner, that evening. Always the same approach, always the same conclusion. And so, after much deliberation, I decided to try a different tack.

I called my parents a few days later, and presented the terms as calmly as I could muster: Accept me for who I am, and understand that there is no changing me: I love men. You do not have to accept all gays and lesbians of the world, and you do not have to join PFLAG or march down Market Street in June. But meet my partner. Embrace my friends. Play a part in this part of my life, or you don’t get any other. Should we ever speak again, you must comply.

And thus began a month of silence. Sam asked if I had picked the right battle. I had no other battles. Over the course of 15 years, there was nothing but this battle. Only the stakes have changed: all of me, or none. No more compartments. As bad as this sounds, I felt justified in throwing a tantrum and laying down this ultimatum. It was the right thing to demand.

The stakes were high, though, and the odds were stacked against me (if the past decade and a half were any indication). Yet, I knew that we could not go on dancing around the same bush. If I were to completely cut ties with them, I could do it knowing that I stood up for what I believed in and did the best I could.

A few months later, my parents and sister, along with 5 gay guys including me and Sam, had dinner at Naan ‘n Curry together in Union Square. It was surreal.

Two years later, I turned 30, bought a house, somehow managed to get Sam to buy me a ring without even trying. All within a month. My parents have now met all of my close friends, and they see Sam on a regular basis. They ask about him when he’s not around. We have talked about my being gay and gay issues in general and we’ve ended those conversations with peace in our hearts and a deeper understanding of who we are as people. I have much to be thankful for.

When Sam and I began construction to add an additional bathroom to the upstairs level of our loft, we were told it was a small job, requiring less than a month’s time with minimal disruption to our lives.

But as construction projects go, the scope crept until it disappeared into the horizon, and we were displaced after the second night without a place to sleep. We took my parents up on their offer, moved in with them, and left 40 days later.

It was a rare opportunity for my parents to get to know Sam, and vice versa, and they all developed a level of comfort with each other that may have taken a lifetime to develop otherwise. My mom discovered that Sam likes yogurt, so she went to Costco and bought two 24-count boxes of Activia. My dad made a pan-fried soy and ginger halibut dish that he knew was Sam’s favorite. Twice. After dinners, my mom would brew a pot of jasmine tea, something to which Sam has quickly grown accustomed. And throughout these 40 days, they welcomed him, and us, into their home and lives, and allowed themselves into ours.

On the weekends, I was typically the last one out of bed in the morning. As I would shuffle through the hall and down the stairs for breakfast, I often heard my parents laughing, and Sam laughing, and conversation lobbying back and forth like an effortless round of tennis. I was thankful to have been an outsider during those moments, observing unnoticed, but listening to what I interpreted as family.

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by Siddarth Murthy

Stolen glances, wry smiles, and eyes catching each other. Aren’t we all familiar with these.

I found myself falling for Ben, a smart, sleek and smooth-talking marketing executive working in my college. Don’t we just love men in suits.

The problem was, I never knew whether he was gay or straight. Oh you must be saying, “Honey, been there done that.” But this is a very big challenge I think most gay men identify with.

Ben had just stolen my heart. But it is so strange how we see only what we want to see. I tried everything to find out if he was gay…investigating, enticing, dropping hints and even Tarot reading. How desperate, right?

He was a tough thing, not giving out any hint at all. Eventually there was more than one person involved: my close confidante and friend who was a mutual friend between her and Ben. Finally after 4 months of speculation and heart thumps and daydreaming, he finally blurted out to her that he wants a girl. What a cliche, I thought. He gave gay vibes all the time. So I wondered what’s missing. The Tarot reading gave a mixed and confused answer.

But going back to the theory that “thought is the precursor of every creation”, I think at the back of my mind that I didn’t really want it. So here I am happy to be out of my romantic white water ride. The warm sun of the Gold Coast sunrise, the hot surfers, the balmy spring sea breeze and beautiful sunsets beyond the hilly hinterland.

Do I need anything more…?

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by Brett Harris

In the crisp fall of 1977 I was a strapping and husky 16-year-old. A close (and closeted) high school friend of mine decided we should visit the “Florentine” Night Club; the premiere, and only, gay bar in our conservative city of Shreveport, Louisiana. Due to my size, I appeared to be of legal drinking age of the time in Louisiana…18.

While I was at “the club” as we called it, I ran into the hair dresser who cut my mother’s and my hair. He was a flawlessly beautiful man with bright white teeth, chiseled features and exquisitely manicured facial hair. I always loved the feeling of his fingers in my hair as he washed it. GOD was he hot! He was a fantasy of mine since we began going to his salon. I always looked forward to our weekly visits to get our hair trimmed.

When I noticed him, my heart started pounding in my chest. I tried to get by him without him seeing me. Unfortunately, not being so “slinky”, I bumped into the guy standing next to him. Then he noticed me and asked what I was doing there. I racked my brain trying to think quickly on my feet. In what was what I later realized to be the absolute stupidest thing I could have ever said, I told him, “I’m here doing research for a report I have to do in class on the gay culture.” I know now he and his friends must of thought “Yeah…right!” Mortified and embarrassed, I found my friend and told him of my horror. Against his protestations, we ran out of the club as fast as I could drag him behind me.

The next day I thought back on the last evening’s adventure. I was reeling at the new revelation that my hair dresser was a queer like me. I finally knew another gay man! I felt I had to express my feelings about him, about myself, about being gay, about everything. So I sat down and wrote him a long letter. However, in the end, I chickened out and put the letter in an orange class folder and put it in the bottom of my sock drawer in my bedroom; thinking it would be safe from anyone’s eyes. I went to school floating on air, but sad and frustrated that I hadn’t had the courage to follow through with giving him the letter. “Maybe tomorrow,” I thought to myself. I thought about him all day.

Later that day my mom washed some clothes. Normally I was responsible to put away my own clothes but today, out of the blue, she decides to put my clothes away and of course, my socks in the sock drawer. She found the folder with the letter I wrote to our hair dresser.

When I came in from school that day I found my mother with her hands folded across the folder, her head down, sobbing. We talked, she cried. We talked some more, she cried some more. This went on for two weeks. Then one day she came to me in the kitchen and said, “It’s none of your business what your stepfather and I do in our bedroom, so it’s really not any of my business what you do in yours! There is a reason the relationship between a person and God is supposed to be personal.” Then she gave me one of the best hugs I ever got from her. That was all I needed. Now that my mom knew, I didn’t care who else knew. I didn’t open my closet door. I kicked the sucker off its hinges and came out to everybody. That was a little over 30 years ago and I have been an advocate/activist for gay rights since then.

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(TRIGGER WARNING: Racist slurs, Homophobic slurs; Violence; Bullying)

by Tirrell Thomas

The rocks flew alongside forced laughter.

“You can’t hit me.” It was a declaration and prayer.

What began as a daily “game” during recess sometimes got scary. I would stand on one side of the haphazard concrete area that was also known as the basketball court and a group of my “friends” would stand on the other side holding rocks, but only for a little bit. It was imperative for me to dodge flung rocks and hurtful slurs with laughter and jeering. If I slipped up and was hit it was my fault. What other choice was there but to brush it off? It builds character, builds a thick skin—builds that wall that you need to survive in a rural town in the Arctic. It wasn’t like I could run away either, unless my goal was the other side of town. There are no roads in or out of Kotzebue. The only ways in or out are jets and planes, which sometimes couldn’t land due to weather and boats in the summer or snow machines in the winter. Isolation at it’s finest.

But it was fun. I had fun. I had a lot of fun. I played a lot of… games… growing up. When I wasn’t dodging rocks, I was racing friends home. The objective: not to get caught. It was turned into an adult version of tag, with more extreme consequences. So you might see me running on dusty roads, laughing, hanging on to the only element I had control over, my delusions. Outrunning my pursuers, I was hyped up on adrenaline, the sugar from the soda I just drank and a dash of fear. Those were the spurs and I had foam in my mouth, which was smiling.

And when it wasn’t a physical battle there were verbal matches of slurs and insults. That’s where my book smarts rescued me. I made it hard for those calling me “fag” or “nigger” to continue insulting me when I was throwing words they hadn’t even heard of into their ears. Because on top of hanging out with too many girls, not wanting to hunt and fish with the guys, and the plain fact that I liked guys, I was not full Inupiaq Eskimo. Or even half, so most people felt the need to remind me that I didn’t look like them. I wasn’t physically strong enough to stand up against them, so I used my words, and not my best ones to fight back. It wasn’t noble, it wasn’t brave, but it was all I had at the time. So I used the looks of confusion I received as leeway to scurry home while they scratched their stone heads. My verbal prowess reached the point to where my cousin was like a boxing manager for me, a really bad one. He would bring me over to a group of people who had been talking bad about me, he’d then tell me what they said and then just step back to watch and laugh while I raged. I was just that good.

After, I’d trudge home from school, down the one paved road to the three-story, egg yolk-yellow apartment building I lived in, spent. Mentally exhausted. I’d then continue trudging down the hallway, go into my room, pick up a book and reenter the comforting world of my delusions.

Everything will be better tomorrow. It was promised.

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by Bruce Ransom

After picking up my 72-year-young mother at LAX, we arrived at my apartment in West Hollywood. Walking up the steps to my building, me carrying her huge luggage (bigger than her 5’2” frame I think) and her struggling with her large carry-on, a handsome, shirtless young man approaches us and offers his help to her as he opens the door to the building. Her response to him: “Oh thank you, I just flew in from Louisiana and just can’t carry this up those steps.” Then she turns to me and whispers: “He’s very cute and so nice.” I whisper back: “And very straight.” Her response: “Oh, that’s a shame, bless his heart.” That’s my mom…

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by Will O.

Shortly after graduating high school in 2002 I was mentally preparing myself to “come out” to my parents. My parents were the first people who I wanted to share this with because they were the most important people in my life.

Every night before I fell asleep I would say to myself, “Tomorrow is the day” but I would not be able to work up the nerve to tell them.

After many weeks of delaying this conversation with my parents I was emotionally drained and at a breaking point. After walking around for hours in the rain I came home and my parents knew something was wrong.

After I worked up the nerve to utter the words “I am gay” my mother said something that I will never forget.

My Mom said “I love you more today than yesterday, because you are being true to yourself and the world.”

After hearing those words I felt a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Coming out gave me strength to face the world as an adult who was proud of who he was. It taught me to never be ashamed of who I am and to never forget that I hold the key to my own happiness.

-(Share your story with us!)

by Andrew Reynolds

Even though it was really 1987, it was still the 1960s in the heart of our teacher, Mr. A. That’s why Mr. A had us arrange our chairs in a semi circle in front of the hot seat.

Moving around the semi-circle, we each had to say one complimentary thing about the person in the hot seat. Sarcasm was forbidden, although faint praise was allowed, “I like his shoes,” or, “He always seems really well prepared.”

I heard lots of kind things when I was in the hot seat.

“He’s funny.”
“He says weird stuff but he’s nice too.”
“He’s cool.”

And then it was your turn to speak.

“He’s the most erotic person I’ve ever met.”

“Uhm, Dan I think you might be thinking of the word ‘eccentric,’” Mr. A. suggested.

“No,” you said, looking me in the eyes, “I mean ‘erotic’.”

Here’s my guess—that was so far out of the bounds of what could be normal that everyone just shrugged it off—there wasn’t any teasing or joking or comment at all afterwards. It was so completely implausible that it must not have happened.

We went on a date, if you could call it that. We walked around the supermarket because even then I thought it was fun to look at package design. You were such a good sport, even coming up with an anecdote about going camping in Vermont and noticing how all the brands were different in the grocery stores there.

Today I know this story should end with me inviting you back to make out in my parents’ basement. But I didn’t know that then.

“I don’t wanna go home,” you said as I dropped you off, “I don’t wanna be alone.”

“I hear you man,” I replied, as if you had complained about Mondays or the rain, something out of my hands, “see you later.”

You were the erotic one. Me? God, I barely had the word *gay*, I certainly didn’t have the word *bear*.

Here’s my guess—you were so far out of the bounds of what I imagined was possible (for starters, you never auditioned for a single musical) it never occurred to me to, you know, ask.

I was a senior and you were a junior. We’ve lost touch and the Internet hasn’t helped. I hope you’ve found a home where you aren’t alone. And thanks for being so brave in class that day. I really needed it, even though I didn’t have a clue what to do with it once I had it. 

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by Ambrose V.

“Are you gay?”

“I am.”

“That’s so cool!”

So went my most recent “coming out” conversation, with one of the students in my advisory class at the high school where I teach in northern Texas. I had my first such conversation twenty-nine years ago, driving my friend, Trent, back from a high school dance in downtown Juneau to his house near mine in the Valley:

“I want to tell you something, but I’m afraid it could hurt our friendship, and I don’t want it to. It’s hard to talk about, and I’ve been avoiding telling you, but I want to.”

“Okay.”

“I’m gay.”

“Okay. It’s no big deal. Just slow down!” Apparently, my nervousness had caused me to tense up and clamp down, including clamping my foot down on the gas pedal. “Well,” I thought afterward, “that went a lot better than I feared.”

Same thing happened a few months later when I came out to my little clique of friends gathered for a boozy evening at my house while my parents were away on a date. My friends took it in stride, acted as if it were old hat to have one of their own come out as gay—we put a lot of stock in being the sophisticated set at school. But really, we maybe weren’t all that far ahead of the curve: A couple of years later, the younger sister of my friend, Karen, came out to her friends and family, my younger brother’s best friend came out to everyone in her history class and began sculpting nude female busts in art class, and finally, my younger brother came out, too. All to relatively little grief and drama.

It was another story with my mother. My parents came around, but it wasn’t easy with or for Mom.

Anyway, little would I have thought driving down the Egan Expressway with Trent that I would still be having similar conversations, experiencing something like the same nervousness, culminating in the same sense of relief—though not as seemingly earth-shattering—twenty-nine years later. It’s surprising to me, and a little sad, how little things have changed in nearly three decades. To be sure, it’s gotten a little easier for young people—I am no longer very surprised when a student tells me in a journal entry or essay the struggles he or she is experiencing coming out to friends or family—it would have been unthinkable for me to confide in a teacher. But there is still struggle, and not that different from what my brother and I went through.

There is one difference. For my students now, coming out sometimes involves a boyfriend or girlfriend, even if they don’t often use the words and seem to regard the concept of “dating” as quaint. For them, being gay is about relationships. For my generation, coming out in our twenties was a part of sexual liberation. It was about sex and sexual partners—having a boyfriend or girlfriend was just not much on the map of possibilities.

That’s not really how I wanted it. At some level, I wanted the same kind of experiences available to my heterosexual peers, no more or less “innocent” or focused on sex than for them. I remember one occasion, during the year I spent attending classes at a lycee in France right after I graduated from high school, attending a dance organized at the Protestant Students Hall in Paris where I was staying for a week’s vacation from my school near Lyon. I was taken with one of the other boys and asked him if he wanted to dance, and was thoroughly embarrassed when he laughed and said, “What, you and me?!” assuming that couldn’t be what I had in mind.

I don’t mean to suggest I was a Pollyana. During my first year of college in Portland, Oregon, having my first sexual experiences was high on my list of priorities. During fall break, I scheduled a trip to San Francisco with the express intent of having sex, and abandoned my friend Deborah, with whom I was staying at the workers’ residence hall where she lived, on the first two evenings after my arrival to hightail it to the Castro disco clubs in pursuit of that quest. With some success, I might add. My first conquest was a somewhat tawdry affair in which I went home with a middle-aged collector of cinema memorabilia and starlet’s autographs who interrogated me at some length about my sexual history and any danger I might have of carrying STDs. But, I spent the second night with a tall, handsome, sweet and surprisingly protective Filipino guy just a few years older than me, who truly initiated me into the pleasures of sexual intimacy. Everyone called him David, but to me he confided his real name: Djuwan. It still makes me smile to recall it.

But, having gotten the “having sex” business out of the way, I devoted myself during the second semester to what I really wanted: finding a boyfriend. Surprisingly—especially given the fact that I considered myself an atheist (albeit open to the possibility of a non-theistic “spirituality”)—I came closest to finding him at church. Well, sort of church. Brett and I noticed each other the first time I attended a Quaker meeting in Portland, and he came right out on the walk to the bus afterwards—he had volunteered to accompany me—and asked me if I was gay. We started hanging out and it wasn’t long before he asked me to sleep over in the house he shared with his mom, a lesbian, feminist Quaker. I met her at breakfast the morning after; she seemed to like me and to take it in stride that her son and I had spent the night together in his bed.

Brett and I spent a fair amount of time together in coming months, but I never really considered us boyfriends—he seemed much younger than me, and I probably made too much of the difference between my college life and his life finishing the last year of high school. The next year, the tables turned—I fell head over heels with a boy in the Gay Student Association I helped form at our college, but he was less interested in anything other than a casual sexual relationship. And, during the subsequent few years of college (I was on the extended graduation plan!), I had a number of one-night stands or more protracted flings, often hoping to become boyfriends with boys interested in the sex, but not in identifying as gay, or at least not to the degree that would have been required in “having a boyfriend.” Sure, I enjoyed the sex, but (with the exception of one memorable assignation with the sextant in the Cathedral in Nice, where I was vacationing during a year spent at the University of Strasbourg, or the summer of the following year with a weekend spent on Long Island with a former monk I met at a cinema off Times Square after working for a month as a camp counselor in upstate New York), I kept hoping it was a prelude to something more, and kept on coming away disappointed. As a generation, we were liberated enough to have gay sex, but not to fall in gay love—for most of us, I think, forming permanent, gay relationships just seemed too far beyond the pale.

Before abandoning all hope of that, I gave it one more go—with Michael, a boy I got to know in the Gay Students Alliance at the University of Oregon and through mutual friends. We moved in together too soon, and I tried too hard to fall in love with someone with whom I was not really very compatible, but who was the only boy I’d met since Brett who seemed equally interested in actually having a long-term relationship with another guy. After acknowledging the lack of real love and breaking it off with him, I threw in the towel—decided I would have a go at “going straight.” That was crazy, of course, but I’m an obstinate fellow, and devoted too many years trying to deny my gayness.

But, if nothing else, those years I spent “back in the closet” did bring about the shift in sensibility I’ve been trying to evoke. By the time I regained my senses and “came out” yet again, gays were no longer fighting for just sexual liberation, but for the right to marry, to form families and have their long-term loving commitments acknowledged and respected. Now, I’m happily married (though not according to the laws of my Bible-belt state) to a man who shares with me the responsibilities of raising, along with their mother and her new husband, my two daughters. It’s been a long, winding road from that moment in the car with Trent back in Juneau, but I wouldn’t undo it—I like where it’s finally brought me.