I am not your average queer person. I guess you could say that having desires for members of the same sex didn’t come to me all at once, but was buried deep within me and slowly came out as I cast aside my denials of it. Even to this day, I do not feel comfortable in my own skin, like there is something that will judge me or torment me for being who I am.

I went to a religious school starting in 3rd grade and was basically inundated with homophobia. Homophobia is not really a technical term, so while most people use it, I will use a stronger term: I was inundated with hatred of homosexuals. Like many, I went along with it. After all, I was a child, I was not in an environment that encouraged the use of reason, and I had not learned to consider whether it was reasonable to listen to what adults were telling me.

Looking back, these people I was around were completely insane, and when I consider my mental illnesses I tend to consider whether the people judging me as mentally ill are not suffering from many delusions themselves. First of all, the person they worship, Jesus Christ, is an obvious homosexual. He surrounded himself with adoring men, he washed his disciples’ feet, he talked about how much he loved them and was willing to sacrifice his life for them. Perhaps a model human being if you were to take him away from his acceptance of the ugly tradition of Jewish persecution of homosexuals that was strong in his day and all that talk about burning people that disagreed with him in a lake of fire for all eternity.

We sang Christian songs, and to see grown men singing about how much they loved Jesus, a man, in the same way a pop singer might sing about how much love they feel for a woman did not strike me as the least bit odd. It does strike me as odd now, but like I said, I was a child back then. As we reached our teenage years, we started branching out into other forms of music at the time when mainstream hip-hop was at the height of its cringy homophobia, misogyny, and egotistical self-aggrandizement.

So, while it seems that hip-hop was a sort of a Kool-Aid to weed out the bad kids from the good at this point, this kind of music was presented in idiotic fashion by MTV and mainstream record labels and seemed to be the natural evolution of our progression into puberty from the homophobic environment we were reared in. Slurs were spoken, drugs were consumed, beer was drunk, blunts were smoked. A homophobic, racist, misogynist, violent Eden full of drugs, cults, and complete entropic lunacy.

I eventually turned to heavy metal and then later to experimental music to whet my appetites for extremity, but I couldn’t even imagine the idea that I might actually be homosexual. It seemed preposterous. Men had sex with women, right? But I hated myself and the world I lived in. Other people were having fun, but I felt alone. I felt only a nihilistic embrace of whatever destruction was at hand, I tried various drugs to escape into other states of mind, something to distract myself from...what? What exactly was I running from?

I believe Allen Ginsberg said that at some point he found within himself “mountains of homosexuality”, but I had buried my mountain under a hell full of fear and hatred. I didn’t know myself so I didn’t feel the pain I was inflicting on myself, I didn’t feel the hell I was putting myself into. This was life? I rejected it, I loathed it, I conspired against it. Somewhere there was something authentic, but I just didn’t know what it was. It turns out that the authentic thing I was looking for was homosexuality, or to love other men.

Love felt icky. How could I love? Love was for...homos, right? I mean, only queers go around smiling and loving and being happy, right? This was a preposterous, wrong, very wrong and insane notion, but it was my rejection of myself and my own queerness that fuelled it. I tried to be a man but I was not masculine, I built up a false self to shield myself from my desires, and it still haunts me to this day.

If there is anything more cruel in our society than the Judeo-Christian attitude toward homosexuals, I have not discovered it.