The following is my life story... or at least the juicy bits. I originally wrote this in terms of "my coming out story," and then added the parts about my family problems, and posted it. The reaction was so positive that I figured I'd tell the WHOLE story, or at least as much as I can remember of it. After a lot of traumatic experiences, I found that I had blocked a lot of memories. (As you read on, I think you'll understand why.) What follows is what I remember of my life, which consists primarily of the important events. I've omitted most of my early childhood, as nothing really happened to me then. Please note that, if you care, this version is considerably fleshed out from my previous postings. I offer this to you that you may see that no matter how big your problems, you can overcome them, and there is a reason to go on. Hang in there. I bid you well. Tom Farrell ----------------------My-Life-Story------------------------- It started when I was 7 years old. On my birthday. At 3pm. The party was over, and people were going home. Everybody had left but the two neigbors my age (who could walk home, and stayed for dinner if I recall) and Joe. It later turned out that Joe's mother had some kind of problem with her car, and was an hour late picking him up, but frankly I wouldn't have cared if she had left him with us, because I wanted to keep him. I didn't understand why, but I knew it had something to do with the way he looked. It wasn't that he was that close a friend, I had hardly ever spoken to him before the party, to which my mother had invited him. It had to be his looks. Since I didn't understand these feelings, I put the thoughts aside as Joe left and forgot about it. His family moved out of town that summer and I never saw him again. Then I was 9 years old. I had a friend named Mike, who lived two doors down. He and I used to play together often, because he liked my Atari and I liked his Colecovision. We talked about sex, but not more often than any other 9 year old boys, and never in any depth. Certainly we never did anything that anyone would find unusual, abnormal, or questionable. One afternoon, after Mike and I had spent quite a bit of time playing quietly in my bedroom (with matchbox cars, as I recall) and after Mike left, my mother spoke to me. She told me that she "knew what was going on," and that "It's NOT all right for little boys to kiss each other," and that "I don't want you participating in any of that filth," and that "if you don't stop it, I won't allow Mike over here any more." Since Mike was my only friend in the world (other than my dog) that was a threat indeed. Of course, I had no idea what she was talking about, but it made an impression on me, because she said it so INTENSELY. When I was 11 years old, I realized that I wasn't going to start liking girls. I didn't quite yet know I was gay, because I didn't have a word for it yet, but I knew what I was. I had always sort of liked other boys, but I thought that when I hit puberty, I would suddenly start liking girls. Well, it didn't happen that way. I lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere. My family's house was on top of a small mountain, between two hayfields. The local people, if asked, would tell you that "there are NO gays in Sussex," and for all practical purposes they were right... all the gay people in Sussex had brains enough to know that if they were to come out of the closet, somebody would probably kill them for it. Whenever there was any kind of violent crime in the area, the local papers would strongly imply that the person who did it was gay, or sometimes if someone was actually arrested, they would go around interviewing people who knew the suspect until they found someone to say that they think he or she is gay. I knew, therefore, that this wasn't something I could tell anyone about. I went on with my life, as quietly as I could, trying not to attract any attention, for fear that someone would notice that not only had I never been on a date with a girl, but I had in fact never even asked one out. However, most of my friends were girls, so most of the guys never noticed. Yet, everybody seemed to be able to see right through me... Anyone you asked would tell you that they THOUGHT I was gay. Nobody was sure, but everybody thought I was. I never got it in my head that I was in any way evil or anything like that, I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, but I also knew that where I lived, I had better not divulge my homosexuality to anyone. When I was 10 years old, my best friend died in a car accident. When I was 11 years old, my new best friend died in a car accident. Then the private school I was going to closed. This left me with two options. One was to go to "Sussex Christian School," a school run by fundamentalist "christians," requiring all students to wear uniforms, and having many signs on the walls throughout the school proclaiming "If you're not Dutch, you're not much." I am part Dutch, (Part Dutch was good enough for them) but I didn't think I'd be able to stand a day in that place, let alone years. I was also rabidly athiest at the time. It's also, incidentally, noteworthy that when my mother called them to ask if I could have a tour, they explained that my mother could tour the school, but I couldn't, as my presence as a non-student would be disruptive. Aparently the students don't matter in a "christian" school. My only other option, which I therefore took, was to return to public school, where I knew I would find hundreds of people who knew me, thought I was gay, and hated me. Beaing teased virtually nonstop by everyone around me for two years was bad. Going to school for two years in a building designed to handle 1/3 of the students it actually had was bad. The fact that the school failed entirely to challenge me in the two years I was in junior high was bad. (I had been going to a school for the gifted, so this was a major step down.) What was absolutely unbearable, however, was that the school's phys ed program, mandatory in the state of New Jersey, required that all male students must change into their gym clothes in the locker room, that all regular clothes must be removed (including underwear) before the gym uniform could be put on, and that before changing back into regular clohtes all male students must shower together, nude. Having already noticed that some of my classmates were... attractive... I knew that I could never possibly remove my clothes with them or shower with them, or they would know without doubt that I am gay. I begged the teacher to exempt me. He wouldn't. (He could have, it was his rule, but he wouldn't.) I begged my parents to intervene, saying I was too modest to publically change. They wouldn't. I worried myself sick, quite literally, and couldn't go to school for two weeks. The day I returned, somebody stomped on my foot in the hallway (on purpose) with such force that they fractured a toe, and I could barely walk for another two weeks, let alone take gym. I had a doctor's excuse. Eventually, the day arrived when I was going to have to take gym. The night before it was to happen, I threw myself at my father's feet and pleaded with him to do something for me. He told me he didn't understand why I wanted to get out of changing in gym so badly, but if it was important enough to me that I would get down on my knees and beg him (I wasn't actually on speaking terms with him at the time) he would try to do something. (If Dad hadn't agreed to help, I had fully intended to kill myself that night.) He and I managed to convince the principal (whom I knew socially but had never spoken to at school) to arrange that I could have a private place to change and that I could shower separately, in exchange for which I would receive the minimum passing grade. The gym teacher was very angry with me for successfully going over his head, and told me so. He never disciplined any student who did anything to me, even if it happened right in front of him. Students used to like to hit me in the face with the ball (Whatever kind of ball we were playing with at the time) but he never seemed to care that I was getting hit in the face with the soccer ball every two minutes or so. He also didn't care that I had asthma, and used to try to make me continue to do whatever we were doing even when I was having a SERIOUS asthma attack. (I am told that he has since been let go from his position at the school because it was determined he did not meet state teacher certification qualifications.) I wasn't well liked in junior high. When I walked through the halls, people would steal my books out of my arms. To cope with that, I got a bag to carry them in, but then everyone made fun of that. People tore my clothes in class. People threw things at me in the cafeteria. Then somebody noticed that I never got in trouble with the teachers, and suddenly everybody started running up to the teachers and telling them I'd done all kinds of nasty stuff. In general, the teachers didn't believe them, but now and then I got in trouble. It got so bad one day that when a teacher came over to my table in the cafeteria to punish me for yet another thing I hadn't done, I decided that if I was going to get in trouble, I might as well do something worth being in trouble for, so I stood there and cursed out the teacher at the top of my lungs. He was so shocked, he just gaped at me for a minute, then he just turned around and walked away. He never said a word to me about it, and gave me a C in math. (A generous grade considering my poor performance.) At the end of my last year of junior high, I came to the realization that my mother was insane. She had dominated me completely for many years, so I hadn't had adequite basis of comparison to notice, but she just got weird enough that she couldn't hide it any longer. She believed that the CIA had planted an invisible video camera in a tree in the front lawn to spy on us through the living room window, so she taped paper over all of the windows in the house. She believed that if she parked her car in a parking lot that already contained a green or blue car, she would die, so we could never go anywhere, since there are a lot of green and blue cars. She believed that microwave ovens were the minions of the devil. She believed that my grandmother hated my father and wanted to kidnap me. I spoke to my father about it. I don't think I'd spoken to him about anything at all for a good month before that, and I hadn't spoken to him about anything important for years... well, I hadn't EVER spoken to him about anything important. My mother had systematically kept me away from him. I learned from my father that my mother had lost her sanity and their marriage had soured when I was three years old. When I was 5, she had been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, but refused to take any medication after the first few months. She had treated him as badly as she possibly could all that time, and he had stayed married to her so as not to abandon me. For 10 years, he had let her beat him, and let her feed him food that the dog wouldn't give a second glance (literally, he gave his food to the dog one time and Tiger took one look at it and walked away. It stayed there over a day until we threw it away), and let her keep him awake all night several times a week, and let her force him to live in a house so messy that he was to embarrassed to bring any friends home, and let her keep him away from his family. Why had he put up with all of this? He didn't want to divorce her because he didn't want me to be in her custody. And under my mother's unfluence, I had been participating in her abuse of him. My realization that she was crazy allowed he and I to take our first tentative steps toward becoming friends, after my mother had so badly sabotaged our relationship that I was 19 years old before my father ever told me he loved me. My mother, upon learning that my father was going to divorce her, went into fits of rage. She started DEMANDING to know which parent I would choose to go with. She pressured me for an answer every day from the moment I came home from school to the moment I fell asleep. I hemmed and hawed and delayed as long as I could, until one afternoon when I returned from school she finally gave me no choice, and I told her. At that point she threw another fit. I ran for my life, got on my bicycle, and disappeared for a few hours. (I knew some back roads she didn't, and could find my way through a nearby lakeside community which most people found to be an absolute MAZE of roads.) When I got home she had cooled down a bit, but she was talking about killing my father. I got on the phone and tried to call his office, but he had already left. When he got home she beat him. I remember watching my father, an ex-marine, cowering in a corner as she hit him and threw things at him. (She broke half of our dishes that night.) Dad then got back in his car and left. I then went into my room and lay on the floor and shook while my mother stood in the doorway and screamed hateful things about my father at me. I... sort of broke down. I couldn't handle it any more. I didn't feel like we were ever going to get away from her, so I decided to kill her. Yes, that's what I said. I even had a knife in my hand. But I didn't do it. I don't know why, but I couldn't. I sure as heck wanted to, but I found I couldn't move until I changed my mind. I just lay there, paralysed, until I was ready to cope instead of kill. It was like something inside me wasn't going to let me hurt anyone. After about an hour of that. Dad returned with two policemen, collected some clothes, asked me if I'd be ok for the night, (I wasn't thinking clearly, so I said yes) and left. He returned the next evening and explained to my mother that if she ever hit him again we would again call the police. (And I told him that if he ever left for the night again, he was to take me no matter what I said, and made him take my knife away.) After this, My mother decided to treat both of us as badly as possible. She'd walk around the house and make loud noises all night long so neither of us could get any sleep. (Take my word for it, sleep depravation is hell.) Or sometimes she'd let us get to sleep, then she'd kick my father. She stepped on my dog's tail every night, until he barely had any hair left on it. (The hair grew back, but he was so traumatized by this that my beautiful, proud collie walked around for the rest of his life with his tail between his legs.) She wouldn't let either of us cook, and cooked all of our meals, but she would burn everything. (She's the only person I ever met who could burn spaghetti.) I remember one night she made polish sausage, and it was covered with... charcoal. I started scraping it off of the meat. I scraped. And scraped. There wasn't any meat. It was just burn, all the way through. She also started taking things. Whatever she wanted. Whatever she thought was valuable. She'd lock them in her car, and we couldn't get at them because she'd stolen dad's copy of the key. She took all of dad's books. She took his new camera. And mine. (*I* threw fits at *her* until she gave back the cameras, but they're the only things I could ever get her to give back.) She took the drawers out of her dresser. (With their contents.) She would then drive this stuff to her sister's house (on the other end of the state), drop it off, and spend the weekend there. One afternoon I saw her take some guns (some antique rifles and two olympic target pistols) out of the house and lock them in her car. I called my father at his office and we agreed that he would try to get them away from her that night, because we felt that she was very dangerous, and should not have weapons at hand. So, that night when we thought she was not paying attention, Dad tried to unlock her car with a coathanger. My mother caught him. And beat him. While I watched from a window overlooking the driveway. He covered his head and tried to get away. I called the police. Dad came into the house and talked to the police. (I handed him the phone because I didn't think they would take me seriously.) He told me to wait at the front door while he talked to them. While I stood in the foyer, my mother came running up the stairs (which went through the foyer) with a look on her face... I have nightmares about the look she had on her face. And she had a gun in her hands. I screamed, and Dad and I ran out of the house. We would have taken a car and left, but Dad didn't have his keys, and my mother was patrolling in front of the house with the gun, so we stood at the far end of the front lawn (it was dark, she couldn't see us) and waited. When the police arrived 45 MINUTES LATER, they walked up to my mother and asked HER if she wanted to press charges. Her! (She said yes, of course.) My father tried to talk to them, and they told him to shut up. I tried to talk to them, and they told me to shut up. I think if dad and I hadn't started screaming at them, they might have arrested him. They then noticed the three rifles sitting on the ground. (My mother had put them there as they arrived.) They demanded to know who the guns belonged to. Neither of my parents would admit to owning them. (I don't honestly know where they came from myself.) The police were talking about taking them both to jail if one of them wouldn't admit to owning the guns, so I said "fine, they're MY guns, write me a reciept and take them away." They followed my instructions. (I gave the reciept to my grandfather, who collects antique guns, and who picked up and registered them.) They then left, without doing anything about the ongoing fight, and ignoring my statement that my mother had more guns in her car. (It took 5 years to get the remainder of the guns away from her.) I may add, at this point, that both times we called the police, they failed to follow New Jersey state law, which requires that the person who makes a call on a domestic violence case must be notified by the police of their right to get a restraining order after the second call. We didn't find out about that until much later, from a friend. They also failed to note in the police report that it was a domestic violence call, and I suspect that they probably failed in their legal obligation to report it as one. (Our county officially reported 5 domestic violence calls that year, when including ours my father and I knew of at least a dozen from friends.) I later had the opportunity to read the training manual the NJ State Police used, and found that it advised that when responding to a domestic violence call, police should take as long as possible to arrive, so that hopefully everything could be over before they did, and that they should do as little as possible upon arrival, because the participants were likely to be violent and the police might be hurt if they interfered. (This, of course, fails to notice that the participants might me hurt if they DIDN'T interfere...) A week or two later, I came home from school and found my mother in a very hostile mood. Exit Tom, stage left, on bicycle. Before I could reach any roads she didn't know, she tracked me down with her car. And almost ran me down with her car. In fact, she ran me right off the road... and almost made me fall off a cliff. I feel sure that she was trying to kill me. I managed to escape her after that, by virtue of the fact that despite her car being able to go faster than my bicycle, my bicycle could corner a LOT faster than her car, so I just drove into the most windy area I knew and took as many obscure streets as I could until I lost her. So, Dad and I found a place to move to, waited until she didn't show up one friday evening, called my uncle Paul to help, borrowed my grandfather's van, and moved out. We took two each of all of the dishes and silverware (which we returned to my mother after we bought our own), one of the two sofas, one of the 6 tv's, all of my stuff that I cared about, and a bed for my father. I loaned him one of my dressers. When my mother returned from her sister's house on monday, we were gone. Dad paid one month in advance on all of the utilities and told them to cut off after that. My mother showed up at my school and asked to see me, but aparently she must have behaved weird, because the principal (the same wonderful person I mentioned earlier) came up to my classroom and told me she was there and implied that he thought she was behaving weirdly and did I want to see her? I said no, and he let me slip out the back entrance to the school while he delayed her until I could walk safely home. (A few blocks away.) I remember dad and I sat down our first nite on our own, and realized that we had forgotten to take any pots and pans to cook with. (Dad and I can both cook, me slightly better than him in my not so humble opinion.) Then we realized... WE COULD GET A MICROWAVE!!! We jumped in the car and rushed to the mall and walked into Sears and said "Show us your biggest and best microwave!" They did. Then we said "Show us the same thing, but not QUITE that big!" They did. "We'll take it!" We rushed it home. We unpacked it. And almost broke our backs getting it onto the kitchen table, it weighed a ton. Then we realized... WE DIDN'T HAVE ANYTHING TO MICROWAVE!!! We rushed to the supermarket. We bought chicken nuggets and a bunch of other food. We ran home. We were so happy to be able to go get something we'd wanted but my mother had denied us for years, (remember, my mother thought microwaves were the minions of the devil,) we were two six-foot kids with a new toy. My mother immediately had her lawyer file papers with the court demanding that my father give her his car, as it was registered in her name. No matter that my father had left her four other cars, New Jersey law states that cars belong to whoever they are registered to, and so my mother said he had stolen "her" car. (No matter that she had never driven it, that it had always been his, that it was only registered to my mother so she could have it inspected for him, or that he needed it to get to work, the law made no allowances or exceptions.) Following his lawyer's advice, my father immediately agreed to turn over the car in two days time. Dad, not being one to waste time, bought a new car that night. He walked into the showroom, said "I'll take it," and wrote out a check for the downpayment. I don't think the salesperson will ever recover. I called my mother to arrange the transfer of the old car. (The lawyers would have haggled for weeks and charged thousands, I did it in 10 minutes for free by phone.) We (both parents and I) agreed that Dad and I would drive the car to the house, pick up my mother, drive back to a supermarket near where Dad and I were living (we hadn't revealed the exact location as yet) and get out, leaving her the keys and the car. When we arrived with the car, she changed the deal by insisting that SHE must drive the car on the return trip. Dad agreed, over my objections, and off we went. We reached the point at which we wished to get out, but my mother decided she would use the occasion to find out where we lived, and so she just kept driving and demanded directions. We insisted on being let out. She kept going. As she drove through a gas station to avoid having to stop at a light, Dad reached over, turned off the ignition, moved the key far enough that she couldn't just turn it back on, and pulled on the handbrake. (He thinks fast.) She started to beat him as we jumped out of the car. Before we could get very far, she pushed the key back in, took off the brake, put the car in reverse, and floored it. Dad, having had to defend himself on the way out, was just outside the door, and was sideswiped by it as he started to run away. (He wasn't hurt.) I was standing directly behind the car, and only lived because it occurred to me at that moment what she would do, and I leapt out of the way. (Landing rather unceremoniously on my face in a flower bed.) I'm not sure if she was trying to kill Dad or me. I'm inclined to think both. To this day Dad and I have a restraining order against my mother. Although, she violated it at will from the day after we got it, so I don't see what good it did us other than making her look bad in court. My father got custody of me (because I made it quite clear to all involved that if my mother got custody I would disappear myself). My mother got custody of 1/2 of my college fund, the other 1/2 of which was placed in trust. She got visitation rights to me and the dog (!) but the restraining order was left in place. (Go figure.) At my father's insistance, my mother changed her name back to her maiden name, Nancy McNamee. (The fact that she continues to call herself Eileen Farrell to this day serves, for me, as that much more proof of her mental disorder.) My mother also got all 5 of the family cars, including the 1960 Austin Healy Sprite which BOTH of my parents had promised they would give to me as my first car. And what did she DO with this car, which she fought for in the settlement? She had it junked. She had all 5 junked, in fact. Consequently I was the only person in my high school graduating class who didn't have a driver's license for other than medical reasons, because I couldn't afford BOTH a car AND insurance. (In NJ, if you have a license, you must have insurance. Where I lived, you needed a car just to get to the supermarket. I consequently depended on my friends if I had to go anywhere, or rode my bicycle. Have you ever tried to bring a pizza home on a bicycle without a rack?) Just before the divoce was finalized, the probation department, which is in charge of such things in New Jersey, ordered my mother to move out of our original house (which my father had continued to pay the mortgage on in addition to our rent, almost bankrupting him) and informed my father and I that we may move back in, a few days before my 14th birthday. We were overjoyed to get out of our tiny apartement, so we made preparations to move back in on the specified day. When it finally arrived, we borrowed the same van and uncle again, and dad took both to the house with a load of stuff. There they encountered my mother. There she tried to kill them. There she was so violent that she not only tore a door off of its hinges, she tore the frame right out of the wall. There she was bodily removed by the police, after my father returned to our apartment and told them (and me) what had happened. With the police standing guard over us for the rest of the day, I went on the return trip to the house. I expected to begin putting out stuff back where it belonged, but I discovered we had some problems. Like the house was full. Of garbage. Waist deep. Both floors. It took me a week to clear a path across the living room. Not to clean the living room, mind you, just to clear a 2 foot wide path to the window. I found piles of old TV guides. I found shopping bags full of plastic utensils. The freezer was full of peach pits. I'd rather not talk about what I found in the refrigerator, sufficient to say it asked me to take it to my leader. The phone had been cut off because my mother hadn't paid the bills, and the garbage company wouldn't pick up for the same reason. (We had to get the state of New Jersey to order the garbage company to start a new account for us under penalty of state takeover.) Worse, my mother had acquired a new dog while we were away, and its terribly smelly hair was all over the house. On top of all that stench, it was the middle of pollen season, and Dad and I both have severe allergies, and my mother had let all the bushes and grass and weeds around the house get seriously overgrown. (We had tried to mow it for her once when she was out but first we found she had changed the locks to the shed with the mower and then he came home and started beating my father.) We moved into Dad's girlfriend's (Barbara's) house until we could decide what to do, and each afternoon I would clean until my father got home to take me there. (Barbara lived in a different town, so I couldn't get to her place by school bus. I volunteered to clean because I didn't have anything better to do.) I also walked around outside the house with a pair of tin snips and cut down everything that made pollen I was allergic to (including several ornamental bushes, to dad's dismay) and dragged it all off to a compost heap. After a week I told dad I couldn't take it any more. I was taking 4 of the 12 hour allergy pills a day to cope with the house, and I was developing back problems from the cleaning. (The back problems took four years to go away.) He agreed that I had done more than my share. We wrote a letter to every single one of our relatives and basically begged them to please help us. We told them to bring garbage bags, promised to supply generous amounts of pizza, and promised that if they discovered any new life forms they could name them. A week later, the entire family (8 adults) showed up on our doorstep. After they walked (well, climbed) around the house for 1/2 an hour in utter disbelief, we all decided that the best way to do it would be to just get all the shovels we could lay our hands on and just shovel everything off of the floor and into bags. It took all day, and that was just to remove everything. (We only actually CLEANED one room, the kitchen.) By the end of the day we had taken out 150 large bags of garbage. (The next day the health department came around with a violation notice. Like we should have left it in the house?) And then there was high school, that wonderful time when the local thugs tried to run me over with their cars every time I dared take a walk or ride my bicycle on public streets. When I was beaten every day in school by my fellow students. When my fellow students would come around to my house after dark to throw eggs at my house and rocks at my dog. When, after 9 years of being treated like trash, I finally cracked when somebody sprayed oven cleaner in my face, and I threw him across the room and strangled him until he was ready to pass out and twisted his arm backward until he apologized for each and every wrong he had ever done me. It got me a little respect, but only a little. All of my friends started dating... so I threw myself into academic pursuits. I made varsity on the Academic Team, which made it to the national competition three years in a row. I made Captain of Debate and won the only debate awards anyone at my school ever won. I joined the Academic Decathlon team and won 7 medals. I wrote poetry which received great praise from professional poets. (How DOES one become a professional poet?) My paintings and photos were shown in all of the school's art shows. I became managing editor of the school paper, and one of the editors of the school magazine of art and literature. I ran the school's BBS for its one year of existance. (The computer was damaged over the summer and wasn't replaced.) I did the lighting for the school musical, and was consequently hired to do lighting for several other shows. I taught German to a third grade class. I figured out that my senior year, I spent a full 1/3 of school days away from the school on field trips. It's amazing what you can do when you're sexually frustrated. My freshman year of high school, I met a guy named Bob. He was a kind of nice guy. He helped me deal with all of the stuff going on in my family, because he had had a very bad family life too. He was also my first crush. :) We were quite good friends for about a year, although we didn't get together very often. His parents didn't like me (they didn't like anyone) so if I called they'd always tell me he wasn't home (even if he was) and if he said he was going to visit me they would forbid him. On his 18th birthday, his parents refused to let him have a birthday party at their house, so his friends threw one for him. (I didn't go, I don't remember why.) When he got home from the party (and I may add that it was a cake and ice-cream kind of party from what I hear) he found all of his stuff sitting on the front lawn: his parents had thrown him out. Bob moved around a lot in the following years. I'm not aware of his living in any one place for more than six months. Funny thing about Bob, though, whenever I get to thinking about him, he turns up. Maybe I get a phone call, maybe I get a letter, maybe he visits, but he turns up. So, once or twice a year we still talk. It's like, the other day I turned up a picture of him while going through my album. I noticed it fit perfectly in a frame I had found, so I framed it and stuck it off in a corner where I doubted it would get much attention. Then for the next week, everybody was asking me about it. So, I finally decided that synchronicity had hit again, and waited for him to turn up. (Despite the fact neither he nor I had any idea where the other was or how to get in touch.) Then I just happened to call my grandmother, and she mentioned that she had seen him on TV, representing an organization I used to belong to, so I called a friend who's still a member... and I just got email from him with his address and phone number. It's weird, but Bob seems to be a permanent fixture in my life. Shortly after Bob's parents kicked him out, my best friend Chris announced that his family was moving to Florida. We were good friends, and I was sad that he was going to be so far away, but we promised to keep in touch. When he finally did move, six months later, we kept our promise. A year after he moved, I flew down to visit him for a week. When I got off the plane I got a surprise. Chris had grown. Chris had become attractive. Very attractive. Very very attractive. I had an absolutely marvelous week hanging out in West Palm Beach with him, going to "the club" with the jetsetters and drinking Perrier by the pool. It was so very very yuppie. And I spent half my time trying desperately not to think about how handsome Chris was. He was a fundemantalist christian, and I rather doubted he'd be receptive to news of my gayness. The next summer I was invited to return, and did. The trip went much the same. I was just DIEING to tell Chris I'm gay, but I just couldn't. And he kept coming up to me and putting his arm around my shoulder or hugging me. It was almost unbearable. I decided that much as I legitimately care about Chris as a person, I would not go back the following summer, it was just too frustrating. I made some halfhearted suggestions that he come to visit me the next year instead of my visiting him, but I didn't pursue it so neither did he. In the middle of my high school years, my mother managed to get a job and rent a trailer and seemed to settle in for about six months or so. I knew she wasn't well yet, it was evident from conversation with her, but she seemed to be less mentally ill than she had previously been, so with some coaxing from both of my parents I consented to occasional visits with my mother. I required that all of our visits take place in public places and that they occur close enough to my home that I knew where I was. I felt that those things considered, I could take care of myself reasonably well if my mother's behavior became erratic. As time wore on, and as my mother's behavior didn't seem to change much, our visits increased to being several times a week as our schedules permitted. My mother also kept me well bribed with expensive gifts, which I felt no guilt about taking, since she'd taken $10,000 of my college fund in the divorce. At this point I should mention that when my parents divorced, I made a deal with each of them that if they wanted me to willingly spend time with them and converse with them as a polite and civilized person, they weren't to talk trash about each other in front of me. My father only broke the agreement once, and when I stormed out of the house he told me he wouldn't do it again. (And hasn't to this day.) My mother had frequently broken the agreement, and I frequently found myself demanding apologies of her, but generally if I demanded an apology she'd give it and stop trashing my dad for a week or so. One sunny afternoon my mother and I were in the car, going to a nearby town to go bowling. (Yes, the secret is out, I used to bowl. So sue me.) Suddenly my mother started saying all kinds of awful things about my father. (I won't repeat them, but sufficient to say they were untrue.) I reminded her of our agreement and demanded an apology, which I got. 10 minutes or so later, she started again. I again reminded her of our agreement, but she responded that she no longer cared and she was going to go on trashing my father. I requested that if she wasn't going to respect my feelings that I be taken home. That threw her into a rage, and she started driving very, very fast toward our destination. Seeing 90 mph on the spedometer frightened me, so I rather urgently demanded to be taken HOME and AT A SLOWER SPEED. She slammed on the brakes and did a u-turn in the middle of the street (thank God we were on a rural road at an off hour, otherwise we would surely have been hit) and started driving the other way very, very fast. I begged her to slow down, and she just started screaming at me. I then demanded that she stop and let me out, and she just screamed louder. So, fearing for my life, I reached across the car, turned off the ignition, and pulled out the keys. As I rushed out of the car, my mother started to beat me. (She had never hit me before, and has never since.) By fortunate chance, we had rolled to a stop near a leather goods store. (No jokes, please.) This was VERY fortunate, because there wasn't anything but hayfields around it for miles in either direction. I'm extremely grateful for the salesperson who took in a very frightened teenaged me and let me use the phone to call for help. I'm also extremely for the father of one of my friends, who called in late to work in order to come get me. (I couldn't reach anybody else.) My mother came running into the store after me screaming that I'd stolen her car keys. I pointed out that I'd dropped them on the car floor, and she ran out again. Then she came running back in again... I'd forgotten my bowling balll. Would I like to go back to the car with her to retrieve it? No thank you. She ran out again. Then she ran in again. With my bowling ball. She dropped it on my toe (ouch) and left. Oh, and I should point out that while this took place, she left her car sitting in the middle of the road with the keys on the floor. I refused to go anywhere with her in her car ever again, and refused to see her at all for several months. Returning to the subject of high school, I got involved in a wonderful group in school called "peer counseling," which is kind of like group therapy for you and 100 of your closest friends. That helped me get over my problems with my mother, and taught me about being a person. (You would NOT have wanted to know me before I was about 16, I had been a real twit.) Peer counseling gave me another experience. The first time a man ever told me he loved me. I don't think he's gay, but it meant a LOT to me at the time. It was in a note he wrote me, which I still have. (The note is, by some quirk, in my closet.) The rest of the important things I learned about being a person came primarily from my Aunt Alice and Uncle Mike. During The Great House Cleaning, they had invited me to come live with them for a summer and work in my uncle's laser lab. At 16 (the youngest I could legally work in the lab) I took them up on it, and spent the very best summer of my life. I know we make fun of nuclear families in the gay community, but let me tell you, living in one that's functional is an experience that must be lived to be believed, and my Aunt Alice and Uncle Mike have the ultimate functional family. The job was awesome, too. At the end of the summer, Aunt Alice and Uncle Mike asked me if I would like to make my move there permanent and transfer to the local high school. I seriously considered it, but in the end I decided to go back to my Dad's place and continue to try to build some kind of relationship with him. (I failed completely, but I'm not sorry I tried.) I returned the following summer to do it all over again. In any case, after returning to school from Aunt Alice's, I began to really make friends in school. I celebrated my 17th birthday on June 30, 1989. I had a party for the occasion, my first in several years. I hadn't previously really had enough friends to have a party, but I'd finally earned enough respect at school to make some friends, so I threw I murder mystery party. (It was wildly successful. I did it.) During the party, my mother called. She talked about how much she hated Italian Americans and African Americans. She called them all sorts of awful names. It was the final straw... some of my guests happened to be Italian Americans and African Americans. I stood there and cursed at my mother over the phone and then refused to take calls from her for most of the next year. But back to gay stuff. My father and grandfather kept their mouths shut about their opinions about gay people. My grandmother said we should all be shot... and I had every reason to believe that the rest of the family sided with her. I resolved to move as far as possible away from New Jersey for college. This was compounded by the fact that I was having terrible arguments with Dad and Barbara throughout my time in high school. (NOTHING violent, just strong and sometimes angry disagreements.) In April of my senior year, I went to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland for a week's tour, with my German class. I had a wonderful time. I also became quite popular with my fellow travelers, because I spoke better German than any of the rest of us Americans except the teacher. In Germany, I can pass for German. Everybody thinks I'm from out of town, but everybody thinks I'm German. I was actually able to tell the waitress for you that you're a vegetarian, and convince her you're not crazy. I could even ask a passer-by where you could buy an umbrella, and translate the directions into English for you. I can find McDonalds for you. In Switzerland. At midnight. I was, consequently, the only student allowed to go off on their own. Everybody else had to go around in threes. I therefore asked the cutest guy on the trip to join me in exploring. :) His name was Mike (not the Mike I mentioned earlier) and he was GORGEOUS. Beyond that, the entire trip, he kept dropping big hints (only to me) that he might be gay. I *almost* came out to him in Salzburg. I think the only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that if I was wrong, and if he didn't take it well, I'd be stuck traveling around Europe in close quarters with a bunch of people who would want nothing to do with me. (Or worse, they might send me home early.) Once we got back to America I never managed to corner Mike alone. Oh, one little thing I found very annoying in Europe: everywhere I went I'd see posters advertising a Tina Turner concert in town... the day after I left. It was like Tina was following me around but didn't want me to see her show. Very frustrating. (I'm a big fan.) Andreas Wollenweider was also in several of the places I visited... the day before me. Aargh! In September of 1990, I moved to Boston. Dad drove me there, helped me carry my stuff into my room, and turned around and left without saying goodbye. I was scared out of my wits... for the whole first week, I only left my room to eat and go to the library. (Besides, I had DECORATING to do!) I spent most of my time talking on my ham radio. I made a few on-the-air friends, and met one for lunch. (On campus.) Yet, I was free, and now nothing could stop me from meeting my first real live gay person. Nothing, that is, except for the fact that I had absolutely no idea where to start looking. So, I went to the library. After a great deal of searching for a card catalog, I finally realized it was on microfilm. (I'd never SEEN such a big library.) Gay? Nothing. Bisexual? Nothing. Homosexual? Ah, there it is. I found the appropriate section and snuck in. Fearful of even being seen reading a book about gay people, I took the books, one at a time, to a table, and opened them so that the cover would lay flat against the table, so that nobody could see the title. The books were terrible. They were all out of date. Nothing about modern gay life. They made the gay community seem like a frightening thing, full of men who wanted nothing more than to get in my pants and do frightening things there. These books COULDN'T be right, I thought. I'M nothing like that. So, I thought I'd look for a phone book and look for some kind of gay community center. Did you ever try to find a phone book in a library? Don't. It's a waste of time. I couldn't find one. I guess it's too obvious, nobody would think to put one there. I went home, depressed. Little did I know that the one friend I had made in Boston so far, the guy I had met on the air and then had lunch with, was gay. (Life throws me these little curveballs pretty often.) I had been living alone in the dorm for a week, because I had come to the school early. (Dad was going on vacation for the regular start of classes.) At the end of that week, three people moved into my suite of rooms. My roomie was a guy named Jeff, who I just didn't get along with. (He broke my tape deck and CD player.) In the other room was a guy named Dave (who notably showed up only once a month and would proceed to shower, douse himself with 30 or 40 different perfumes and deodorants and hygine products, put on new clothes and leave) and a guy named Karl. Karl seemed as nervous about it all as I did. While his father and brothers helped him move in, I made smalltalk with his mother about "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Evita." When they all departed, Karl wandered into my room and introduced himself. He wanted to know if I had any idea what we were supposed to do. We got to talking. And talking. After a little while, we went out so I could show him where the nearest bank was. About an hour after we met, he said "You know, I think we're going to be best friends." Within about a week, we were. I don't know if I can fully describe Karl to you. He's two months younger than me. He's brilliant, one of the smartest people I've ever met. (and believe me, I've met some of the smartest.) He's fairly handsome. He, like me, tries to always wear black or red. He doesn't drink, but if you keep him awake past 1am he gets drunk spontaneously anyway. :) He doesn't smoke. He's celibate. (Saving himself for marriage.) He's quiet. He has endearingly awful taste in music. He likes people. He doesn't pick on anyone. He doesn't insult anyone. He's hard pressed to even complain about anyone. He never gets angry unless you interrupt him while he's doing his homework, and even then he'll just tell you to shut up. He's very agreeable. He is, in short, the absolute nicest person I ever met. The only thing I don't like about him is that he's Catholic, and he never really makes much of a problem about that. Karl and I do everything together. Sometimes we just sit around together and enjoy the togetherness. I can tell him anything, and I share everything with him. I trust him completely. I have no doubt that he's straight... but I also have no doubt that he loves me. Or that I love him. We're inseperable, and I think we always will be. I like to say we're like an old married couple... we're always together and we never have sex. :) So anyway, I kept my eyes peeled all through orientation week at school. I finally saw a poster hanging in a hallway, advertising the campus gay group. I was afraid to look at it for fear of being seen. Really! I actually stood there for a good 5 minutes pretenting to look at something else while trying desperately to read it out of the corner of my eye. When I was sure I knew what it said, I walked away. I didn't dare write it down anywhere... that meeting date was burned into my brain in 10 foot tall letters of fire... "Oct.3, 7pm." The day finally rolled around... and Karl wanted me to go see a movie! I lied to him, and told him I couldn't go. After a bit of convincing, I went to the meeting. (I'm a fairly bad liar, I could tell he didn't believe where I said I was going, so I knew I couldn't keep lying about it.) The meeting was... not what I expected. I'm not sure exactly what I expected, but this definitely wasn't it. The meeting was a bunch of very normal looking people, talking quietly about the budget they had been allocated by the school, and what they ought to do with it. A short guy wearing an oversize camouflage raincoat that made him look for all the world like an olive gumdrop talked about ROTC, and I remember thinking he was the ugliest person I had ever met. When the meeting was over, I cornered the group president, and asked him what I should do. He said something to the effect of "I have no idea," and suggested I come to a social event that sunday (brunch, which everyone agreed was awful, followed by Quincy Market, which was crowded but a blast), and attend future meetings. On my way home, my head was spinning. My meeting with him was the first time in my entire life I ever said "I'm gay." I realized on the way home that I was going to have to tell Karl. For one thing, I had ALWAYS invited him to EVERYTHING I did, and it was going to seem awfully strange if every sunday and wednesday I suddenly wanted to go off on my own. For another, he was talking about moving in with me, and I felt that if he was going to be moving in with someone who had every intention of becoming an openly gay man, he had a right to know about it. So, I told him. He was the first straight person I ever told. My heart was pounding. I was short of breath... heck, I was having a minor asthma attack. I could barely speak... but I told him. He looked surprised for a moment, then said "Gee, that's a tough one." I asked him if we could still be friends. To my immense relief, he didn't hesitate to say yes. Oh, Karl, dear Karl, with that one word you changed my life forever! Then I asked him if he still wanted to move in with me. After a little thought, he again said yes. We resolved to irritate my current roomie until he moved out by means of acting just like he did. (We were wildly successful and highly amused, but that's another story.) We then had a pillow fight. (The first of many.) In the end we were lying on the living room floor and laughing so hard I hyperventilated. (Aunt Alice and Uncle Mike are the only other people who can get me to laugh like that. They tell puns so fast and furious you wouldn't believe it.) With one success under my belt, I started trying to tell my other friends. This was slow going, as I had decided to only tell people in person, and my friends were spread across the country. Here in Boston, the next person I told was my friend Erica. "That's GREAT!" she exclaimed. "Now we can look for men together," she said, and asked my opinion of the looks of our waiter and asked if I thought she could seduce a mutual acquaintence of ours. (She did.) In fact, all of my friends here in Boston took it well. (Other than Karl, all of my friends here in Boston were women.) My friends and family all started mentioning that they had noticed that my voice had changed. It was little wonder: Coming out was giving me so much stress relief, that I was undergoing a sudden lack of various health problems I'd been suffering for many, many years. My asthma wasn't bothering me. My allergies weren't bothering me. My monthly, week long, debilitating migranes mostly went away. (Migranes are biological, they stick with you, but that mine have gone down is remarkable.) In fact, I then started having personality changes to reflect my new stress-free self. I completely changed my wardrobe. I changed my hairstyle for the first time in my life. I started listening to rock music. I developed something I'd never imagined I'd have... a good self image. I soon arranged to make it home to NJ to see another close friend, Brian, who was the only person I would let read the Tarot cards for me. (A mutual agreement... our readings for each other were always, oddly, very very accurate. He was also, incidentally, the cousin of the Mike I hung out with in Germany.) He and I had been best friends until I met Karl. I cared a lot about my friendship with him, and I was very unsure how he would react. On one hand, he and I had a very intense relationship, which he had done a lot to build. (This is unusual for me, in most of my friendships until then I had done most of the building.) He had always told me rather openly that he thought I was gay, and he was aware that I didn't deny it with much vigor. His behavior often made me wonder if he was coming on to me, and I felt that if that was what he wanted, his advances would be welcome. On the other hand, his family (other than his mother, an artist) seemed about as redneck as you can get (I actually refused to visit his home if his father would be there) and I thought he might take after them. So, when he jokingly asked me if I was gay, (a common occurrance between he and I) I said yes. He seemed a little surprised, but accepted it. He said he had always thought so. We talked about it a little, and the issue seemed to be put to rest. We spent the rest of the weekend together, and everything seemed very normal. We watched TV, chatted, read Tarot cards, and generally just relaxed, alone in his house for the weekend while the rest of his family was away. Brian indulged in his usual practive of sitting around in his briefs (and nothing else) when he was hot. (It was usually hot in his house.) I felt that this was a good sign that he still felt comfortable enough with me to do that. It was also one of the major things that made me wonder if he was coming on to me, but I didn't say anything about it, having decided that if he wanted me he was going to have to say so. At the end of the weekend, I returned to Boston. A few weeks later, I had my first date. I don't just mean my first date with another man, I mean my first date ever. He was a nice man, and we had a nice date. (Dinner at Pizzaria Uno.) I thought that I might actually manage to have a relationship with him. His name was Jon, and he was a musician. Feeling good about it, I told Karl and Brian. Karl was happy for me. Brian was... distant. A couple of weeks after that I was again in New Jersey. This time I was visiting my Aunt Alice in Princeton, but I wanted to see my friend Brian, so I made the trek half way across the state to do so. (For me, at the time, this was a difficult and expensive proposition.) I knew Brian was going to be home, so I called him. He said he wasn't sure if I should come over, as he had broken his leg and he wouldn't be a very good host. To heck with being a host, I told him. I wasn't there to be entertained, I was there to see my friend. He said he wouldn't be able to pick me up. (I don't drive.) I said I would get there by bicycle. Then, in a moment that I shall unfortunately remember for as long as I live, he said "I didn't really want to put it this way, but I don't want to see you." Shocked, I asked why. He said I had changed.(Duh.) He said he didn't really know me any more, and didn't care to. He asked me not to call him any more. I cried all night. I wasn't ready for that. If he had said the same thing when I had first come out to him, I could have taken it, but he had seemed so accepting. I let my guard down, and he plunged in the knife. I have various theories about why Brian did what he did, and why he did it when he did. One theory, which I think most likely, was that the fact that I was actually dating a man made my gayness enough of a reality to him that he just couldn't handle it any more. Another theory, which I consider possible but less likely, is that Brian is gay too, and he is in denial about the fact, and he had a crush on me, and my coming out made him have to deal with his own gayness, and he therefore dispensed with me so he could stay in denial. Alternately, he could have been mad that I would date someone other than him. Either way, this theory is corobberated by the fact that my father's girlfriend thinks it's correct, and she has EXCELLENT gaydar. (If Brian is straight, it would be the first time her gaydar has been proven wrong, but I'm still not sure. I'd like for that to be the reason, but I have a feeling it isn't.) Lastly, it's also possible that Brian's redneck father found out about me and convinced him that gay people are bad, but I don't think that's what happened. The following evening my father invited me to come to see a musical with him. I agreed. He suggested I bring Brian. Working hard not to burst into another crying fit, I said he had a broken leg and could I instead bring my friend Mike? Dad agreed. (This is, incidentally, not either of the Mikes I mentioned earlier. I know a lot of people named Mike. For that matter, I know a lot of people named Mike with the middle name James. It's kinda weird.) The show turned out to be "La Cage Aux Folles." Better, the production was good and the theater was nice. (It was actually a cabaret.) I actually managed to have a good time. It was a good excuse to come out to my friend Mike, and I saw that my father wasn't homophobic. (He had a very positive reaction to the show.) I decided to tell dad sooner or later. Coming out to Mike turned out to have been a lucky thing to have done, because a week later he called me to tell me that Brian was telling my other friends that I was gay. Oh, no, I was being outed! I paniced... Brian had phone numbers for EVERYONE in my family. I had to tell my father, and I had to tell him immediately, before Brian could do it for me. So, I called dad. I told dad that I had something important to tell him. He said ok, go ahead. I told him I'm gay. "So what?" he asked. "Now, what's this important thing you've got to tell me?" I couldn't have asked for a better reaction. A month or so later, I realized that in my conversations with Dad, "you and Karl" had become "youandKarl". He thought we were lovers. I explained that we weren't. "You're NOT?" he asked. I explained that Karl is straight. "He IS?" Dad asked. I'm flattered that Dad liked Karl enough to think he would make a suitable lover for me, but to this day I still have the occasional feeling that Dad thinks Karl and I are an item. Like when he gave us matching twin beds and made a big point of showing me how they could be connected together. :) Shortly after my problems with Brian, I decided to tell Chris. I told him by phone (it wasn't practical to fly to Florida just to tell him) and he sounded like he was ok about it. Then he calmly told me that his family was going to be changing their phone number at the end of the month, and he would call me when he got the new number. (This had happened several times in the past, and all had gone well, so I didn't worry about it.) He didn't call. I sent letters. I sent postcards. I had mutual friends try to get in touch with him. Nothing. A year later, he called me up. He said he had finally gotten one of my letters. I'm not sure EXACTLY what happened, but one thing he told me is that he had let his mother (a real solid fundamentalist "christian") that I'm gay, and I think that had something to do with it. You see, the reason he never called is that she lost my phone number. Why, you ask, didn't he have it? He's dyslexic, he couldn't read it if he had it in front of him. The same could also be why he never got my prior letters... his mother reads all of his mail to him. It also explains why he never wrote me... he's so ashamed of his writing he never writes ANYTHING other than signing his name. His mother has been distinctly cool toward me since we regained contact. (We used to be quite good friends.) Anyway, Chris and I talked about my being gay a bit. It seems he's lost quite a bit of his religion, so he no longer would object on religious grounds. (This is kind of funny because it changed us from him encouraging me to have faith to the other way around.) He also told me that he's ok with my being gay, but he was fairly disturbed that ALL of his male friends had been coming out to him. I told him that it's no surprise considering his looks. He also told me he's engaged (to a woman), and very intelligently having a long engagement. He asked me to be the best man, so I guess he really IS ok about me being gay. (He still sets off my gaydar, though, so I wonder...) I went home to visit Aunt Alice and Uncle Mike, and took Karl with me (since he wanted to get away for a while). They loved him. He loved them. They bought a Nintendo for him to play with while he was there. I went shopping. We had a great time. Then I came out to Aunt Alice. She expressed some initial concern, but nothing too heavy, and it went well. Some time later (on a different visit) Uncle Mike asked me if I had a girlfriend, and I told him that my boyfriend wouldn't like me to. He told me that didn't answer the question. :) But anyway, by the time Karl and I were ready to go back to Boston, Aunt Alice was telling her daughter to "Say good bye to your cousin Tom and your cousin Karl." He's become an honorary Farrell. Time passed. Jon and I parted, on good terms. I came out to the rest of my friends. None of them had any problem with it. Then, something odd happened. My friends started coming out to me. I remember that some years before, Barbara (Dad's girlfriend, remember?) had said to me, "Tom, all of your friends are gay," and I had laughed at the thought. I was therefore completely unprepared for the reality: It seems that Karl is the only male friend anywhere near my own age that I've ever had who isn't gay or bi and hasn't "experimented." (I'm not counting casual acquaintences.) Most of my male high school friends seem to have been sleeping with each other. It's sort of funny to realize that all those years I spent wishing I had someone gay to talk to, virtually everyone I talked to was gay, and most of them were wishing they could talk to me about it. The flattering part of it all is that none of them ever had the courage to actually come out to anybody but the people they were sleeping with until they had my example to follow. A few have directly told me that I gave them the courage to come out, and I feel justifiably proud of the fact. (I am no longer in touch with some of my earlier friends, but have heard through mutual friends that they have in fact come out too.) Earlier I mentioned that at that first meeting of the gay student organization I attended there was a guy in an oversized camouflage raincoat that I thought was the ugliest guy I had ever met. His name was Frank, and we became friends. We started hanging out together when Karl had something else to do. (Karl didn't like Frank.) He asked me to help him with his wardrobe, so I encouraged vast changes, and he turned out to be a pretty good looking guy once he ditched the raincoat and got a new hairdo. Frank joined me in my habit of walking all over the place, and showed me around parts of the city I hadn't explored yet. I had brought myself to come out as gay, but it was Frank who taught me to exist as an openly gay man. Karl started asking me if I was in love with Frank, and I said no, but after a while I realized I was wrong. Frank didn't return my feelings, but we remained good friends, and I held out hope. He moved to the D.C. area, but I flew down to visit several times. On one visit, I asked him to marry me. He turned me down, saying that he's not ready for that yet. I could accept that, so I just told him that if he ever changed his mind, he'd have to ask me next time, and that I wasn't going to hold my breath and wait for him. Within about a year and a half of my first telling Karl, pretty much everybody who knew me (except my grandparents) knew I'm gay. (Or at least, I assume they did, but now and then I find out that somebody doesn't, and they get a surprise. :) I'm very open about it, and I won't take any garbage about it. If someone doesn't want to deal with it, fine, they can get out of my life. I got a job working for a small (10 people) software company. The job was pretty good and I was happy about it. I took a tiny (wallet size) picture of the man I loved into my office and put it on my computer next to the monitor. (This made me the person in the company with the absolute smallest number of personal things in their office.) I didn't say anything to anyone about it, (I don't think it would be appropriate to rub other people's noses in my personal life on the job,) and nobody asked. Then, weird things started to happen. I'd leave my office to go to the kitchen, and when I came back the picture would be sitting on the other side of the monitor. Or it would be face down. Or it would be turned around backward. I don't know who was doing it, but I found it very disturbing, so I took the picture home. My boss (the owner of the company) suggested to me that I could have all of my email forwarded from my regular UNIX accounts to the office. He told me that company policy was that I could receive whatever personal email I wanted as long as I read it on my own time or print it out and take it home. Since this seemed like a nice idea, I forwarded my mail to the office. A couple of months later the email system broke down, and the boss and I were working on it together. When we got it to work, it went and downloaded all of our incoming email from MCIMail at once. What I wasn't expecting was that when it did so it would run all of the incoming message headers up on the screen... and I had a number of incoming issues of gaynet. The computer outed me. Well, my boss didn't say anything, so I figured he must just not care. I was wrong. A few days later he informed me that I was to cancel the forwarding from my regular accounts or stop receiving "that gay stuff." He told me that what I was receiving was "unacceptable," and that if any of our clients were to find out I'm gay I would be fired. Since Massachusetts has the gay rights law, I called Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders and spoke to a lawyer. She told me that I could make a case with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, and that I would probably win, but that I would probably get fired in the meantime, that I would probably spend a lot of time working to make it happen, and that I would probably not get much in a monetary settlement. Since I needed the job I decided not to press the matter. This made me very depressed, and after that I found the job very stressful. Then it happened. My first Pride. I knew there would be a lot of people, but oh, my God, I had never imagined! The most gay people I had ever seen in one place before in my life was the Boston Gay Men's Chorus, and that only a week before. To suddenly be immersed in the midst of 100,000 stunning, gorgeous, outrageous, FABULOUS gay people was... oh, I won't even try to describe how good I felt. It was what I had waited all my life for. At the end of the day, on my way home, I saw a man and a woman walking down the street holding hands, and I thought to myself "gee, that's WEIRD! What are they doing THAT for?" and suddenly I realized that Pride had really gotten into me. And now a word from our sponsor. My friends, each and every year, go to your nearest Pride celebration. The very act of your being there can do immeasurable help to those young people like I was who go to pride feeling alone in the world. The more people at Pride, the more that young person will learn that Pride is more than just a word, it's a state of being... and a state of being they can achieve. We now return to your regularly scheduled program. The only people left to come out to were my grandparents. I'd been putting that off because I was SURE they would not take it at all well. The problem was that I no longer had anything to talk to them about. I'd call them to say hello and they'd ask what I'd been doing, and I'd think about what I did the last week. Hmm... I had gone to a gay student support group and gone on a social outing with some gay friends and had dinner with a gay friend and had a date with a man... and I couldn't tell them about any of it. I tried to get up the guts to tell them, and I couldn't, so I wrote them a letter. Then I went out and bought them a copy of "Loving Someone Gay" (which I highly recommend) and highlighted the good bits in green so they'd know what I wanted them to see and highlighted the bits I didn't agree with in red so they'd know what I didn't find applicable to my life. I put it all together and mailed it to my grandmother, who I think may be the more intelligtent of the two. (She had won many academic awards in her youth and graduated second in her high school class.) They didn't take it well. I called them a week after I sent the package. Grandpa just said he was sure that any day now I'll "meet a nice girl and forget all about this gay thing." Grandma kept talking about the bible and saying she hoped I'd realize the wrong of my ways. A week later I went to visit them. Now, something you should know about my grandma is that she's spent her life on the eternal search for the perfect handbag. So, when I came to visit, I wore a t-shirt that says "Wanted: the perfect man or the perfect handbag." I thought she'd be amused (Barbara is on the same quest and almost fell off the sofa laughing) but I'm not sure she appreciated the joke. Anyway, I thought it would give them an opening to talk about it if they wanted to, but neither of my grandparents said a word about my being gay the whole time, and haven't said anything about it since. The last one of my friends to come out to me was Mike. (The one that went to La Cage Aux Folles with me, not the first two.) He was visiting Boston, and for some reason (I forget why) I cracked a joke about "well, maybe you're gay." He got kind of serious and said "maybe I am." We talked about it a bit, and it seems that he's bi, and has never been able to admit it before. I must tell you, I was absolutely flabberghasted. Mike is the least sexual person I know... he's 20 years old, and he looks about 12. (Yes, I'm sure he's 20, I've known him since he was 5.) Mike still lives in my hometown, so he hasn't come out to anybody else yet. He does have access to a machine with Internet email and Usenet though, and I think he may be a motss muffin. (Hi, Mike!) Karl and I remain best friends. After three years, we're as close now as we've ever been, and I don't expect that will ever change. Chris and I are still talking, and he's considering coming up for a visit. Mike will be making his fourth visit to Boston soon, his first since coming out to me. Aunt Alice has asked for information about being gay, which I was happy to furnish. After making dramatic changes to my style of clothing, my hairstyle, my lifestyle, and my waistline, I've finally got a good self image. My mother doesn't know where I live or what I look like. In September of 1992, I moved to a new apartment, and Karl didn't move with me, he moved home to save on rent. I agreed with his reasons, but it left me feeling very alone. He's a very busy person, so I don't get to see much of him any more. He tries to visit me on the weekend every few weeks, but when he's in school (about half the time) I only get to see him every month or two, and then often only for an hour or two. On Christmas Eve, 1992, I was let go from my job. This marked the beginning of six months of unemployment. I also didn't get any financial aid, and had to drop out of college. It made me fairly depressed, compounded by the fact that I was now living alone. On April 25, 1993, Frank married someone else at the group marriage in front of the IRS. This upset me. It further upset me that I'd spoken to him only a week before, and we had been talking about moving in together. He hadn't said a word about planning to get married. On July 23, 1993, I got an email from Karl, telling me to call my father, and saying it was important. (I don't have a phone, so Dad had called him.) I knew it must be extremely urgent, because Dad NEVER called my friends. I called his house, I got Barbara. She told me my Uncle Bill had been murdered the previous morning, and that my mother had been arrested. She was later released, for lack of sufficient evidence, but when the autopsy was completed the next day she was re-arrested. She used her one phone call from jail to call my Aunt Alice to ask for my address. (Aunt Alice didn't give it to her.) That fact... didn't exactly reassure me. I have since spoken to my Aunt Maureen, who is my mother's sister and who was my Uncle Bill's wife. She tells me my mother had been there the night before, and that things had been relatively normal that morning. However, Uncle Bill didn't show up at work, so she went home to look into it, and found him lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood with a hole in the back of his head. My mother had aparently bought a new gun the month before. The police haven't found the gun yet.