Warning, this is a long one:
So today in Gmail I received a message from Daily Kos Community with the message: Ben, June is LGBT Pride Month—where we celebrate all that we have accomplished as a movement, and how much more we still have to go. Are you openly gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender? Did you come out to your family? Log in or sign up for a Daily Kos account, and write a blog post about it.
So I thought about it, and I decided that I wanted to share my story. Mostly because of the fact that as gay men and women, we even have to “come out” in the first place. Straight kids don’t even have to think twice about this. They can tell their friends, their parents, and even those they’re crushing on. Even with the recent wins in the Supreme Court, young gay people must struggle with the pain of coming out, of admitting that they’re not like their friends, and risk losing their homes, their families, and their friends.
So without further ado, here’s my story:
The year was 1999, and we were rapidly careening toward the end of the century, the end of the millennium, and the end of the world as we awaited the destructive Y2K bug which would destroy our civilization.
While working for Microsoft, testing Website technologies, I was living in a house with two Born-Agains. Gene owned the house, and Larry and I were tenants. I was also attending, and volunteering at a very large church in the greater Seattle area, writing comedy sketches, directing the plays, and singing backup vocals for worship services.
Wow, I must have it all together—only at the same time I was attending one of many of the ex-gay organizations I had spent over twenty years participating in. I was convinced God would set me free if I just wanted it bad enough.
Yet despite all my “success,” as the outside saw it, I was still attracted to men and that attraction was getting stronger, not weakening. The only way to describe these intense feelings would be to say “starve yourself for a week or two, and then go stand in front of the buffet table at your favorite restaurant.” That was the power of these emotions, and it was getting harder and harder to suppress them.
One day during I decided to research gay bars in the Seattle area. At the time of my search only a couple of them were online, so I visited them just to see what they were like. At one bar I met a guy who introduced me to the bathhouses downtown Seattle. At the bathhouse, I could have sex with anyone who wanted to. It was easy.
This was my first time with a man and it was amazing. During the entire time I was in ecstasy. I ran my hands up and down their bodies, I experienced the physical connection and I felt free. I left the bathhouse and went home, feeling free for the first time in my life. However, that freedom soon changed to guilt.
I continued writing sketches for my church and sometimes performing in them, though I felt like a hypocrite. For the next few months I stayed “straight” and avoided downtown Seattle at all cost. But I couldn’t shake the memory of the men. So one Friday night I went to a bar to hang out. There was something freeing about watching men show affection toward one another, and publicly.
Before long, I signed up for an internet dating service, and through that I joined one of the gay baseball leagues. It was like having a new family. It was even deeper than anything I had felt among my Christian family.
The new millennium was now upon us and while everyone around me worried about the Y2K bug, I worried about where my life was going to go from here. Now that I was experimenting, would I stick with the ex-gay movement, or would I just give up. I was truly on the verge of a major decision that I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to make.
One Friday night I went out to my favorite bar and had a little too much to drink. I didn’t really want to drive home in that condition so I decided to spend a few hours at the bathhouse. Of course when I tell my friends that this was why I was at the bathhouse, they all look at me and nod in a sort of “if that’s what you want us to believe, that’s what we’ll pretend we believe” sort of way. The bathhouse was attractive to me because I had just come out and I didn’t know anyone. This was a way to experience that connection or experience I had been longing for most of my life.
The next night, Saturday night, my sister, who was a flight attendant living in Boston, came into town. So I went to visit her along with several of our mutual friends from church. We separated when the restaurant closed. Sunday, I got up early because I had a game. Sunday afternoon I met somebody who wanted to take me home with him—where I ended up spending the night. Monday, I went home before work to take a shower and change my clothes.
When I arrived at home I found a note on my pillow from my roommate which read, “Ben, the police were here asking some serious questions… What’s going on Ben?” Attached to the note was a card from a police officer and below that was his title and division: “Detective: Homicide.” So I picked up the phone and called the number.
The first thing the detective said to me was that he wanted to know what was going on at the bathhouse over the weekend, and why I didn’t stick around when my partner went into convulsions. I was confused since I never saw anyone go into convulsions.
“You’re not in any trouble,” the officer reiterated, “I just want to know what happened.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told the detective.
“Look, the guy died and we want to know why.”
“If someone had died next to me then I think I would have remembered it.”
“We have proof that you were there.”
“I’m not denying I was there, but nobody died when I was there; at least not that I was aware of.”
“You’re not in any trouble, we just need the truth.”
“And I’m telling you the truth.”
We argued like this for over a half-hour. Finally, he said, “Look, we have it on video surveillance tape.”
So I said, “I’m going to take a shower and get dressed, and then I’m coming down to the station and we can look at this tape,” and then asked for his address.
He backed down at that point and eventually I was able to ascertain that the guy they were talking about died on Saturday night, the night I was with my sister and our friends, not on Friday night, the night I was actually at the bathhouse. But the damage was done. The police had visited my Born-Again roommates, and I was officially “outed.” That massive decision I was on the brink of making had just been made for me.
My roommate told me that he was quite surprised and that he didn’t know what to do. But he didn’t want me living with them anymore. On top of that, I had to leave my church. Thanks to my roommate, word was trickling out about my situation and they weren’t about to let me continue writing or performing for them. Ultimately, though, I couldn’t handle all the whispering.
By now we had reached mother’s day, 2000, which meant I had to take my mother to dinner and tell her why I was coming out after all this time, even though coming out was never my plan. Thanks to the police.
We went to my mom’s favorite restaurant and talked briefly about what had just happened. Then she told me that she wanted to talk about it in a more private place so that she could cry. That was the last thing I needed to hear. I told her that if she needed to cry, then I couldn’t talk. It was simply too much for me.
She had brought her little New Testament and wanted to read to me a couple of scriptures.
“Do you think I haven’t researched this?” I asked her.
Her response was, “Humor me.”
So I listened to her read her scriptures, one out of Romans, and the other out of Corinthians. She got to Corinthians, where Paul said, “Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders…” I pointed out another part of the scripture further down which she hadn’t noticed, “And that is what some of you were.”
After reading that, she couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t keep trying.
I was through trying. Fifteen years was enough and now that my proclivities had been “proclaimed upon the rooftops,” I may as well take advantage of the newfound freedom that had been foisted upon me.
The next few weeks were tumultuous. The next few weeks were spent moving, job hunting, moving, resettling and job hunting some more, wondering if anyone from my church was going to at least call me and see how I was.
In the midst of all this I called my best friend Corey and asked if we could get together for lunch. Corey is one of those friends that I have cherished for a very long time. He was one of the first people I met when I started attending Eastside, and we became close friends as soon as we met. The first thing that Corey said to me was that although he didn’t understand, he knew me, and he knew that I had given this decision a lot of thought. It was a quiet, off-the-cuff statement, but it meant more to me than anything anyone else had said. He was the first person to actually say that he knew me and he trusted me.
What happened was me saying to me, “It’s time for you to go out and live the life you were meant to live, and be the person you are.” The event with the cops was just a little shove in that direction. Why it had to be so dramatic, I don’t know. One of us, me or God—or maybe both of us—is a drama queen, that’s the only reason I can think of.