By many metrics of human experience, six years is enough. Enough for older sisters to marry, younger brothers to graduate, nieces and nephews to replace aging grandparents.
For other things, six years does not suffice.
It’s been six years since I first allowed myself the courage to love another man. I was still too afraid to tell anyone﹘or, God forbid, label myself “gay.” Mom and Dad’s tableside condemnation of the “Gay Agenda” and our Assemblies of God church’s heavily decontextualized topical sermons on Genesis 19:1-11 and Romans 1:18-32 scared me into a decade-long despair that my only option was a misbegotten wife or eternal celibacy. I had a conservative Christian family and an all-consuming God to appease, after all. I had sons and daughters to conceive who would inevitably join the growing panoply of cousins. That was the single greatest act I could do as a human being, if Mom’s preëmptive tears were any indication. I had to honor my father and my mother.
In February of 2014, just days after my twin sister and I had ordered our overpriced high school cap and gowns, I began my college search in all the obvious places: Midwestern conservative Christian universities. After a cursory internet perusal, I found one with a decent Graphic Design program, entered my relevant (albeit modest) credentials, clicked Apply Now, and received a detailed John Brown University Scholarship Weekend pamphlet in the mail a week later. The next Friday, Dad was slamming the trunk on our eggplant-purple 2003 Chrysler PT Cruiser. I held a quarter-folded black-and-white ‘8.5”✕11” MapQuest printout in my left hand and a branded full-bleed glossy CMYK tri-fold pamphlet in my right.
During the Weekend’s first day, we ate up the hor d'oeuvres along with the fundamentalist panderings of the university’s board speakers. As I walked down campus the first night with my small group of prospective males, I knew I could hide my sexuality here for four more years.
After the pretentious meet-and-greet, we walked into the expansive multi-story atrium of J. Alvin Brown Hall and into the second-floor suite of Freshman dormitories to the right. Underclassmen roared at blockish Mario characters on dubious motorized carts on a small LCD flatscreen in the suite common area, so I discreetly rested my overstuffed backpack in our host’s dorm room and rolled out my sleeping bag in my own form of protest. Unfortunately, our hosts had left heretofore-sinful explicit rap music playing to the empty room, which inconsiderately thumped through the faux-tile laminate and dollar store rugs into my heretofore-sin-sensitive feet. Another of my prospective companions came in with the same idea, saw my indignant jaw clench with every “shawty” and “fuck,” and was audacious enough to tap the Bluetooth boombox’s power button, banishing Post Malone to the demonic realms whence he came.
“I’m Jared,” he began, if only to fill the silence he created. I responded in kind.
As it turned out, our common interest in technology lent for some decent (though admittedly superficial) conversation. Soon, other guys sifted in and settled down, cutting short our brief tête-à-tête. I fell asleep to the symphony of the group’s slow, somnal breathing.
As morning crawled through the window slats and across the floor onto my bleary face to gently remind me I was here to interview, I deliberated the practicality of waiting until the other, slimmer, prettier, manlier, real-er boys had finished their token hygienic rituals before doing so myself. Deodorant would, I decided, suffice for the entirety of the weekend. I found Dad again in the Cafeteria and puzzled through the campus maps to find the interview locations. A few parent forums and keynotes later, and I was back with my small group. I could tell Jared had little real interest in Super Smash Bros beyond trash-talking, so he and I soon paired off again in our room and continued our little talks, this time circumnavigating our families and churches and lives. The tenderness of his attention gave me hope that I would at least have a familiar face if and when he and I returned the following August. We fell asleep on our respective sleeping bags, bantering about iPhone vs. Android or something.
Dad drove me back home with an extra phone number in my phone. I didn’t even bother adding the contact name. I woke the following school morning to a text from what I almost assumed was a wrong number.
Is this Jared?
Yep!
What are you up to?
Just talking to my bf.
Nice. Getting ready for school. Talk later?
Okay
I have no idea what the lecture in my Honors: English IV course involved that day. Those two simple letters transfixed me. Best friend? Boyfriend?
I avoided asking for clarification for days, teasing out other topics between LOLs and the unspoken hope he’d forget. But my curiosity gnawed at me with every new buzz in my pocket.
Meanwhile, I waited for word from John Brown University whether my interviews would yield substantial scholarships.
What did you mean, “bf”?
Oh lol my boyfriend Christian
He and I are long distance. Hes from Canada :(
I almost stopped texting immediately.
Oh cool.
Are you ok with that
Like me, he was raised Christian. Like me, he could never reveal his attractions. And it was the first time I had ever allowed myself to believe someone else﹘anyone else﹘could be that living contradiction: gay Christian.
So we kept talking. I kept asking. He kept answering. And I caught feelings like the ground catches leaves﹘slowly, inexorably, until up is down, green is brown, and the trees are just branches. I told him we could inspire each other closer to God by teaching each other to love. And I believed it﹘sort of. His boyfriend didn’t seem to mind that he had a less-long-distance interest. He encouraged it, which was weird to me for reasons I had yet to scrutinize.
My teachers started chiding me for texting in class. The family laptop stayed in my room. Our 1AM Skype calls normally lasted five minutes.
I wanted to understand why he felt I was someone attractive, someone touchable, someone human. I had hitherto convinced myself otherwise.
So when he asked if I wanted to become his boyfriend, I swallowed my fear. I knew the risks﹘most of them, at least. We were long distance, so there was only so much we could do or say or be, right? He became the living embodiment of the future I hated that I wanted.
After almost a month, I got another official John Brown University document in the mail, this time including the president’s signature and the word Congratulations. And the next day, Jared told me he got the same, both from LeTourneau University in Texas and John Brown University. LeTourneau offered him a better scholarship.
I guess you'll go there then.
I don't know.
But that didn’t stop us from talking. And flirting. And saying naughty things good Christian men ought not say.
My English teacher had assigned my class journals to discuss topics relevant to his curriculum. He struck me as a very studied, wise, trustworthy, confidential man. In a footnote for one entry in late March, I revealed I had a secret boyfriend and was unsure how to proceed going into college. He responded in the margins beneath saying he’d pray for me.
That was the first time I’d ever encountered or received that particular response, but to me it felt either worried for my family situation or littered with passive-aggressive Christian condemnation.
I’m going to John Brown.
The program there isn't exactly what I want. And Id get to be with you.
You want to be roommates?
I could’ve slapped myself for being so impulsive. The mere suggestion of me sharing a bedroom with another boy I knew was gay flew in the face of everything I was raised to believe about morality and propriety.
Absolutely. I was hoping you would ask. I got my roommate request forms in the mail a few days ago.
During that Easter weekend, he used part of his college savings to buy a bus ticket to Kansas City﹘as my future college roommate, of course. Mom and Dad seemed to believe it, anyway.
I drove through Kansas City on a cloud. The bus squealing into the station was music. As he stepped down onto the asphalt, I took scrupulous mental notes so nothing would be discounted or forgotten. I traced the contours of his jaw, the curls of his hair, the arcs of his fingers. I wanted to know him fully.
Ironically, I felt stilted because I still half-clung to the notion that this boyfriendly relationship might be some sort of God-ordained ministry on my part. My personal mantra preceding the weekend was not to touch or even make overly-intimate eye contact. It could﹘no, it absolutely would﹘send either one of us over an edge.
But his foot against my leg under the table at the breakfast cafe was a gamma ray burst through all my moralistic bracing. I was caught into a sweeping blast of his masculine energy, hyperfocused to me in a way I had scarcely dreamt possible. I was the object of desire. I was wanted by that whom I wanted.
Barely an hour after getting back home, we were making irrevocable choices and giving each other experiential firsts. Even the short Easter weekend during which he stayed in my room, I chose to place him over the value system I had been raised to believe.
I had no lock on my bedroom door and my house was very small. We would hear my brother or sister slomp up to the door to ask a casual question or grab some LEGOs from our big blue Rubbermaid container, and we’d immediately scramble into a less incriminating position before they could turn the doorknob and see what we really were. We might as well have been cockroaches skittering away from the flashlight.
I lost my virginity Easter morning while everyone else was celebrating the Resurrection.
The time came for him to return home. I drove him back to the bus station, my blithe father in the passenger seat, and once we arrived, he and I got out and meandered through some north Kansas City avenues while we waited for the horrible, terrible, no good, very bad bus. I wondered what Dad thought as he reclined his car seat and watched us duck around the corner of a local East Asian food market.
There was something so mythic about holding hands with him out on an open street, like two starcrossed Greek demigods pattering down Olympic thoroughfares. Once fated to eternal celibacy, we were now lauded by the pantheon of indifferent vendors and city-goers for whom a pair of gays holding hands was, in reality, as significant and sweet as the blackened gum clods in the pavement on which we walked. In a curious way, their indifference was the highest praise and adulation.
But this moment couldn’t last. The bus had to come. And it came.
Our distant tryst continued﹘and escalated.
For the remainder of my Senior year, the days filled themselves with clandestine texts between lecture points and late-night Skype sessions between my bed sheet covers. We joked, we argued, and despite it being little more than the passing of electronic signals through a network, it felt more real than anything I could’ve imagined.
Summer erupted in yellows and greens. I told my intrusive summer job boss I didn’t have a girlfriend and didn’t even have to lie. We saved up some money and bought another bus ticket, this time for the week during which my third-oldest sister got married. And I couldn’t help but weep bitterly for how happy it all was, and how happy my own could not be. I imagined our wedding﹘in all its complexity﹘ witnessed by chosen family who supported us the way our biological family never would. But I didn’t know how that new family would make up for the loss of the old.
I drove him back to the bus station again, more resolute than ever.
A few weeks later, he stopped responding to any of my messages. And a few days after that, I got another message over Skype.
My parents are reading this to make sure I say exactly what they want. They’ve seen everything we’ve talked about. They want me to cut off all contact with you, and they also want you to tell your parents. If you don’t, they will. I’ve requested a room change, and I told ResLife about our relationship as my reason for requesting the change. This is the last message you’ll get from me until my parents and I drive through Kansas in two weeks to drop me off at college.
Having my boyfriend’s parents blackmail me with my own sexuality was like being locked in a car as a firefighter pushes it off a cliff. The scraping of silverware against bowls on the dinner table that night reminded me of the sharpening of an executioner’s ax.
I told my twin sister first, a few days later. She cried as we crossed legs on her freshly-made bed. I stared at the nail polish stain on her light pink comforter because I couldn’t look her in the face, trying to explain that the friend I had over Easter weekend, to our own sister’s wedding, was actually my boyfriend﹘and that she barely knew the brother with whom she shared a womb.
But she loved me and told me so.
Unfortunately, I was still naïve enough to rely on WikiHow for “Coming Out” advice. And that’s the advice I took in breaking the news to my parents.
“You’ve been lied to,” was ultimately their take on everything. That phrase echoed down my ears into my stomach and settled there, round and hard and dark and heavy and layered and cold like the punctuation mark I always feared would be their answer to my decade-long question.
My parents called his a few days later. Arrangements were made. I stumbled around in a bodiless, hopeless blear. His dad video-called me using his Skype one day, encouraging me to pray and read my Bible. I bought budget college dorm supplies at the Dollar General in town. Another, smaller, more discreet paper arrived in the mail, this time from the Office of the Resident Director, indicating my roommate had requested a room change for “moral concerns.” The letter gave a link to the University website where I could confirm a room change request. My college’s residency account now had me listed as “same-sex attracted.”
A day or ten later, a red minivan crept up my driveway. I saw Jared step out of the car. In person, he looked weirdly different from either of his parents. They slowly and purposefully walked up the shabby cement walkway to our countryside rent-a-home and greeted my parents with a certain Christian commonality and mutual, “our sons are gay lovers” discomfort. My parents offered tea. As we sat down in the living room, the stained sofas might as well have been lined with pushpins. It was the first time Jared and I had spoken or even seen each other since that final message. We were cadavers on the autopsy table of our parents’ wounded fundamentalism.
After regurgitating little more than what had already been said in kidnapped Skype messages and pretentious video calls, my parents told his parents what they had told me: “We don’t believe our sons are actually gay; they’ve been lied to by the Enemy and they need to resist temptation and cleave more closely to their Savior; they need to repent in prayer and fasting.” His parents nodded and amen’d. They acknowledged they wouldn’t be able to control us once we were in college, but that they hoped we’d make the right choice. The conversation died, and with nothing further to say, they picked themselves off our stained couch, gave my parents their half-drunk teacups, and drove off, headed for John Brown. I stared out the living room window, wishing I was a part of the scenery instead.
“What is truth?” Dad asked me as we packed up my life into the PT Cruiser, echoing Pontius Pilate to an imaginary Jesus. It felt like his rhetorical answer, instead of the standard “Jesus,” was “A straight, God-honoring marriage﹘or lifelong celibacy.”
The next day, Dad drove me and all my belongings to Siloam Springs for Freshmen Orientation. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or distressed that he didn’t say a single word about my newly-revealed status of homosexuality, either to me or to anyone else. Did he just want to avoid the issue? Was he uncomfortable addressing it? Was he giving me space? Was he disappointed?
I was beleaguered by existential questions the second we arrived on campus, and no amount of anemic Orientation Week reassurances from the faculty, staff, or RAs mitigated the throbbing ache of not knowing how to relate to a father who was pulling out of the university parking lot﹘and, it seemed, my life. I knew no one here except my own ex-boyfriend. I didn’t know how to feel that his room, also in J. Alvin Brown Hall where we first slept together, was only a fifteen second walk from my own.
My replacement roommate was a red brick wall of indifference, entirely disinterested in anyone outside of his smartphone case. I had effectively chosen him over my own boyfriend.
Classes started, and I gradually worked up the nerve to wander into my ex-boyfriend’s room, which he shared with two other guys. I eventually found myself hanging out in their room less for him and more for them. I admired their zeal for God and their genuine spirits.
Academic classes blurred together with mandatory Tuesday and Thursday chapels, seeming at once a continuation of high school’s academic tedium while also a refreshing deviation from the godlessness of the public education system. Here, the pre-postmodern dichotomies of “right and wrong,” “truth and lies,” and “good and evil” were openly discussed as concepts that could be learned, known, and acted upon. I became submerged in a culture of “good” and “right” people, where the knife’s edge between attraction and action was what ultimately separated sin and death from salvation and life.
Jared and I started quibbling about little things. I would bargain for something, he would manipulate a little here, I would insist something there, and, eventually, he and I resented each other more than we wanted each other. The simple atmosphere of conservatism and heteronormativity also stifled any hope we might have had of being accepted or acceptable as a gay couple on campus, and I began to resent our secret status as I watched Freshman classmates fling themselves into fledgling romances. His roommates were the only friends I had really invested in, so I continued to visit their room to spend time with them in spite of him.
I broke up with him on decent terms. We still saw each other walking to and from classes on our fairly-small campus, but I never really attempted any romantic relationship with him again. We both graduated with academic honors four years later.
Of course, my “coming out” process was much more turbulent, nuanced, complicated, organic, and gradual than simply being blackmailed into coming out to my parents. After all, to be a part of a socially stigmatized minority is to come out first to yourself, and then to everyone, over and over, for the rest of your life. I hid being gay from my siblings for different reasons and for differing lengths of time, although it was always more influenced by fear than by hope they’d be accepting. The last to really find out was my oldest sister, whom I knew was the most progressive and accepting of all my close relatives. I waited so long for her because I felt I needed the resistance and condemnation of my more conservative voices rather than the acceptance and support of the others.
I’ve been through four more largely secret relationships and my family is still broken on how to best respond to the bleatings of their black sheep. My current boyfriend, whom most of my siblings know and love, is held at arms’ length by my parents, whose last words on the subject still echo their first: “You’ve been lied to.”
I live my truth now, six years later.
Read more about Noah here.