The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

In most of my childhood, I felt extreme loneliness, even when with those who loved me. It is possible when you are desperate to believe two opposed ideas when the outcome gives pleasure beyond all that you had ever known. Any justification makes sense if the result is pleasure.

In the body of the average twelve year old boy lays a bottomless pit of unquenched desire for pleasure denied. When my younger cousin, also twelve, came to me with the desire to service my pleasure it began a very discreet four year affair. As we lived in neighboring towns it could only be fulfilled on weekends but, as our parents were godparents to us both, we saw one another every weekend. He knows that he initiated the affair, just as he later ended it in favor of the woman who would become his first wife. Yet, as we could love, we were puppy dog in love with one another.

"Was this a phase?" I asked myself when it ended in 1969.

And there the most precious part of my life ended- and tears were shed by me alone. Life became a pursuit of getting out and going to college. It was there after one year I "came out" in 1972 in a political manner. This meant that, sexually, I was poison to my fellow classmates and would remain so for as long as I was a political Gay man in Lafayette, Indiana. It was only off campus that I dared have social friends.

If I had not had the gift of being Gay I would have mindlessly followed my family into the pit of union factory work. I have no regrets for wanting out to become myself.