The next morning, I woke up and I had ringworm. I had contracted ringworm in Jamaica, which is a fungus and it grows in a circle, so I had got it on my face, and it had not shown up until the morning after I kissed this girl for the first time. Which, as a Catholic person who thinks that she might be going to hell because she just discovered that she has same-sex attraction is, like, probably one of the craziest things that can happen to you. Especially if you’ve seen the movie The Exorcist. Satan’s in you, it’s trying to get out.
I was so ashamed of myself, and I did end up dating that girl; she was my first girlfriend, but I didn’t stop dating those other guys. For years, while I dated the guys, I was totally having sex with her.
We were both finding out at the same time. There was no teacher or student. We were both very much learning how to do it, which is really cool. I wish I hadn’t been as ashamed of myself and I wish I hadn’t had to hide, but I’ll tell you, some of the best sex you’re going to have in your life is secret gay sex. Secret gay sex that you’re hiding from your boyfriends.
I was so upset. I was disgusted with myself. I was disgusted with what was happening. I still have these dudes around in case I can get married, in case I can have babies, they’re still around. I told my folks, because I got home for the summer and I was just a wreck. I wasn’t sleeping or eating. I thought my life was over. I didn’t know any gay adults. I thought, I won’t be able to have normal friends, and I won’t be able to have a job. I just didn’t think that anything was going to be okay.
TODD GLASS
If you want to use the word “gay” and you use it without meaning any harm, you didn’t do anything wrong. But once someone makes you privy to what it does, if you still want to use it, that’s the problem. Not that you used it in the past, “Oh, that movie’s gay,” or, “That’s gay,” or, “This is gay.” You did nothing wrong. Until someone tells you what it does when there’s a twelve-year-old around, or a fifteen-year-old who’s gay. It crushes their soul. What does “gay” mean in that context? It means “bad.” It means “stupid.” Like gay people. They’re weird. They’re stupid.
CAMERON ESPOSITO
I told my folks; my dad cried for five years. Like, every time I would talk to them.
I had been a good kid. My older sister was the wild one that would, like, sneak out the window, and my dad had to remove the door from the hinges to find out she wasn’t in there. She was like, the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off kid, and I was like the Cameron. Which is funny. I just realized that that’s true. I am Cameron.
My parents wanted me to go to therapy. We went to therapy as a family. The three of us. I’ve since realized that they were probably really confused; that they just didn’t have a better plan, but at the time I thought that they were trying to get reparative therapy going.
One of the most damaging things I think a gay person can hear when they’re coming out is that thing where their parents are so worried for them. Because I was so worried for me, so to have that echoed back was pretty awful.
I am very aware of the fact that as much as I didn’t have any knowledge, they had also no knowledge, and then they also weren’t experiencing this, so I didn’t know anything about being gay, but I was gay, so I knew that this felt strong and weird and real. For them, I think you just remove all those emotions and it just looks like a choice and it looks like I’m ruining my life.
They also have apologized for that. I mean, they look back on it and they realize that it was a tough time for them too, and that they’re sorry that they weren’t able to trust me.
I do forgive them. I do. I get it. I get why that’s what happened. It also helped me in some ways, because we had such a close relationship and I was so worried about letting them down in this way that I would never be able to change. That was kind of a gift, because now I can be a stand-up comic. I’ve already caused the largest possible schism. There’s no other way I could have been that I think would have disappointed them more in the short term, so we already went through that. Now they just kind of have to trust me a little more.
DAN SAVAGE
My dad was a Chicago cop. Busted heads at the ’68 Democratic National Convention. Then he became a homicide detective for about ten years, which was weird for me when I came out to him, when I told him that I was a big faggot. He was a homicide cop in Area 6 Chicago, which was the gay neighborhood at the time. This was the 1960s and 1970s, when a gay neighborhood was not a nice place. They were kind of marginal places. They were not like coffee shops and bookstores, and they were not lovely.
Gay bars and shit were dominated by the mob then, so gay neighborhoods were kind of rough places where gay people kind of dove in, had a little anonymous sex, and then went back to the wife, or the rectory. That is where the nightclubs were, that is where the bathhouses were. It was just at the cusp where people started creating gay-borhoods, and gay communities, and coming together in the North Side of Chicago.
Clark and Diversey was the intersection in the middle of my dad’s beat, and the cops called it “Clark and Perversity.”
He was not a cop anymore when I came out, and he reacted fine. He was the last person I told.
When I was fifteen, he divorced my mother. He left. I was ready to come out when I was fifteen—which was really weird, kids did not come out at fifteen in 1980 when I was fifteen. They came out after college.
After my dad left, I did not have to come out to him—he was not around. He was really homophobic when I was a kid. I want to slam him for it, but I want to exonerate him at the same time, because this is what good parents thought they had to do then. They thought gay was something that grew in your child—like an inclination, or a cancer—and you could nudge them and they would not go gay. He would say shitty things about gay people because he cared about me.
When I was thirteen years old I begged my parents—all I wanted for my birthday were tickets to the national tour of A Chorus Line. These motherfuckers were shocked when I came out. That is like seeing your thirteen-year-old son give a blow job, and you are shocked when he comes out. “I want tickets to A Chorus Line for my birthday! That is all I want!”
This was thirty years ago. This was when being gay was the worst thing you could think of someone, so you did not think that about your own child—no matter how much evidence was staring you in the face.