This is the sixth in a series of excerpts I am doing from my book “Born Again.” It’s from the third chapter, which is called Abomination. If you’ve not yet read the previous installments, you can find them here: First | Second | Third | Fourth | Fifth
In 1988, after seven years at the small Baptist school (my class had just nine students), I was tired of all its stern discipline and insane rules. So I decided to get out of my bubble and transfer to the local public school for my final two years of high school. Unfortunately, it did not go well.
By the second day of school, my safe and sheltered world had begun to crack apart. A group of my classmates, who happened to all be on the football team, immediately pegged me as gay, and they went to great lengths to let me know how they felt about that. Mind you, this is literally years before I even really understood that I was gay, and I did nothing to these guys to provoke their actions. But I spent the next two years being terrorized by them. They would snicker and snort at me in class. They would whistle at me in the hallways. They would tail me out to my car, exaggeratedly prancing behind me, calling me sweetheart and Tinker Bell, fairy and faggot, honey and sissy and freak.
It really got to me. It threw me into severe depression. I felt isolated and alone, confused and hurt. And I was terribly worried that I was being a bad witness for Christ by somehow having done something that made them think that I was gay. (I was also terribly worried that my friends who didn’t go to my school would somehow hear the news and confront me about it.) I grew to hate school so much that I had to steel myself to get through each day. By the time each Sunday afternoon rolled around, I would be sick to my stomach, absolutely dreading the thought of another week. In my Algebra II class, the atmosphere was so intolerable that I barely managed to pass, even with the help of after-school tutoring. (For years, I interpreted that to mean that I was “bad at algebra,” until I took College Algebra years later and easily got an A. Turns out the problem wasn’t my mathematical abilities.)
I still occasionally think of those football players. They obviously saw something in me that I couldn’t recognize or acknowledge in myself. I clearly remember some of their names and faces: Dana. Paul. Bo. Jim. Bernie.
We were all so young. I wonder if any of them ever think of me, ever feel remorse, ever wish they could take back the words and undo the damage done. (I also just now wondered something I don’t think I’d ever thought about before: whether any of them were gay.)
Letter to a friend
October 12, 1999
I can’t tell you how terrifying it can be to sit in high school and hear the football players snickering at you during Algebra class. I can’t explain how the dread of going to school each day virtually paralyzed me every morning. Or what it was like to try to make it out to my car each day before the jocks managed to follow me and whistle at me and mockingly call me “honey” and “sweetheart.” Or what it was like to feel the intense guilt about being a “bad Christian witness” to my classmates because some of them thought I was gay. Or what it was like to lay awake night after night as a boy, praying and pleading with God not to send me to hell, even though I was a rotten, awful, abomination of a person.
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I was 21 years old before I had my first kiss. By then I’d moved to Nashville, where I was studying at a big state university. Within the first week or two on campus, I struck up a conversation after class one afternoon with a guy sitting near me. We proceeded to talk all night. Literally.
His name was John, though he went by his middle name. He was from Alabama, and he smoked, which I of course thought was sinful, but also just a tad exotic. Anyway, that first night we stayed up talking, we both sort of danced around the gay topic, but the second night, we eventually admitted that we were attracted to each other, and we kissed. I don’t remember anything specific about the kiss— other than that it was the most incredible thing I’d ever felt, and I instantly understood so much about myself that I’d somehow either never known, or had completely denied.
I was gay.
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Note: Last fall, when I was still unsure of whether I would ever make Born Again available outside of its original school context, I did an early excerpt in a piece about my coming out of the closet (five times!) and eventually getting married. You can read it here.
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You can read the next excerpt here.
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