I met my first boyfriend three days before I turned 18. It was one of those whirlwind I just met you yesterday, but I think I'm in love with you and we should totally start planning our wedding tomorrow kind of affairs. It ended about a month later, but not before he showed me a picture of his six- or seven-year old self wearing heels and a flowery blue dress. If I remember correctly, there may have been pearls.
I thought of this today because I came across a brilliantly hilarious and touching blog called Born This Way, a photo journal of gay men and women as children, documenting some of the earliest foreshadowing of their eventual coming out.
My parents have countless photographs of me as a child, but none qualify as damning evidence. I never dressed up in my mother's clothes, never carried around dolls (stuffed animals, yes, but what future heterosexual hasn't?), and don't think I ever posed with a hand on my hip and another in the air. I exhibited my own signs, but apparently nothing that was caught on camera, and apparently nothing that my parents even saw as signs.
Because when I came out to them, they were totally shocked. Nevermind all the Madonna posters in my room, the unhealthy preoccupation with my body, the stash of gay porn my dad found on my computer. Twice. (When I exhibit signs, I go big.) They couldn't believe I was gay at all, and even if there was a chance, they were convinced that I would outgrow the phase, that 15 was too young to really know what I wanted.
What they didn't know (or ignored) was how I had started spending a suspiciously long time in the bathroom, locked in privacy with myself and a Marky Mark centerspread (it might have been from a Tiger Beat magazine). Little did they know that I once had a pure, but ill-defined crush on my third-grade classmate. (I still remember how his mom forgot to pack him a spoon one day, giving me the opportunity to lend him mine. He ate his pudding with it. When he gave it back with still a little speck of pudding near the handle, I sat with the distinct knowledge that I would soon be putting in my mouth what at one point was in his. What a treat!) They had no idea that I got this peculiar tickle in the pit of my tummy watching He-Man at five years old, especially this one scene (still so clear) where He-Man was pinned to the ground in an arena by some dragon's laser beam. On his stomach. Pinned.
I was definitely gay. I categorically knew it years before I came out (which puts me in my pre-teens), and while I was always OK with it and eventually didn't mind telling people selectively, I was never OK with seeming it and having people know it as soon as look at me.
So as a teenager, I took steps to try and mask what I could. When I realized that I was pronouncing my 's's with too much 'ssssssss,' I consciously rewired my brain and my tongue to soften the hiss, blend it so it sounded like a hybrid with 'sh.' When I noticed that my left hip jutted out a bit when I stood still, I consciously retrained myself to distribute my weight equally across both feet.
And with this consciousness, I refashioned myself as a passable straight guy, someone you may not suspect if you didn't look too hard (there was still only so much refashioning possible). I remember the one kid in high school who was not so aware, and he became "that" gay guy. No coming out necessary. I made sure I was nothing like that kid.
But now, I wonder if he was actually unaware, or if he was just unconcerned, if he had reached, by whatever means, the sense of true self-acceptance that I only recently attained. My teenage self-imposed behavioral modification program has largely become ingrained in me as an adult, so much so that I don't know how I would be now had I just let myself be back then. In seeing the blog and the pictures of obvious future homosexuals, witnessing the uninhibited flamboyance and total lack of shame about it, I envy their freedom. I wish I could find a photo of me as a kid, blatantly but unknowingly gay, oblivious to the future, but confidently getting there. I wonder if I had ever been that kid, how different my life would have been and be if I were less aware, followed my instincts and pronounced my 's's in whatever way that came naturally, stood how I felt comfortable, let my hands flail about when I spoke. Maybe I would now understand better and with greater confidence that I am what I am, that I will seem how I will seem.
Born This Way is an awesome project; I'm glad I found the site.
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