I spent most of the next day wandering aimlessly around the campus trying to exhaust my nervous energy. After four or five hours of walking I was headed back to the dorm. I was halfway down the steps at the entrance to the main building when I had my epiphany. Simply and directly, I knew:

"I can kill myself."

It seemed like an attractive idea.

When I reached the bottom of the steps, I had decided to live.

There was no particular reason why. I just knew that I would play out the hand I had been dealt.

It is a cold choice, choosing to live.

Sometimes I wonder how many choose not to.

August 20, 1981

I talked with CC on Sunday night after I got back from NYC. I told him that I'd told Sensei that I was gay, and that I had begun to think about telling my parents. He wondered for me if it was a good idea. I have wondered myself. After all, why do it? Is it for my benefit that I tell them? Do they need to know?

Barry said that he told his parents because they were coming out for a two week visit and he didn't think he could put up a charade for that long. He had a lover then.

I think he could have managed. Anyone with years of closet experience knows how easy the mechanics are.

It's true that such charades do fall apart accidently. An odd word, and embrace, a casual reference can blow the whole thing. But parents usually have a special will to see their kids as they want them to be, and anything less blatant than photographic evidence is dismissed out of hand. I bet his parents could have been fooled.

When I started doing "gay things" last year, the one thing I made sure of in my heart was that I could cope with being found out. I played out a few fantasies of being confronted by friends, co-workers, and even Mom and Dad. Mostly I just settled it that I could cope with a confrontation; I settled that, for me, being gay was honestly inevitable--no--more like inevitably honest.

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