06/16/2026
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Guest Post from J
Growing up the way I did was an unlikely way to “turn out gay”. You hear all kinds of arguments (hypotheses? myths?) about why people are gay: they got influenced by “homos*xual culture” while young; they were molested (some think that definitely causes gay); maybe they were rebellious, bored with the s*xuality god gave them, and decided to try something else; they were demon-possessed; or they’re born the way god made them. I’ve heard it all. Here is how I “turned out gay” – against the odds.
I started life with hot sand, scorching sun, and summer weeks that passed with no breeze and no rain. My parents birthed me on a deep-south peanut and to***co farm outside of Tifton, Georgia, where even our farmer neighbors weren’t very close by. I was only 6 during the Summer of Love, with all the siblings 8-14 years older, and my parents were just tired of parenting by the time I popped out. They didn’t give me much input growing up, other than driving us all to our little white country church several times a week, and making sure we spent summers working, out in those sweltering fields. The nearest kids I knew were almost a mile away, and then in 3rd grade they moved me to a school an hour’s bus ride away, where no neighbor kids went.
Our house was scrubbed clean of pop culture. TV did not flicker in the living room. My folks owned an antique 1950s television set that didn’t work, and I’d have given my eye teeth to watch Carol Burnette – but no TV for me! Our town boasted two AM radio stations, one country and one rock, yet our house mostly tuned in for newscasts. I didn’t even learn to enjoy pop music. One conservative christian FM station broadcast hymns and preaching from Valdosta, and we saw a movie less than once a year. Magazines lying around were Reader’s Digest, Better Homes & Gardens, National Geographic. Those subversive homos*xuals had no portal to infect us with their propaganda.
What about that idea of being “rebellious and trying out other s*xualities”? My own s*xual orientation has always been far along the Kinsey scale, but people at other more fluid places on the continuum might feel natural reaching outside of what society expects them to do. Seventh-grade me, though, started feeling things I hadn’t felt before, and they got triggered by other boys and men. By about thirteen I’d realized, “oh, no, I think I’m one of those terrible homos*xuals” that I’d heard adults talking about. I anguished for years over it – my s*xual feelings were so strong, there was no possibility of “just trying anything different” and being a hetero.
No one told me about s*x. Early every morning I rode that bus an hour to a school whose only purpose was keeping Black people out. Lack of any s*x education was only one of the ways the school was substandard (we could talk about the chemistry lab where neither the sinks, bunsen burners, nor fume hoods were ever hooked up). At home, my parents never tried to teach me where babies came from. At one point out in the garden my (embarrassed) older sister finally gave in and explained the barest essentials to her annoying kid brother. Now I’m embarrassed telling that.
With no s*x ed teacher who might have mentioned that other s*xualities are possible, I only heard the “q***r” or “gay” insult sometimes thrown around at school. Riding the bus home, I once heard some other students gossiping about whether the two unmarried coaches might be gay. Yet somehow, without any real information, by my eighth-grade year I knew, clearly, that I got turned on by boys, not by girls, and had no idea how I was going to deal with that. As for those other “hypotheses”, I wasn’t molested, though some later tried hard to get me to say I was; and we won’t even talk about the demon possession thing.
I often climbed the steps on Love Avenue to a red brick neo-Romanesque portal to the world – our public library. Picture a little bookworm who checked out his limit in books, then brought them back next week for more. Now picture a teenager hiding back among the shelves, finding answers to the questions he could never ask at home, or at school. I finally got my basic s*x education, and it came from a book titled something like “Everything Your Child Wants To Know About S*x (But is Afraid to Ask)”. The author didn’t say anything good or bad about homos*xuality, so at least I didn’t come away feeling more sick or damaged or evil than I already did. The library had other books that talked frankly and without judgment about how other people thought about s*x. These books showed me I wasn’t the only one like me. They’re probably challenged or banned now by reactionary parents.
My forming years were shaped by isolation from community, by hard-right christian indoctrination, by reading everything I could get my hands on instead of pop culture, and by a family that did not talk about s*x. Despite this, somehow, I turned out very, very q***r. I suspect I’m far from the only one.
