Finding Light in the Dark

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http://www.quadnews.net/lifestyles/finding-light-in-the-dark-1.2649391

Editor's Note: In honor of National Coming Out Day, Oct. 11, members of GLASS (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Supporters) have offered their tales of struggle and courage to The Quad News as inspiration for others. We hope that you will respect these individuals and their stories.

I told my mother on a Tuesday. Just after school, sometime in the fall.

I wasn't the only gay in school, but we were far from a populous bunch. Before my senior year, before the year I came out, Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) were these mythical sorts of things that existed in the same far-off lands as the unicorns I'd been mocked for liking. I never actually liked unicorns, of course. That was the bit that angered me. I'll never know why that idea popped into their heads, but I'll be damned if they weren't convinced.

High school was lonely, for lack of a better word. I enjoyed myself, had friends who knew my sexual orientation and was a generally healthy kid. But it was lonely because I had no one to talk to about being gay. There was a period of denial I went through when I was a freshman and a sophomore. I even had a girlfriend during those days. But looking back now, I realize that most of what I did with her was not out of love or desire, but out of a belief that it was probably what was expected of me, and I'd do well to perform it. But that ended, as they often do, and around junior year I realized that I was as gay as Christmas.

And I had no idea what to do then. It wasn't the Lifetime-Television sort of cluelessness, with soaring music and tears. It was one of the times where I looked at myself in the mirror, frowned and said, "Well damn. Now what do I do?"

I had no idea what it actually meant to be gay. Many of us were given the American Dream; the notion that one day I'd stand in front of a house with my wife, two kids and a dog.

The wife went away. I couldn't get married at the time, so the kids went away. The house went away. And in that mental image I stood alone, because the happiness I'd been told I'd have one day was no longer available to me.

If I was gay, I thought, "What do I actually DO?" Being the book-loving introvert that I am, I did what came most sensibly to me: I looked in the library and on the internet.