Journal 001: Coming out to Myself

I would never say that I had a closeted childhood. I would actually say that mine was a lot more open than other boys that I knew at the time. One of the questions that I get asked a lot is “When did you realize that you were gay?” I came out to myself as gay when I was 12 years old. I hear all the time that that is to young of an age to to become self aware on that level, but trust me, I knew.It started in the second semester of 7th grade in 1983. I grew up in a city that had a population of about 12,000 people that was about 30 miles from Minneapolis, MN. So it was a decent sized small town with the big city right next door. I had one of those gym classes where the boys were expected to strip naked to change from the class clothing to the gym clothes, complete with jock strap, and then take a shower (naked of course) at the end of the class before putting the class clothes back on again. At first I wasnt nervous about being naked around the other boys in class because I was gay (I hadn't fully come to that realizaton yet), but because I was a late bloomer of the sort. I had absolutely no hair in the pits yet, even less between the legs, and my voice hadn't cracked yet. Most of the boys that I called my friends at the time were starting to get the hairy pits, starting with the hairy legs, and voices were beginning to drop. I was more embarrassed about having the smallest tool in class than about being gay.The embarrassment of being a late bloomer didn't last very long when at the first day of class I realized that I wasn't the only one at that stage of development yet. What replaced the embarrassment was the astonishment of how good looking the other boys in the class were. Yea, it sounds a little weird, but remember we were all 12 and 13 at the time. I found myself just staring at the other boys nakedness. Some boys were as smooth as I was, some boys, especially one that I found extremely good looking, had a full bush of hair. Some boys were circumcised like I was, and a lot of other boys weren't. Most had limp dicks walking to and from the showers, while some others were boned up yet seeming not to care about it at all.Some days I don't know how I got dressed at all because I was so focused on looking at the other boys that I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing. The boy that I found very good looking, Mark, caught me on more that one occasion looking at his dick, and smooth, perfectly round butt, that I would years later would later find out is called a bubble-butt. He would see me staring at him and do something to get my attention and say “What are you looking at?” Him and I knew perfectly well what the answer to the question was, but it would snap me back awake, and I'd get dressed and head off to my next class. I wasn't the only one that got caught looking for time to time, but nobody ever got teased or bullied, or worse, for showing interest in another boys junk.At the time I knew what the word “gay” was, and I knew what it meant. I don't remember exactly how I knew but with other boys saying things like “that's gay”, or “he's a fag”, I put two and two together and realized that gay meant you liked other guys. And with the way that “gay” was put into context, being gay was a bad thing. But to me, being gay was just being me. I never remember trying to hide the fact that I was gay, but I wasn't going to advertize it either. Years later though, in the upper grades of high school, while most other boys had pictures of girls, and the big rock hair bands of the day, I had pictures of cute boys from the movies and TV shows that I watched along with pictures of the very first boy band, New Kids on the Block. Some friends I'm sure thought it was odd, but not enough to make a big deal out of it.So for the rest of the semester I spent about every moment I could looking over every inch of every other boy in my gym class. After a few weeks I was able to go to the shower, spend a few minutes there, and go back to my locker without boning up. I would still get caught every so often looking at Mark, or one of the other boys, and sometimes hear another boy looking at another a bit to long. It was probably about half way through the class, 4th quarter, that another boy, Brian, started taking up residence a few lockers away from me. We didn't have assigned lockers and could move when ever we wanted, and I think everyone did at least once or twice. I really didn't want him to camp out so close because he was one of the guys who were at the top of my “Hot to Look at List”. Mark being #1, Brian #2, and boy named Kurt at #3. Brian was my age as our birthdays were just a few weeks apart, he was an inch or two taller, had nothing under the arms, and about half as much as Mark between the legs, had a cut dick, and soft his was probably twice as big as mine. I had no idea how I was not going to bone up every day in class with him being so close. At least Mark's locker had been at the far end of row, and the closest anyone else had been to be me was about six or seven lockers away, and now Brian was an extremely close three.Brian had been next to me for about a week when he became the first person to ever come out to me by saying “at least I'm not the only one who likes looking.” There are only a handful of thing that people have said to me over the years that I can remember clear as day, like they happened just earlier this morning, and that is one of them. I was pulling up my underwear looking at Mark who had been standing with his back to us so we were getting an absolutely perfect view of his butt. Brian was sitting down on the bench, naked, putting his socks on. I always thought it was weird that he put his socks on first. I was so astonished by what he said that I had no idea what to say in reply so I said the first thing that came out of my mouth, “yea.” So after Brian basically came out to me, within 30 seconds, and without thinking, I had come out to him. We both knew now that each other liked to look at other naked guys.Then he asked if I wanted to come over to his house to hang out after school. So really in a matter of three months, maybe four, I went from not thinking of myself as gay because I'd never seen any other naked boys before, to admitting to myself that, yea, I did like boys and didn't have an interest in the world in girls, and had all but admitted to such to another boy my age, and he had revealed the same to me. Having someone know what I was feeling was a load off of my shoulders. I'll probably do another journal about how we became friends and what all we did together later, but I think this is a good place to stop this one.I may have accepted to myself that I was gay long before admitting so to Brian, but with that revelation, I think is when I gained total acceptance of my being gay. By knowing that there was someone else out there, like me.