twenty-something

● ● ●

With the end of my junior year and the beginning of summer, I decide to make some changes in my life. The first and most profound change is to get involved.

I am fed up with the environment around me, fed up with my inaction and the closet I was stuck in. In frustration, I get in contact with Outright Vermont, an organization for gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth in the state. But the group is based in Burlington, nearly two hours away from me. There are simply no resources for those of us in my hometown or part of the state. And that sucks.

I don't intend to come out. I don't intend to be an activist. All I want to do is hang out with other gay kids.

So I decide to start something.

From Outright, I am put in contact with a young man named "Nate." At 25, Nate is not only interested in starting a youth group in Rutland, but also in starting a publication for the gay community in Rutland. Quite by accident, I wind up taking a "job" as junior publisher and editor of the now-defunct gay newsletter, Out & About.

Nate is an interesting character. He's small, weak, effeminate -- but his presence is huge. He's a fireball, a bitch, an activist. He talks a mile a minute, and he's damn inspiring.

I sneak out of my house and meet with the small staff of Out & About -- mostly older folks, people I've never met or seen, one of them the father of one of my (cute, straight) classmates -- and, for the first time, find myself surrounded by other gay people. A room full of them. "Family," they say -- and, man, it feels like that. I'm on a high for the days that follow, finally affirmed.

The newsletter is top priority, so the youth group takes a backseat. I write several articles for the publication and lay the whole thing out with Microsoft Publisher at home. It comes along nicely.

Soon, a boy named Matt, near my age, joins the group. He's a kid from another town, maybe an hour away, and he's mostly interested in the youth group, but still hangs around. Mostly with Nate. He doesn't contribute much, but he's a cool guy. And then all hell breaks loose.

Nate and Matt had entered into a secret relationship. And it had gone sour. I don't know exactly what happened, but the next thing I knew, Nate was on the phone with the Outright folks, and he was denying the relationship with Matt. He's lying, and everybody knows it. Outright refuses, and rightfully so, to support a group if it allies itself with a 25-year-old who sleeps with high schoolers.

Suddenly, the bitchiness that had inspired me was destroying what I had worked for. I saw Nate for who he really was -- a selfish trouble-making liar.

Out & About saw one issue published. But due to Nate's stubbornness and inability to pay for it (I think he pocketed the ad revenue), it never left the printer. All our hard work that summer was for nothing. The newsletter fizzled and the group disbanded.

I'm on my own again, and I have to start from scratch.

● ● ●That summer, I turn seventeen. And at seventeen, the world seems full of possibilities, particularly in the cute guy department.

I am meeting guys -- here and there, through Outright and chatting online. But I'm not dating. I don't want to hook up either. So I just look, wide-eyed. It's fun checking out boys and chatting them up -- but that's really as far as I take things at that point.

Sometime that summer, I begin chatting with a guy named "Parker." He's my age and grade, and he lives about two hours away in northern Vermont. Parker is a soccer-playing activist who's out at school and making change in his very rural town. I'm inspired and cyber-smitten, but the boy is far away and there's just no way to be together.

In August, the summer heat finally gets to me. I chat with a boy named "Ben," who is Class President at a neighboring high school. He works just down the road from my house, and I agree to meet him on his lunch break. In his car in the back parking lot of the Norman Rockwell Museum, he tells me I'm hot and kisses me. We make out for a bit and eventually I have to walk up the hill to my house with a boner.

After work, he picks me up and we go for a drive. He tells me how cool I am and how much fun we're going to have. I am just along for the ride. We end up in the woods, naked, straddling a fallen tree. We make out and get off. He brings me home in silence, all his promises for our fun times together gone. I never see him again.

As August presses on, I have a few more sexual experiences in the woods. I begin hooking up with "Anthony," a twenty-something married bi guy from Burlington. He picks me up and we go fool around in his car or in the woods. Before school starts, I also meet up with "Joe," another twenty-something, a tall, beefy basketball-player type who owns a local pet store and drives a VW Van. We also go for a "hike" or two that summer.

At seventeen, the idea of having sex in a bed seems so foreign and exotic. I don't realize that most other people don't hook up in various wooded areas around the state of Vermont. I think I'm doing what every other gay high school student in the world is doing. How little I know...

● ● ●Adam -- remember Adam? -- calls me in August. I haven't talked to him in ages, possibly once since his visit the summer before. He's calling to say hello. We chat, detached, about our respective status quos. He tells me he's going to college in Boston in a few weeks. I tell him which colleges I'm looking at (which also happen to mostly be in Boston). I don't mention Out & About or any of my summer activities. He mentions nothing about his secret love life.

Now, as the school year ended, I heard a bit of juicy gossip from a friend in NH -- Adam had, allegedly, been found making out with another guy at a party. The rumor was denied by him, but it was out there. It was all I can think of as he drones on about the Orientation session he'd just returned from.

I can't stand it anymore. I finally just say it.

"Adam..."

"Yeah?"

"Are you...?" I immediately chicken out. "I mean, would you want to come visit before you leave for school?"

He says yes, and before I know it, I'm seeing him for the first time in a year. It's the first time I'm looking at him through these eyes -- eyes that know they're gay, know what they're looking at, like it and allow it. He looks good. When we hug, I almost die.

He comes for the day. We hang around town, go to dinner, catch up as much as two guys who are obviously holding back can. I want so badly to tell him everything, but instead I say nothing. Forget how far I've come in my life -- the instant I'm around him I clam up. I'm smitten. I'm terrified.

The visit comes and goes. We say good-bye awkwardly. I don't want him to go, but I can't bring myself to say or do anything that would make him stay. The instant he leaves my driveway, I want to cry. But I don't let myself. Instead, I throw myself back onto the path I set out on since he left my house a year before: the path of self-discovery and coming out.

● ● ●By August, things start to get back on track with the gay youth group. I meet a young bisexual woman from my school named Kristen. I had gone to grade school with Kristen, right before my first move, but I did not know her and really didn't remember her. In meeting her again, I find an invaluable ally and a best friend.

Kristen is famous for driving a big purple Cadillac, the back of which is covered in various feminist and pro-gay bumper stickers. She listens to Ani DiFranco loudly as she cruises through the streets of Rutland. She's famous for having a girlfriend who she took to the prom. I remember watching them while I danced with my girl-date, scared and envious of their pride. She was instantly my hero -- but she seemed like an alien just a few months earlier. Now -- now she was my friend, my inspiration, my partner-in-crime.

Kristen and I start a small club for gay teens at the local youth center. It's not well attended, but it's something. We're happy with how it turns out, but not satisfied. We're both dreading our return to school in a few weeks and decide that things have to be different for our senior year. No more closets. No more homophobia. No more bull-shit.

It happens in a Dunkin' Donuts late one night. Kristen and I sip Coffee Coolatas and hatch a plan that will change our school and our lives forever...

---

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Posted by Patrick on 05/ 4/05 at 4:31 PM
Categorized: 90s-Something
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