So to get away from the pressure of the Christians and at the same time remove myself from “temptation” I transferred to a tiny Bible college in Pennsylvania. And yes it was surrounded by cows. I went from a school of over 20000 to a school of around 1200. It was a big change but I think it was the best decision I could have made at the time. A friend of mine from my youth group days was also going there. So I at least know someone else there. And the people were very accepting. I was still not out of the closet, but I was learning to be myself more and more. The professors were much more liberal then I think the students. They didn’t want you to believe something just because your parents did, they wanted you to discover it for yourself. I met some good people who I hung out with, whom I felt comfortable being myself around. There wasn’t that pressure to be the perfect Christian around them.
Many nights I would stay in the computer lab working on papers and such and one night I stumbled upon someone’s stash of gay porn on one of the computer lab computers. It was hidden pretty well and this was in the early days of the Internet so to get pictures you had to get them from a newsgroup in a text format then use some program to decode them and view the images. Not as simple as it is these days. I copied the files and figured out how to decode them. Then viewed them in the graphics lab. I had never seen pictures of guys having sex. I remember in one picture a hairy guy was fucking another guy on a towel outside on a beach. The most I had ever done with a guy was a blowjob, (although one friend did come close to it when he dry humped my ass crack). The pictures also meant something else; they meant that there were other people like me out there. That even other Christians were gay.
I began to accept my identity more and more. I finally accepted that I was gay. The first person I told was a friend of mine, Mark. I was so scared to say the word. But it wasn’t as bad as I thought he was actually very cool about it. He said he used to think that he might be gay too, but he was dating this other friend of mine at the time (a girl).
I was going to tell my roommate but before I could tell him he said something about how disturbed he was by his previous roommates, how he had found KY in the fridge and how they had been so blatant about having sex with one another and he could not take it if I told him I was gay. So I let the mater drop. But I think I had found whom the porn belonged too.
I stayed at school one summer to work and became good friends with Dave, I eventually told him I was gay, he was totally cool with it. I still considered myself to be a Christian but I learned that maybe I could be gay and a Christian too. In one of my classes we learned around the civil rights movements and there was even a part about the gay rights movement and stonewall. I did my senior paper was on homosexuals and the holocaust.
I returned to my old school one time to visit my old friends and I told them I was gay. It was like I had some kind of disease. Most of them did not talk to me after they found out. I think it was then that I started to question being a Christian.
So where does a good "Christian" boy who once vilified "new age" as the work of Satan go to work after college?
As a missionary?
A health food store and a "new age" newspaper?
Find out in the next installment!
If you are wondering what school I went to, here is a link to site set up for gay alumni and students.
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