The novels of Mary Renault were also my first introduction - literary introduction, at least - to
homosexual love.
Simply purchasing them, I
recall, was a nerve-wracking experience for a closeted teenager. I must have
been 16 or 17, living in Solihull, and I´d head into Birmingham and to a hippie
bookshop called the Peace Centre, which reeked of joss sticks but which
contained, among other counter-cultural products like Spare Rib and patchouli,
a little shelf of lesbian and gay literature. I´d stroll in, check out
something left-wing or CND-ish, before edging, with a wideways glance, like a
crocodile about to leap on its prey, towards what really interested me.
I mock, but I owe an
immense debt of gratitude to that patch of Birmingham around the Bull Ring. Now
it has a glitzy new Selfridges, but then it was life-changing. For as well as
the Peace Centre´s stack of gay reading matter, my first dip into the gay scene
was a visit to a weekly ´Gay Soc´night in a bar just above the market nearby.
At the end of every night, we´d all hold hands and sing along to Sing if You´re
Glad to be Gay... Gosh, it makes my toes curl just to think of it, but thank
heavens it was there - and it was there that I met the man who took my cherry
(or at least a decent-sized bite of it) and got me started...
James Collard Times November 2006
One of the grooms has been
a friend of mine for 24 years. Bob and I attended high school together:
Chaminade, an all-male Catholic prep school on Long Island. In every class we
shared I sat behind him, not because of any particular bond between us, but
because we sat alphabetically and his last name begins with “Cors”.
Lunch was the only time we
could choose our seating partners, and there we sat together again, along with
about a half-dozen other guys over the course of our four years there. At least
five of those guys have turned out to be gay (another is a Catholic priest
whose sexual orientation I’ve never bothered to ask). Go ahead and joke about
“gaydar,” but somehow we found kindred spirits years before any of us dared to
admit—to ourselves or others—our sexual orientation.
John Corvino May 2007
The fear of being thrown out of his home was one of many that Jason Osmanski struggled with before he decided to come out to his parents two years ago.
As a child, his family attended a Southern Baptist church where Jason was taught that being gay is a sin. He remembers hearing his father say that having a gay kid would mean he had failed as a parent.
"I prayed every single day, asking God to take it away from me because I didn't want to feel like this and I didn't want to go to hell," said Jason, now a sophomore at Snow Canyon High in St. George.
The summer after eighth grade, Jason lit several candles in his bedroom and wrote a suicide note. He lay down on his bed and held a knife to his wrist. But he stopped.
He pictured his mother's face when she found him.
"I thought, 'I can't do this to her,' " Jason said.
Instead, he called his best friend and confided for the first time what he was going through.
Jason knew he also had to tell his mom, but he didn't know how. He was 14 years old and had spent half his life sensing he was different. Now, he had the words for it. Wanting to break the news somewhere public, someplace safe, Jason tagged along with his mom on a shopping trip to Walmart.
But he still couldn't say it. He took a pad of paper from the pharmacy counter and wrote, "Will you love me no matter what?" Carolyn Osmanski gave him a quizzical look but answered, "Of course." Jason scribbled another note, crumpled it, handed it to his mom and bolted to a nearby aisle.
She looked down at the wrinkled paper: "I'm gay."
After Jason passed his mother that crumpled note in Walmart, she found him shaking on the floor in the cosmetics aisle, beneath rows of mascara and eye shadow. Carolyn Osmanski lifted her son to his feet and gave him a hug.
She told him, "I love you no matter what."
Rosemary Winters 2010 Full story in Salt Lake Tribune