Growing Up Gay

Boy, did I used to have sexy legs.

I know, I know. Young men aren't exactly celebrated for their legs. But I'll be the judge of that, thank you very much. Just ask my best friend from high school. Straighter than a ruler, that one. Yet the day I strolled into school wearing Daisy Dukes, even he did a double take. "Wow, Paul, you've got quite the sexy legs." And he wasn't wrong. They were tan, taut, and absolutely tormenting—a word I use deliberately, because that's exactly what they did to the other boys. Not in the way I might have hoped. They teased and taunted me so relentlessly that day, I retired those shorts forever. Some battles aren't worth the war. That one wasn't. Yet.

I came out of the closet at 15, though calling it a choice would be generous. It was more like the closet door blew off its hinges. Unlike a lot of gay boys today, who navigate identity with a kind of quiet, self-possessed confidence, I was performing, subconsciously, the feminine. I had a swish you wouldn’t believe, as flamboyant in the way that gay men of the 70s, 80s, and 90s often were, not because they wanted to be, but because that was the only template the world had given them. Visibility through stereotype. Survive by becoming the thing they already think you are.

Scholars now suggest that the old architecture of rigid, homophobic masculinity is crumbling--that softer, more inclusive versions of manhood are rising to replace it. The "gay radar," in short, is losing its signal.

But unlike a lot of my gay peers, I fought back. And hard.

My adoptive father—complicated man, complicated legacy—taught me one thing that actually served me: don't absorb the hit, return it. When boys on the football team came for me, he'd pull his car over, point at whoever was causing trouble, and say, simply, "Go beat his ass and don't come back to the car until you do."

So I did.

Many school expulsions followed. I became fluent in fighting back. But the bullies grew creative, as bullies do when ordinary cruelty stops working. One of them shot me with a BB gun, while I was on stage, performing in a high school musical. Mid-song. In front of an audience.

I got back at him. I'll leave the details to your imagination, but let's say the score was settled.

It wasn't all darkness. Though some days it was very dark.

At 17, my adoptive parents disowned me. My Roman Catholic church excommunicated me (thank God). The trauma stacked up in ways that would have buried someone with a thinner skin or a quieter spirit. Some days I was suicidal. But here's the strange hermeticisim of living a brutal adolescence: it didn't flatten me. It forged me. Made me bolder, stranger, more curious about the world, more ferocious in my love for the people in it.

Today, I carry my gay heritage like a flag and a wound at the same time, with pride and with full knowledge of what it cost the people who came before me. The ones who marched, who fought, who were beaten in the streets so that I could eventually walk down them without flinching. I owe them everything. And so, I keep fighting, in the ways available to me now: letters to cowardly governors, conversations I refuse to stop having, a refusal to make myself smaller in a state that keeps trying to legislate my existence into silence.

Florida's governor has banned words related to homosexuality and transgender identity in schools. Words. He's afraid of words. The children sit in classrooms, some of them quietly desperate, and the adults in charge have decided that the most dangerous thing in the room is language.

It's not dumbfounding. It's calculated. And I won't pretend otherwise.

There are benefits to being an outlier, to living your whole life slightly outside the lines everyone else takes for granted. It's terrifying. It's exhausting. It's painful in ways that don't always have names. But the people who survive it come out the other side with personalities made of something close to steel.

So bring on the bullies. Their opposition is fuel. Their cruelty is, paradoxically, the very thing that makes us uncrushable.

I'm not entirely sure why I wrote this today, except that I found an old news article I'd been featured in (I forged my parents’ signatures to get it in), one I thought I'd lost years ago. Holding it, I felt something shift.

I thought I had lost it.

In actuality, I haven't lost anything.

Here's a poem I wrote the other day and published on Vocal. It nicely summarizes my feelings on this matter. Thanks for reading!