It is in retrospect that I have begun to see the painfully obvious ways in which being in the closet, in which defaulting to secrecy, has hurt me. After all, being in the closet is an active effort and required picking up habits that don’t go away just because you come out. Unfortunately, the more painful memories require a trigger warning as they involve child abuse, sexual assault, efforts to cover the aforementioned up, and my reactions to it, which includes recreating trauma.

I don’t remember when I learned to keep myself secret. When I told my mom that a male family member had molested me, I blamed her when she asked why I hadn’t told her sooner. I wasn’t able to talk to her about it until after I had been through a lot of therapy and a lot of that time focused on the dysfunctional relationship we had. Plus, there wasn’t anyone else around involved in raising me. Generally, she had taught me that I should be seen but not heard, that I was around to help her process her feelings, sometimes that included being her punching bag, and that the person who had molested me could do no wrong and was forgiven, usually, for any of his past transgressions. This person is no longer in our lives, because my mom finally was able to stop letting him in, but I digress.

When it happened, I was eleven or twelve years old, well before I had started to have real sexual urges, although I had started puberty and had already noticed that I was also attracted to boys. I don’t even remember being told not to tell anyone; it was as if he knew that I just wasn’t the type of person to talk. I was painfully quiet back then and perhaps that was obvious to the adults in my life and doubly so to the predators looking for an easy mark. Indeed, it was only after therapy lessened the impact that I could begin to talk about being molested. I wrote about it often, but it took me close to ten years to tell anyone other than two therapists about it.

I’ve reviewed my journals from back then. Although I noted what happened, near as I can gather or remember, I only didn’t tell anyone because I was worried that they would take that as the thing that “turned” me gay. That the pride and assuredness of my own sexuality blinded me to the hurtful impact of continuing to keep his secret is an irony that I think anyone with more experience could have seen. And really, that is the undercurrent to the ways in which I have hurt myself by being so secretive; if I had had a trusted adult and been able to be honest with them, the self-destructive behaviors that came after may have been curtailed. I don’t blame myself though. In retrospect, I can see the parts when I let shame control the narrative, but in large part it was about survival: as I’ve said prior, I knew that coming out would see me homeless, I thought I was controlling the narrative about me, and it also true is that you need a sense of pride in your sexuality to survive in a heteronormative hegemony. Yet, again, that trusted adult may have been able to point out to me the link between the childhood molestation and all the cruising I was doing as a young person.

I used to go to the gym a lot in high school and college, work out, then cruise in the steam room and locker room showers. As I wrote about it back then, I was excited to be sexually active and also saw it as my obligation, a way of sticking it to society by having lots of gay sex when, at least in California, the right to marry was being voted on and being taken away. It wasn’t just about sexual freedom, but revolution, after all, no amount of shaming could take away how good the good times felt. The issue was the bad times. Stone cold sober, I would lose agency over my body, freezing in place and letting people I was not attracted to touch me and pleasure me. I remember explicitly telling myself to just close my eyes and let it happen, it would all be over soon. I didn’t understand what was going on then, that I was recreating the earlier childhood trauma by letting these older men use me. Apparently, I also didn’t understand that I could just say no and conceptualized what was happening as an obligation, although I’m not sure why I felt obligated to do anything.

In the gyms, this cruising consisted of mutual masturbation and oral. I don’t know why it never went further than that. Perhaps, from up close, some of these men realized how young I was and never invited me anywhere else. In the post-orgasmic clarity, they realized the hairy chest couldn’t hide how young my face looked and the fact that my voice still cracked. I apologize as this may be too much for some people, but I do have some sympathy for these pederasts. Attracted as they were to younger men, they were playing a dangerous game, as they never bothered to confirm my age and would certainly have gotten themselves in trouble if we had ever been caught. See I never lied about my age, one or two did bother to ask and I would always respond honestly, “Seventeen!” And perhaps it was that I rode my bike to the gym and would not have wanted to bike anywhere else but home, or be driven anywhere else as I wanted to stay in control.

Whatever it was, I managed to hold onto my virginity until my freshman year of college. The one close friend I had back had their own unhealthy sexual patterns and encouraged me to get rid of it. I deeply regret that I didn’t have someone else to talk to about that and that the culture in general led me to think I wasn’t a man until I did. I chatted with a grad student on the hook up apps who was fairly attractive. He sent over a couple pics of his body and I was ready to go. Unfortunately, when I opened the door, the person before me in no way resembled his pics. An older me would have angrily confronted him about this and sent him on his way. But instead I walked him back to my room and I tried to ask him about his pictures. To every question he had an answer and to every hesitation he had a negotiation. We did get some of our clothes off and at some point, I rationalized to myself that if I just went along with it, he’d finally leave. I remember he rode me until he came and then I asked him again if he would leave. He finally did. I thankfully insisted on wearing a condom. I remember taking a long hot shower and then logging onto some forums, probably a reddit forum, to brag that I had finally gone all the way. I didn’t even bother writing about it in my journal though, although I do remember feeling as if something was not right.

My freshman year of college, I decided to go back into the closet. In a truly hare-brained move, I thought I would stay in the closet, not make friends, get my degree as fast as possible and then move on with my life. I think, without having written it down, I can admit that I wanted as much financial independence as soon as possible because I knew my parents would not support me. Second, I certainly did not fit neatly into the gay identity and was scared because of that. Although I knew that I was some sort of bisexual, my then favorite author spoke often how he knew many gay men who started off as bisexual and were just kidding themselves. I wasn’t sure about my own sexuality and didn’t want the scrutiny, so I just didn’t bring it up and kept my online and gym cruising to myself. Per my journal, I then went on to feel tremendously guilty when I did make friends who I wanted to come out to, but was scared they’d feel bad about me lying. Still, I wish I had come out, not just to help me reflect on the above behavior, but also to have warned me about the only other gay person in our cohort.

By the end of my freshman year, I had managed by and large to avoid scrutiny because I was really into two of my friends. Really a third if I’m being honest, although he was a guy so I’m not sure how I kept that crush a secret. It isn’t as if I went around telling anyone who asked that I was into my friends, but with one specifically people could tell I liked her. At the end of the year, I had started considering how I would come out and was even wearing subtle rainbows and yet was not being recognized. The one time it happened at a party that an older guy asked in code if I was family, I happily said “Yes! We’re all one big engineering family!” He kept insisting that no, he wanted to know if I was family, familia, which truly confused me because the minority engineering program at this school painted itself as a family and I could not tell the difference. The upperclassmen interceded and told him to leave me alone. As I later learned, he had a habit of getting his classmates drunk and sleeping with them, clearing out the closeted men in his generation and they didn’t want him wasting his time with me, so obvious was my crush on my female friend.

We had a guy my year that was following in his footsteps, regrettably. One of our friends told me later that he had a list of all the guys he wanted to get drunk and sexually assault. I know for young gay men and for a certain type of older gay man, the fantasy persists of getting a straight man drunk and “turning” him. Having been on the receiving antics, I can say that it’s awful and that no means no. As I later found out, this guy had made a list of all the guys our year that he wanted to get drunk and sleep with, his go to MO as he remains a total slime bag. Still, it was another end of the year party and apparently it was my turn for him to try something.

The party was fairly non-eventful. At the time, I recall him being persistent in handing me booze and me telling him many, many times, that I needed to be careful with how much I drank. If needed I can elaborate on it later, but I had broken my leg and was on crutches at the time, so I knew I needed to stay sober enough to walk on crutches. I made it home safely and I wish I had ended the night there. However, I had made it a habit after any party where booze was involved, to stay up late playing video games until I was completely sober, as I get the spins when I try to sleep while inebriated and inevitably end up puking. I don’t remember who messaged who first, but I do recall him pointing out that if I wasn’t going to sleep yet that I should come over and hang out. Even though my gut was telling me not to, I figured I’d go up and see what happened.

We got there and it was fine, until it wasn’t. We made out, I did get hard, and we fooled around a bit but then I said no. I told him I didn’t feel comfortable proceeding with more but wouldn’t mind staying to sleep together. He said ok and let me doze off. I awoke some time later to him stroking me awake and I got mad, told him no, and went back to sleep. This kept going for a while, because while I was wanting to leave, I was scared at the thought of having to hobble my way down from his dorm room and back to mine, so late at night and so desiring to just be asleep.

That was the last party of the school year and I pushed it out of mind that summer. When I returned that year, I noticed that some of the freshmen seemed to already know something about me and that the gay ones were particularly stand offish. I didn’t know what it was at the time, I figured that having recently come out (again) I was still a bit awkward and, having joined the officer positions in the minority engineering group, I did not want to come off improperly toward them. What I didn’t learn until later was that the guy above had participated in a summer program and had told all the incoming minority engineers that he and I had issues because I was homophobic.

I didn’t learn this until well after college and in retrospect, I applaud the sociopathy of this man. He figured since I showed such discomfort being openly out that I wouldn’t effectively counter the narrative that I had a lot of internalized homophobia. And in a way, he was right. But the reason I went on to dislike him was because he had forced himself onto me. After all, I had given him several clear and precise nos. What could have been drunken mistakes then turned into sober cover ups. Also, to be clear, by the time he had locked his eyes upon me, I had started to come out to our friends anyways and either way, had already come out to my parents, something he hadn’t done. There was no way to cast him as a man trying to help someone struggling to come out. And truly, if he had not tried to turn people against me, I might have continued to have said that he and I just didn’t get along. See, it wasn’t for another year that I bothered to tell anyone about what had transpired against us and it was only because he insisted on trying to make me a bad guy.

I am happy that I finally stopped trying to keep things secretive or private and, in the end, came forward with my story. It didn’t undo all of the issues I had with the younger gay men in our group, after all, I am still a huge dork and at the time was still very socially awkward. But it no longer made them afraid of me and thankfully, it minimized the amount of times I had to be around this rather unpleasant individual. I only wish I had seen sooner what it was costing me to keep secret the ways in which other people had hurt me. Our peers did turn against him and helped me keep him out of my life, which was the other side of secret keeping. Not only was I holding onto this pain by myself, but managing the scenario fell on me alone, when I could have been getting help the entire time.

Because I have already written so much and because I still want to go hit the gym, I will stop here. I want to follow up to make clear what else hiding all of this caused as well as elaborate on the relief I felt in telling my story and some of the help I received.