Dealing with the Closet in Highschool

Last night was a great time with a big group of friends. The bring-your-own-wine concept of a restaurant really doesn't get the credit it deserves. When you have 15 people each bring a bottle of wine (who cares what kind, I'm no wine aficionado - alcohol is alcohol) good times definitely happen. I left the group early to see the Cut Copy concert, unfortunately I didn't think to buy the tickets early. The concert was soldout and even the scalpers didn't have tickets, so I rejoined the winefest.

My close friends, along with the extended network of friends, were all there. Apart from the boyfriends/girlfriends, we all pretty much met in highschool. With the exception of my close-guy-friends and a few others, I'm usually pretty indifferent or disinterested about seeing other people I knew back in highschool. There are a few reasons for these feelings, but the main one is that seeing them makes me think back to myself and how I felt back then.

For the most part, highschool was lots of fun for me. I liked learning, I'm good at math, science and all the other subjects. Being on the football and track team was also lots of fun. My negative experiences stem from me being gay and how I dealt with it back then.

My reaction mechanism for being gay was to hide it as much as possible. Like most people who are gay and in highschool, I was scared that if someone found out I was gay, everyone would be disgusted and afraid of me. I would lose my friends and family and I would be alone. I spent countless nights running these long scenarios in my mind of how everything would go wrong and I would be abandoned. I knew that there was no one for me to possibly speak to or express my feelings to so I just buried them deep inside my mind. That is unfortunately one thing that I learned to be very good at. It's only looking back at it all now that I can describe my warped mindset and way of acting.

My mind would always be in a state of alert. I had to make sure to never do anything that could be labeled or linked to gay. I would only express my like for things that I thought were linked to straightness or normal guy things. A lot of this would come from me constantly gauging and remembering other peoples' reactions to things. I wouldn't bash gays or the idea of homosexuality, but I wouldn't dare touch it or consider mentioning anything related to it (The only exception being me at home alone with the internet's gay porn. Wooo!). I'd even go so far as to constantly analyzing the way I moved to make sure I never looked gay and to analyze other people so that I could always "blend in".

With the constant strain on me to keep up a perfect portrayal, even if at times it was for something as mundane as the type of music I like, my mind and personality wasn't exactly the greatest in the world. I was kind of an asshole. I disliked meeting new people and I would disregard someone very quickly. I would hide it around my parents, pretending to be a happy-go-lucky kid, but I was depressed. To hide my feelings, and not just those of finding other guys hot but happiness, curiosity, creativity and the willingness to share a part of myself with others, was pretty much killing me slowly.

I think it's time to bring this all back to the present now. Seeing other highschoolers back from my closeted days just brings back all the emotions I felt (or didn't feel at all) back to mind. But yesterday was different. I didn't feel that way. I wasn't brought down by my memories. The 15 of us just had a great time eating, drinking and then going out.