“I have sometimes been envious of people who have known they were gay since five, six, seven. That was never me. When I look back on those years, I only see a childhood filled with kickball games, summer camp, and playground antics. Who I was as a sexual being never came into focus.

“However, as I became older, I automatically recognized that I was different. I would not define it as identifying my own gayness, but more of a recognition that I was not attracted to girls in the same way the guys in school were attracted to other girls.

“I continued to compartmentalize my own concerns about my sexuality until there were no other spaces in my brain to move the self-confusion and hurt. A decision had to be made.

“It was a dark evening, and I was lying on the second floor of my parent’s house, the window shades open and the moon hitting the reflection of the room, creating a bright white space. I sat staring out at a tree next to my window (which had become ‘my tree’ at that point), and I contemplated who I was and what I stood for. I knew that this was the moment; I recognized that I had reached a fork in the road and that I needed to make a decision.

“The first choice was to live a life as an openly gay male, something I knew nothing about (besides incredibly flamboyant men on television). The second choice was to choose silence, to allow the closet doors to devour me. I can still feel the dissonance that crept through the hairs on my head and came out through the tips of my toes. As my body grew tenser and tenser, I knew that I was not ready; I knew that I had to take the road more traveled. I chose silence and, for six years, lived my life in that manner.

“Over ten years have passed since that moment, and I can still physically feel the fear that I felt in those moments lying in bed. I spent years denying my true self because I lived in fear of breaking down, a breakdown from looking at the truth. It was only until I graduated from college, a month from graduate school, that me coming out to myself as a gay man came to fruition. As difficult as it was, life has not been brighter or better.”

– T

“I spent so much of my childhood and adolescence working myself out of a bad situation. The home I lived in was very abusive. I was afraid to go home after school because I knew I would get screamed at, hit, manipulated, or sexually abused depending on the day and my stepfather’s mood. He hated my ferocity and did everything he could to break me down. Eventually, I threw myself into school because I finally realized that was the only way to independence and safety. The other parts of my identity were left unexplored for over a decade. 

“Before I even knew how to describe it, I was a highly sexual person. I was sent to counseling several times during my elementary years for masturbation. There, I was instructed on how to hate my body and bury my sexuality. I remained in that pit of self-hate and ignorance for a very long time.  I didn’t even know I was being sexually abused until I got to high school because I knew nothing about anything sexual. I was so scared and angry that I had difficulty communicating with people about simple things, never mind what was wrong. I didn’t trust counselors and therapists after my earlier experiences and refused their help. I was a mess of a teenager and am very lucky to have come this far. I moved out of that home less than ten days after I turned 18 and have never looked back. 

“I had a very serious boyfriend in high school more out of insecurity than anything else. At first he was a lifeline and later he grew to be an irritant. I absolutely despised myself for having failed to save myself for marriage, and it eventually tore us apart. Not even six months after that relationship fell apart, I found myself yet again in a very serious relationship with a different boy and still deep in self-hate.  

“While I was away for study abroad, I started reliving my worst memories in my sleep. At the encouragement of the man I was then engaged to, I came back to the United States early. The nightmares didn’t stop until I made the effort to process them and a commitment to healing the gaping holes and scars. That engagement ended very poorly a couple of years later due to a number of things, and I was thrown into a very dark place.

“During the soul-searching aftermath of that engagement, I started to realize that I wasn’t making life goals because I wanted to achieve them. I was just making the ‘standard’ life goals because that was what I had categorized as normal. I finally gave myself permission to just be. It took me a long while to figure out who I was, what I wanted, and where I wanted to be. Once I stopped trying to shoehorn myself into a mold I didn’t fit in, I started developing new interests of all kinds and noticing old ones that I had suppressed. I had always known that I found people of all genders to be intriguing and beautiful, but I had categorized it as wrong and dirty to entertain same-sex attraction. After I jumped into all my new interests and started projecting my newfound self-confidence, I realized that I shouldn’t limit myself to one gender just because society had decided heterosexual couples were default. I could be whoever I wanted to be and be romantic and sexual with whoever was willing to give me those chances. Once I threw away society’s rulebook, I realized I was a pansexual, polyamorous pagan who owed no one an apology. I was 24 when I finally learned to love myself. 

“I don’t make it a point to discuss my relationship dynamics with people because I don’t really enjoy being the pariah of the group. Being pansexual is relatively easy to explain to anyone who understands bisexuality. Being in a polyamorous relationship is not easy to explain, and I won’t volunteer that information unless I know the asking party very well. I tire of being called a whore, a slut, and a hoe. I don’t want to hear concerned parties tell me or one of my partners that we aren’t committed, aren’t serious, aren’t safe, and are taking advantage of everyone involved. Polyamory requires very thorough communication. If a problem comes up, we talk about it. Immediately. Leaving problems to fester is not good for any relationship. I have many diverse interests and not everyone is into all of them. That’s okay, and the beauty of polyamory is that they don’t have to be. When I became active in BDSM, I decided I was never again going to be monogamous because it’s cruel to ask someone to do something they find repulsive. Now, I think it’s really good that each person gets to enjoy what they find appealing and no one finds themselves in a situation they wouldn’t enjoy.”

– J

“We met super young. Our parents were best friends, and I think somehow they thought we would fall in love, marry, and continue the tradition of high school sweethearts. No how matter how much I cared for her (and possibly actually loved her), I knew it wouldn’t be enough.

“As I wrote the first, ‘Will you be my girlfriend’ note, I thought about how I would never be able to give us both the life we wanted and be genuine in it. Did we both deserve that?

“It luckily never came to that. Somehow, she knew, and then I knew. It’s something unspoken that maybe she sensed from knowing me better than I knew myself. I was gay and I couldn’t live a truthful life in love with her.

“There will always be a ping of wonder – or maybe it’s even jealousy – as I see her now married and starting a family. Wondering how, if I had sacrificed more, it could have been me. But I wake up every day in a little more truth and a little more acceptance and a little more hope for the future.”

– B

“My family grew up in the church and I had repeatedly heard about homosexuality and sin, but did not really understand what homosexuality was.

“When I was in elementary school, I called my sister a fag (obviously having no clue as to what a fag was) and clearly remember my mom telling me I shouldn’t call my sister a fag because it was ‘when a boy liked another boy, which is a sin.’ So naturally, in my little 10 year old mind, I was thinking, ‘Oh holy shit. I am so gay.’

“I have always known I was gay. I had crushes on other boys and fell in love with every shirtless movie star. I never struggled with my own acceptance of my sexuality, but I did struggle with what others thought. So, I spent years avoiding dating and lying to others until I had the chance to come out on my own terms. (Just kidding. My parents went through my phone and found me talking to a bunch of guys. Best coming out story ever, right?!)”

– T

“Dating men: I gave it my best shot in high school and freshmen year in college. I went to prom, wore the pink dress, and kissed my boyfriends like I was supposed to. I tried to convince myself that eventually I would feel ‘something.’ I just wasn’t doing it quite right. I had to try harder. Eventually, I told myself, it would all make sense. I would finally understand the excitement my friends felt about relationships, and feel a connection, a spark, that thing I saw in the movies.

“But I never felt that spark with men. I found my connections rather boring, meaningless, and often made up completely erroneous reasons to break off my relationships to avoid leading them on more than I already had. Little did I know that by ending these relationships, I was actually doing everything right after all.

“At the age of 19, with the help of a standard college house party, a bit of liquid courage, and the presence of a beautiful, older, bisexual woman sitting next to me on an old, tattered couch…I found my spark. She looked at me, the young freshman that I was, and in a moment, I felt my entire body light up with a current unlike anything I had ever experienced before. I was shocked. ‘Could eye contact really be this powerful? What was happening? Have I had too much to drink?’

Despite all of these thoughts, I felt the truth in that moment. I was swept away, and in front of a room full of mostly intoxicated strangers, I found myself holding her head in my hands and kissing her. It was then that I knew. The connection, the spark, that thing I saw in the movies was real. It was meant for me too, not just everyone else in my life. The clarity of that moment just about knocked me off my feet…and heaven knows…she certainly did. I was definitely doing it right…”

– R

“Gender is weird. Growing up, I never heard of variant gender identities. Granted, I never heard of gender as an identity. It wasn’t something that you claimed, it was just something that you were. Immutable and absolute. I rejected norms as much as I could, but it didn’t matter. I was still called a girl because of the parts I had. When I fidgeted with my dresses or insisted on putting my hair into a ponytail or sat with my legs wide like my dad’s, grown-ups would tell me (or my mom) that I would ‘grow into being a lady.’ I kept waiting for that to happen. I assumed that at some monumental stage in my life, I would start feeling like I belonged in my body, and like I belonged in the same group as all of the other folks who were called women.

“That never happened. ‘Girl’ always felt just a bit too tight and suffocating, like a turtleneck. ‘Woman’ felt even tighter.

“What made it all the more confusing, frustrating, and painful was that I didn’t ever feel like I belonged in the ‘man’ group either.

“I just never felt like I belonged.

“Fast-forward to my sophomore year of college, when I’m reading Divergent for the first time. It was when Tobias was explaining why he has all five faction symbols tattooed on his back, ‘I want to be brave, and selfless, and smart, and kind, and honest’ that a light bulb started flickering in my head. My literal, actual, legit thought process went like this:

“That’s right!”
“He is all of those things!”
“Any one of the factions would be too confining for him.”
“He’s choosing not to choose!”
“AND THAT’S OKAY!”
“Oh.”

“And that truth said in the context of a safe, completely fictional, and unrelated story, resonated very deep inside. That was when I first knew that I didn’t fit into a single gender. That was when all of those pieces came together and I began to understand why I never felt like I belonged as either a man or a woman. It’s because I don’t. And that’s okay. (and yes, this is a story of how Divergent all but completely shattered my sense of reality and led me to a near-existential crisis.)

“This new-fangled sense of ‘knowing’ started me on a journey that I am still on three years later. It has led to some pretty interesting research on other gender identities, other pronouns, and other peoples’ experiences. It has led to new experiences for me, including finding a partner who affirms my gender identity (or lack thereof) and asking a few very close friends to call me a different name. Above all, it has led to a sense of validation and a place of peace.”

– L

“I knew I was gay before I knew what the term gay meant. I can remember having a fascination with my friend Ryan from the first time I met him. I was five. I remember feeling so uncomfortable at the YMCA in the locker room because I was attracted to the bodies I saw around me.

“It took me years to actually say the words I am gay.

“I had a good friend in 8th grade. His name was Elliot and he told me he thought he might be gay. It was the fall of 2001 and I had never met a gay person (that I knew of). Elliot eventually decided that he was not gay, but I knew I was.

“I told my best friend, Taylor, later that fall. She invited me to her evangelical church and I became a member of the youth group. Elliot was an atheist and I became a born-again Christian. I walked away from the friendship as we went off to high school because I thought he was bringing me into sin.

“I remember thinking that I simply couldn’t be gay in this new world, so I decided I wasn’t. I told Taylor not to tell anyone what I had told her. My parents found a note in my pocket while doing laundry and I denied it. I was a good Christian.

“But I wasn’t. I still looked at guys and masturbated to gay pornography. I remember being so, so afraid that someone would find out my secret. I would be left behind. I felt like I was festering and filthy inside.

“I didn’t fit in anywhere because I felt so different than the rest of the world. That church has caused me years of pain, but they did love me and they did give me a home when my own was falling apart because of divorce. At least they loved the version of me I projected. I dedicated my life fully to the church and my god. And more fully to the image of a good, straight life.

“I ran off to college and threw myself into ministry to try to make sense of myself and the world. I was the evangelical poster boy. I took mission trips and led bible studies. To this day, there are people in full time ministry who credit me for introducing them to that way of life. It blows my mind.

“I hit a wall my senior year of college and got drunk and bought a bottle of sleeping pills. I wrote the letter and I sat on my couch in my dorm and wept. I almost took the pills that night. I remember thinking I could never be with a man the way my male friends could be with their girlfriends. It made me so sad.

“During college, I dated an incredible woman and we even talked about getting married (as all good evangelicals do). We broke up for other reasons.

“The first week of my first professional job out of college, I was in the wedding of one of my best friends. I was with him before he walked down the aisle and I saw the love he had with his wife. I knew I would never experience that.

“I was terrified I would end up having some sketchy cruising sex when at last my urges got the best of me. I decided that I had to kill myself before I did that. At least I would go to heaven. Again, I wrote the note. I wept in bed that night in 2011, ten years after I had first told my dark secret to someone. But I didn’t kill myself. I decided I had to move forward and be honest. A god that would care about who I loved was no god at all.

“So I came out. It was slow and then all at once as though I had turned on a bathtub faucet. My friends and family embraced me. They loved me. They loved me as I was.

“But I still struggled. I still held onto that god. I still felt his shame. I still felt the pain of disappointing him, of living in sin. When I finally had sex with a man for the first time, I cried afterward because I couldn’t reconcile in my heart who I had tried to be all those years with who I actually was. The sex was sketchy and exactly what I had feared.

“In a horrible turn of events, the man turned out to be a bit of a stalker and threatened to share our story. So I shared it first. I told my friends and family what had happened so that I was not stripped of my power. And they loved me. And they saw me. And they still loved me.

“But I still didn’t love myself.

“This past February first (the day of the Super Bowl), I took a knife to my left wrist and cut it to the bone in the bathtub. This time, there was no letter. It was a text. It was the saddest text I’ve ever sent. I intended to send it as I passed out. Before I could finish it, I accidentally hit send while trying to hit the letter p. The tub filled with blood and warm water. I remember praying. Begging. Sobbing that I would go to heaven and have peace.

“And then I fell asleep. And I believed I would never wake up.

“A good friend was a few blocks away. So was my sister. He was supposed to be three hours away. She was at a bar watching the big game. He broke down my door and found me in the tub. He put a tourniquet on and called 911. The doctor said I would have died soon. I would have died. I almost died.

“I spent nine days in the hospital and this is what I have decided. I do not want to be straight. I’m still not sure I want to be gay. But I do know I want to be seen. And heard. And most of all, loved. I want to be loved for who I am.

“I still don’t know what I believe about god. My inner demons still speak up and sometimes I listen to them. Sometimes I believe that I am destined to a life of feeling forever out of place. I hope that isn’t the case.

“‘It gets better’ is a popular mantra in the gay community. I hope it does. I’ve now been out for four years. I would never, never take back the decision to come out. I am sure I would be dead by now if I hadn’t. But I still wonder if it gets better than this.

“Because I still struggle. I still struggle to love me. I knew I was gay before the word had entered my world. It was innocent and it wasn’t scary. It only became scary when someone told me it wasn’t normal. It wasn’t okay. I’m going to choose to believe that that is a lie. I have to.”

– R

“School had been out for all of fifteen minutes, but I was already headed back to the band room, even though practice didn’t start for another two and half hours. I was going to work on a research paper for AP English, a paper arguing that homosexuality was, in fact, a choice.

“At this point in my life, I had already acknowledged that I had a ‘problem’ with being attracted to other guys. Without much of a home life, or a close group of friends, I didn’t really know how to deal. I talked with my pastor, who told me that, if I was baptized, the devil wouldn’t have such a hold on me. My guidance counselor at school pointed to my strained relationship with my father as the source of my problem. This left me resigned to becoming an asexual blob of clay. I grew to over 300 pounds, grew patchy facial hair, and was happy enough on a day-to-day basis to ignore the ‘problem’ in general.

“I was hoping in writing my English paper, I would finally be able to put the final stake in the heart of my demons. To my dismay, I was finding there was little to no research supporting my claim. I was still pursuing the topic, honestly unaware of how desperate I was to help myself. When I walked into the band room, I glanced around the room and noticed that a few younger friends were also hanging around in the room working on papers of their own.

“Fancying myself an intellectual, I offered to read their papers and share my advice. One of their papers hit me so hard that it took years to readjust, and it was a simple assignment to tell a personal story. My friend shared his coming out story. He told the story of how he had been having a hard time dealing with life, and it ended with him coming out to his parents

“I would love to see the look on my face as I was reading that paper. I knew this person, but knew none of this part of his life before. I knew he had a religious family, but they were supportive. I could barely reconcile those two things. I handed him his paper back, offering no commentary whatsoever. I couldn’t do anything other than to go immediately to the bathroom and cry. I haven’t cried that hard since. It was glaringly clear to me at that moment that I was still gay, and I had to find a way to come to terms with it. It was still several years and good friends later that I was able to publicly come out, but this was the moment that I accepted myself, and I couldn’t be more grateful for it.”

– B

“I was 19 at the time I first kissed a guy. I had recently broken up with a girl, and I met him in a show I was doing. He told me he was straight too. He dared me to kiss him, but I didn’t need dared – I wanted to. He told me, ‘Just because you kiss a guy doesn’t make you gay.’ So these two straight guys kissed, which … led to other things. We were together for about five months. Neither of us admitted to being gay – just two straight guys having a good time. I fell for him, hard. And so I broke it off.

“Being gay is wrong. Continue living the lie. The words of the sermons at church echoed in my ear. I was not gay. I just needed to be fixed. When I transferred to a residential college, I moved with the hope of a new start. I was ready to embrace these heteronormative values and to find the girl of my dreams and make her my wife.

“I quickly connected to a girl at my new college, and we started dating. With all the emotions of my past behind me at home, I began to build a future with her. It worked for about a year, but with every passing day that image of a perfect wife and family dwindled. I wasn’t her that I saw. There was something else I was not acknowledging. 

“I began to cheat on her with men. The emotions I felt being with him, the first guy I fell for,  came back to me. I needed to explore the possibility of finding true happiness with a guy. Which is kind hard to do when you are with a different guy every other week. I felt ashamed, but I didn’t know how else to satisfy my desire. I finally told myself that maybe there was a possibility that the feelings I have felt for most of my life are because of how I was made.

“Things quickly fell into place the end of my senior year. A boy I admired from across the choir room every day changed the world for me. Having wanted to be heard, I shared with him things I hadn’t told anyone yet: I liked guys and I wanted to be with one. He listened. He held me. He wanted me to be set free. While I always had feelings that I might be different, it wasn’t until him that I finally had the courage to come out to myself.

“The rest, I guess, is history: I quickly broke up with my girlfriend, found solace and advice from two good friends, and fell in love with the man who sat behind me in choir. I will ask this man to marry me someday…

“But that’s another story for another day.”

– J

“When did I know? That’s kind of a tough question. Deep down, I think I always knew I was bisexual, but it wasn’t until I was about 25 that I could truly come to terms with it. I have always had a logical, straightforward type of outlook, so spending 25 years essentially lying to myself and coming up with justifications for my thoughts and feelings rather than accept the truth was exhausting.

“I remember growing up, my friends would talk about celebrity crushes. I had to hide the fact that I had just as many crushes on male celebrities as I did on female celebrities. In middle school, one of my classmates introduced me to the black hole that was/is porn. He showed me a bunch of girl-on-girl stuff, but after he left, I gravitated to straight porn. I found myself focusing on the guy more, but I explained it to myself that I was imagining it was me and I wasn’t actually attracted to the guy. Then I stumbled upon bi and gay porn. Most of the porn I watched was all men, though I rationalized that porn only objectified women and I didn’t want to support that.

“Throughout high school and college I had a few girlfriends who I really did like – some of them love – but, no matter what, I couldn’t shake the tendency to stare when I saw an attractive guy walk by. I kept suppressing the feelings because, even without being fully honest, I was happy. I opened up to the girl I was planning to marry about my feelings of bisexuality. The conversation seemed to go well, but between physical distance and subpar communication, things changed and we called it off.

“That was the first time in my life that I was in a place to be fully honest with myself. I knew there would be a lot of questions if I came out as bi to my friends and family right away. I wasn’t ready for that. I needed to figure out myself and overcome 25 years of lying to myself before I could talk to anyone about it. It was and continues to be a tough road sometimes, but I am extremely happy that I can be open and honest to myself and to others. The exhaustion of holding this secret for the first 25 years of my life is quickly fading away…”

– T