When you miss someone who lives in a different state, someone whose phone has a foreign area code and whose city’s weather you check every morning when you wake up, someone you’re learning to love but you can’t say love yet so you say, “really, really like,” and, “think the world of,” and, “more than I’ve ever liked someone before,” someone who stumbled into your life by surprise, the missing can be particularly pernicious. It pries open your fingernails and crawls underneath, swimming just below your skin and settling like cement in your heart.
1. Make sure the sexiest of your three part-time jobs is the one that’s visible on your Facebook.
Unless you studied something relatively marketable (read: Engineering, Accounting), chances are high that you — like I — are juggling multiple jobs to pay for rent/car insurance/food/something-to-do-besides-sitting-on-your-couch-and-watching-hulu. Since Facebook only makes one employer visible, you’ll put up the one that impresses people most — even if you only do it for five hours a week. A similar section could be titled, “List yourself as a graduate student as soon you get accepted, even if it’s seven months before classes start.”
Kirk Cameron recently stated that homosexuality is “unnatural… detrimental, and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization.”
This last year, I’ve learned something incredibly important: that my friend was wrong, profoundly, painfully, perfectly wrong: we can experience intimacy. Real, challenging, transformative intimacy — the kind that fights, and cries, and wrestles, and laughs. The kind that sits on porches, waits, and sends you, speechless, into the morning light. I’m still searching for the parts of my life that tear at the moral and social fabric of this country.
“I’m sorry,” I wailed. “I’m so sorry.”
“Shhhh,” he assured.
“I love you, Todd,
“I am proud of you,
“You are clean,
“You are whole,
“We’re going to get through this,
“I love you, Todd.”
I was afraid, depressed, and alone. I picked up my phone and dialed. “Hey, son.” “Dad,” the tears immediately rushed down my cheeks; my voice was nearly inaudible. “Dad, I’m back.” “Back where?” “I’m depressed, dad. The darkness is back and I’m scared.”
Growing up, I never saw healthy portraits of my sexuality, never caught glimpses of what life could be: not in movies, not at church, not with friends. Whenever homosexuality was mentioned, it was usually hushed or laughed or worse — ignored.
I’ve known something was different about me ever since I wanted to kiss Mr. Peterson in 8th grade. The son of two pastors in the Church of the Nazarene — a small, evangelical Christian denomination — I never thought I’d tell anyone about my little, rainbow-patterned secret: that I’d bury my head in my locker when the guys would change after P.E., that I left the television on every night because I had to silence the voices in my head that told me I was disgusting, that sometimes I’d get so scared of being caught I’d throw up. I was hopelessly haunted by the biblical passages I’d read — the ones that allegedly said people like me couldn’t be Christian — afraid that if my hunch was right about the kind of sex I wanted to have, I’d lose everything. It wasn’t until my last year of college that I finally reconciled my sexuality and my Christian identity.
