| My Story |
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| Looking back over the years, I notice things I did when I was younger that show that I have always been gay. Even before kindergarten, I would play dress up with my sister. I would usually be wearing a skirt, dress or apron and would put on my mom's oversized high heels and parade around the house dressed as a girl. My parents never spoke ill of my actions, and in this respect, I was lucky. As I started first and second grade, my younger sister started dance lessons and I would parade around the house in a leotard and her tutu. I thought this was normal behavior for a little boy. I thought it was what everyone did. In addition, in first grade, I started to do needle work and cross-stitch. I made several dishtowels for the new church my dad had started in a small rural Minnesota community (my dad is a Lutheran pastor). I also liked to play with my two dolls, Baldy and Curly. I would always dress them nicely. One day I tried feeding them by holding them to my breast. My mom saw me and informed me that I was not able to do that. I was really disappointed. In kindergarten through second grade, I was a "normal" little kid at school. I had a nice group of friends that I played with during recess and friends in my country neighborhood to interact with. After second grade, however, my dad took a new calling to a church in southern Minnesota. I had to move to a new town and try to fit in with a group of friends that had previously been formed. However much I tried, I was not able to make any true friendships there. During recess, I often hung out with the girls and twisted the jump rope while they jumped. I also had a bead collection with which I would make necklaces. All the other girls would bring their beads to school. Therefore, one day, I brought my collection. After lunch, when I went to my desk to get them, the container was empty. On the verge of tears, I headed outside to find that my beads had been scattered all over the sidewalk and grass. I was devastated. The people I thought were my friends had turned their back against me. The summer after my fourth grade year, Amanda, a classmate who lived down the block, and I decided we were going to make a bunch of friendship bracelets to sell and make money. Every day I would go over to her house and we would work on the bracelets while watching TV. Sometimes we would play a board game or on our Game boys or her brother's Sega game system. Although we spent so much time making bracelets, we never attempted to sell any... it was just a wasted effort. Fifth grade was when I started to notice my attraction to boys. I was attracted to many of the boys in my class and often thought of them in a romantic manner. Although I did not act on my thoughts, I realized that I was different from most of the other guys in my class. During my fifth and sixth grade years, I learned a lot about myself but did not comprehend the hardships it would bring before me in the future. The summer after sixth grade, on July 12, 1996, we moved from southern Minnesota, to our current residence in central Minnesota. Starting Junior High in a brand new community, in a brand new school building was not easy. The two elementary schools joined together that year so everyone was making new friends, but I just did not seem to fit in with anyone. I remember being teased because I always stood with the girls in the hallway before school. I was taller than everyone else, and the guys would tease me that I stood with them because I liked looking down their shirts. This really embarrassed me, as I had no attraction to any of the girls and doing something like that was not something I would do. In eighth grade, my classmates decided to apply the label gay to me. If I would have been out, this would have been no problem, but I knew about myself and did not understand why all these other people were labeling me gay in a derogatory manner. It made me depressed and I often spent my nights crying myself to sleep. Ninth grade was not much better. This year, in addition to the �gay� label, I was teased about being a perfect couple with one of my classmates, a girl, who had been a friend since seventh grade. I knew that that would never work out, and it hurt to be teased about being in a heterosexual relationship. However, I could not say, �I can tell you that isn�t going to happen, because I like boys.� I was just not ready to handle all the things that come along with the label. Towards the end of my freshman year, I met a nice senior in my art class. Diana was the other pastor�s kid in town and had just moved here her senior year. Unbeknownst to me, she was going through many of the same troubles I was trying to understand. It was her positive attitude during art and at track meets that helped me make it through my ninth grade year. The one thing I remember her saying is, �It doesn�t matter if you are gay. Gay people are really nice. I have many gay friends, and they are all great people. I will like you the same even if you are gay.� Although I did not come out to her for a couple more years, those words helped me to realize that being gay is not an evil thing but just the way that I was made. The summer after my freshman year, I went on a mission trip to West Virginia with my church youth group. There I met Leah, a nice and crazy girl from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. On the last night of the trip, I kissed her in the back of our van on the way back from our evening activities. It was my first kiss. We decided to go out. We wrote letters, snail mail, to each other for about a month, when I became lazy and stopped writing back. It was my first relationship and it was a good relationship. I still talk to her every once in a while online. I recently learned that I was also her first kiss. We can talk openly about many things. |