More On My Life: Sexuality

Page 24.
     So the third ridiculous casserole that I brought to the dinner party is homosexuality. I had my first gay crush while in the first grade. Though, of course, I couldn't have identified it as such at the time. But certainly, once I hit puberty, I knew what I wanted, and it wasn't girls.
     I was never one of those guys who thought he was straight until age 25. Then he woke up one day and viola! there it was: a preference for men. Nor was I one of those guys who needed to pretend he was straight to make his parents happy, until he couldn't take it anymore. Nope. I was gay as hell right from the start. And everybody knew it. I acted "gay" and you know what I mean: I seemed effeminate, had a gay voice and was poor at sports. There was just no mistaking it and all my family, friends, classmates and anybody whom I came in contact with knew it. As I joke nowadays, Helen Keller would have known that I was gay. It was no joke back then though.
     But it still took a back seat to the Tourette's where the teasing from my classmates was concerned. Well... depending upon the day. See, because of my Tourette's I was really in my own category for "freak". There are average outcasts in every school: fags, nerds, spazes and so forth. But my Tourette's was just so outside the realm of experience for my classmates and teachers, I was in my own universe. And put all this in an extremely shy person who only ever wanted to blend into the woodwork. It was a bad dream. But it was real.