I’m Coming Out

At thirteen, I climbed live oak in the backyard and said “gay” out loud. I knew I had committed a sin. No one could hear me. My parents and sister were inside the house or, at least, far out of earshot. Even so, I was scared to say it.

I knew, more or less, what the word meant. I did not quite think it belonged to me or defined what I felt, but I recognised that it made me feel something — it was charged with treachery and transgression.

It still is. All these years later, and with all the other words I know now, “gay” is still a blunt, in-your-face, limp-wristed battle cry. It means a man who fucks men, who takes it up the ass or fucks an asshole, who prances around gay bars or prowls dark corners waiting to strike unlucky men (depending on which homophobe you ask). I love being gay.

I realised, a few years later, there was a problem: I did like girls. Only sometimes — and not in the super-sexual way I liked men. But something was there, some heat between “gay” and “straight”, the only two options I believed existed for me.

The fact that I needed some privacy that day in the tree tells me I understood what the word meant, but saying it was not momentous, not a flash of self-recognition that comes for some when they watch porn or touch a dick for the first time. I knew what I wanted — what I wanted done to me, how I felt about boys in my class — but the word still felt ill-fitting. And it still does.

The word came to me as most words come to kids: through other kids. They said it on the playground. It was the same as calling someone stupid. “You’re so gay!” a guy shouted when a teammate fumbled the ball, lost a point, whatever. Some classmates spelt it out — G-A-Y — instead of saying it outright because it was, for them, a curse word. It wasn’t one of the fun curse words like “shit” and “damn”. It lived in that second category of ones we innately understood as truly punishable, truly bad. I don’t member anyone getting in trouble for saying it, as they would have been punished for saying “shit” or “damn” in class, but I remember a teacher reprimanding someone a few grades below me during an outdoor activity: “Don’t you ever say that word again!”

Everything changed the day in church when I learned the word’s real meaning. Philip, a blond boy about my age — ten, maybe — asked our Sunday school teacher about “gay people”. I don’t remember her initial answer, but I remember her explaining that gay people are men who have turned away from God and have sex with each other. She was visibly uncomfortable. She said homosexuality was a sin.

I knew sin. By then, I had spent time overseas — my parents were missionaries and founded a Christian orphanage in Zambia, Africa. I grew up with a fair sampling of the various micro-sects of conservative Christianity during my childhood. The general consensus among them was that gay people were against God.

That’s how they said it: against. Gays were not merely unaware of the Bible’s mandates like people in Africa were — people who, with white missionary help, could be saved once they heard the truth. No, gay people were combatants: they were actively opposed to the word of God. Their lifestyle was antagonistic against everything the church stood for. They had heard the truth and abandoned it. They were not lost — they chose to leave. There was an understanding that one should not try to save a gay person or even approach one because they were dangerous. They were enemies of Christ, disfigurations of something holy. That holy thing, I later learned, was marriage — a thing believed by Christians to be the purest representation of God on earth.

I was fascinated by all this. I loved theology, even at a young age. But then, I was in the tree, looking across the field, some years older from the Sunday school lesson, knowing that “gay” rang something true and recognisable in me. I was clear-headed enough to know that a strong reaction to its mere utterance was not a good sign. It was fire and excitement. It tasted like disobedience. I then spent years praying over it.

Today, I am gay, though I still struggle with the word. I am frustrated that I had to choose a label because I still have occasional fantasies about girls. “Bisexual” was considered until I hooked up with a non-binary person who did not identify with any gender — which helped me realise that gender itself was not a huge factor in my arousal. I was pansexual, fluid, or, really, just kinky. I was a faggot when I wanted to be submissive and degraded. I was a top on rare occasions. I was a boy to daddies, a lover to my lovers, a friend to my friends. Were all these words not enough?

Most of my fantasies involved men. The majority of my sex was with men. But “gay” still felt like the closest word to what I really was, not the word. Thankfully, a teacher in college had a saying: labels are tools, not cages. It took time for this lesson to sink in — until after college, in fact — but now I think I have it. A word is something one uses for utility because it can make life (and dating) easier. But it is not the summation of one’s being. It does not tell everything. No single word can do that.

The queer community makes a fuss over labels and terms. I think we would do well to remember my teacher’s lesson: Labels are tools, not cages. Terms are not fixed. Identities change. Desires are anarchic, forever in flux. No label must last forever.

I think I will keep saying “gay.” It does the job. As a social practice, labelling oneself feels systematic, very neat and clean, just something one does. But my identity, whatever it is, is not clean. It is messier, instinctive, and hungry. It wants and wants.

My generation is the children of the Internet. New words come to us quickly, and more are coming. How do we cut through the confusion and land on anything? I encourage friends to try many labels. I did. I have friends who evolved from “lesbian” to “queer” to “nonbinary” in just a few years. How exciting! Even our collective label, “queer,” is a reclamation of an old slur. Everything changes, and change is nature.

Take away the words and I am just another person looking for sex. It is that simple. My need for the company of others is universal. It should ring true to anyone, no matter how they identify. Desire and loneliness are the human condition, things we all share. I share these things with Christians who hate me and with other gay men who think they are too sexy to even look at me. Why can others not see our shared humanity? I think, at times, labels themselves are partly to blame — they entrench us into groups and fuel animosity against others Labels are useful but can be misused.

Christians are not hard to understand. They are people moved by words. I have been moved by words too. I am a writer. I get it. Language is powerful and terrifying. If I thought I had the word of God in my hands, I would probably feel as they do. But creation is not just the territory of God — I do it every day. I write stories and poems and make worlds happen on pages. I play this game too. I eat gods for breakfast.

In my freshman year, a lesbian couple explained to me what a clitoris was at IHOP one night. One of them drew an illustration on a napkin. I remember the drawing, a black thing like a bug or butterfly, resting there, open. Later, when I finally touched a real-life clitoris, I was amazed to see that it did actually look like the drawing. I rubbed my finger over it as if I was tracing it on paper, and she gasped.

I started exploring my desire for men long before the clitoris — illustrated and otherwise. I remember a day in high school, walking through the woods with my father. He was trying to teach me about identifying trees. I was not paying attention — I was thinking about a guy named Johnson who I thought was about to kiss me the last time we spoke. Johnson was my first great love. I do not remember much about him except the feeling of that love and how it burned in me during that walk with my dad. This was a beautiful thing bursting in me that, if shared, would bring only damnation and punishment. What I felt was as natural as the trees. I could be identified by an eagle-eyed observer of humans: “Ah, here is a sparkly one!”

I was something to celebrate. Dad could not see that. Soon, Johnson vanished from my life — he ran away to California and was picked up by the police near the state line. I never talked to him again. Even so, the memory of his almost-kiss burned in me and nothing else mattered. Years later, I heard he got mixed up in bad drugs. I still do not know what happened to him or where he is now.

But he was going to kiss me. My longing — the absence of his kiss — fueled me until college. It carried me through many fights with Dad and through my coming out in high school. In college, many men kissed me. College was where I got drunk and stumbled home with them. Every man I undressed was a discovery, not of them, but of me. I learned myself. I found the animal in me, reflected in their eyes.

When I think of gay sex now, the word “rapture” comes to mind. In Christianity, the rapture is the taking of the saved in the last days — something Christians love to fantasize about. What a word to use, “rapture” — what a person feels in the throes of orgasm. The word is synonymous with “ecstasy”. Once, the word filled me with fear of the end times, fear of Hell. Now it is the best descriptor for getting fucked in the ass.

My first college boyfriend lasted only two weeks. Once, late at night, he held me against a tree and kissed me. Later, I saw the tree was a Southern live oak, like the one I climbed when I first spoke the truth. Like the sermon on the mount. I am what I am.

Love, Beastly