My way out

I have spent my entire life looking for the way out of pain.

However, no matter what form it took—fear, depression, bitterness, anxiety, jealousy, loneliness, addiction, anger, judgment, self-criticism, you name it—and no matter how much it hurt, for most of my life I didn’t think of it as pain. Rather I qualified these feelings as symptoms of my imperfection. In other words, I thought the pain was me.

As an adolescent growing up in the suburbs of Birmingham, Ala., in the ’70s and ’80s, I was in a lot of pain. But by the time I was 16, I was sick enough of being listless and depressed to do something about it. I decided that I wanted to be happy. And I was certain that the way to do this was to correct my imperfections.

The most serious of these imperfections was my homosexuality—it was my fatal flaw, my original sin that I had not chosen to commit. Though by my midteens I had accepted that this condition was never going to change, I could not really accept that I was gay. To me that would have meant accepting that I was a lonely, pitiful and defective human being, that I was not loved by God, that I was less than straight men, that the only others like me were shadowy discards from society. Doing that would have meant accepting that I was never going to be happy, so that was out of the question.

My sexual attraction to men, however, was by no means the only imperfection I needed to cloak. Compared to the fabulous Pretty in Pink teens I grew up with, I was absolutely riddled with imperfections—I wasn’t beautiful; I wasn’t rich; I wasn’t masculine; I wasn’t confident; I wasn’t athletic. As I became hyperaware of these inadequacies, too, I slowly became both ashamed and embarrassed to be me.

To remedy this I became devoted to getting gorgeous and becoming popular—in other words, to getting “perfect.” And college became the set where I was able to successfully act the role of a privileged pretty boy. Playing this role felt like the very first shot of morphine after a lifetime of debilitating pain, and I often felt high. But whenever the morphine wore off, I would find myself hurtling back into the void, and it was as if I had never left.

Meanwhile, my sexuality was literally in the closet—that’s where I kept my gay porn, on a high shelf in a small closet blocked off by a large chair. I even did such a number on myself that, whenever I saw a guy I thought was gay, I would find myself thinking, “Ugh, how horrible that would be.” Then I would momentarily move into a kind of twilight zone of awareness of the fact that I was this person I pitied. I was in a state of shock over my own being.

Then in 1993 I made a monumental shift in how I experienced my life when I rebelled against the depression that still tormented me and looked inside myself for the first time for its source in the form of my own thoughts. Not only did learning how to fight my thoughts mark the beginning of the end of depression for me, it awoke a nascent awareness of my power to change the reality of my life by looking inward rather than outward. As a result, the way I lived my life began to change.

First I ditched my plans to go to law school and decided instead to follow my lifelong dream to become a writer. Even more significant, for the first time in my life I began to question my belief that I couldn’t come out of the closet and be happy. There were few images of gay people in the media then, so it was still a very lonely time to be gay. And I couldn’t even say the word “gay” out loud, so I was at a total loss as to how to go about coming out.

Then opportunity struck. One night I read in Details magazine that they were starting a new section that readers could submit stories for. And I had a revelation: I would write an essay about life inside the closet and thereby come out in the process. As much as going through with it scared me, and as much as it seemed an impossible long shot that it would be selected, I became aware of a silent, certain knowledge about what to do next: write that essay. And so I did.

Despite my sense of certainty, I was shocked when I got a call from an editor in New York saying they loved the piece and wanted to run it with a picture. At the time I was getting ready to move from Mississippi, where I’d gone to college, to Boston for my first magazine internship. Added to the mix of my new life “up North” and working in publishing would be the fact that I would be Out. Me. Out of the closet. Gay and for everyone else to see. I couldn’t even imagine it.