“I knew it!” exclaimed Kelly, my best friend since first grade. “We’ve just been waiting for you to say something. (She’s now implicated my family in this cover up). We’re sitting on her bed in our shared apartment, the morning sun blazing through sheer white curtains accentuating and celebrating this glorious day. After all, it’s not everyday one gets to confess their fabulosity. It’s spring semester of our senior year as undergrads. I just told her that I’m gay.
“Well why didn’t anyone tell me?” I respond, half jokingly, half seriously.
The thing is, I knew. The kind of knowing that’s so close to your face you can’t see it, but the reality is that it’s still there. The kind of knowing so inextricably wound in your DNA, it’s an absolute truth. Undeniable. Fate. A destination no matter how far off the path one roves, one will eventual land right where they were meant to be.
I knew it.
There are pictures of me shirtless in the summer (I must be around seven), just out of the pool, excitedly and with carefree, non-self-conscious abandon blowing out birthday candles as I’m joined around the table by a bunch of neighborhood boys, including my brother. I wanted to swim like them (shirtless), and I did. I wanted to be the quarterback when we played football, and I did. I wanted to be the dad when we built playhouses out of leaves, and I did.
Another photo. In this one, I’m dressed up like an old man, trucker hat, toy guitar, and a flannel. My friends are enmeshed in a fantasy world, playing roles they know are make believe. But for me, this is not make believe. This is me practicing for my future life in the real world. I’m trying on the role claimed by everything in me, encoded in my blood, my nature, and secretly shucking off the one everyone assumes I will take up.
Then there are the memories of the inner worlds I created for myself. One where I was a boy driving a girl around, who I am undoubtedly imagining is my wife, in the maroon jeep Power Wheels my little brother and I shared. Another, I’m Garth Brooks going to school wearing my belt like I watched him wearing his: the extra piece of the strap not placed into the keeper loop but left unkept. Just like him. No one knew I was miming one of my childhood heroes, but I knew. My inner world was expanding, exploring, gently pointing the compass toward coming home to myself.
I majored in English as an undergraduate, so naturally, I’m drawn to books, book stores, cafe’s, the experiences of others like and unlike me…and…libraries. I found myself hanging around the HQ section of the college library for inordinate amounts of time. One day, it occured to me, “Wait. I spend a lot of time in this section. I go out of my way to take any class that even hints toward Queer Theory. Oh, my God. I’m queer!” I’m not sure if outside that campus library that any clouds parted to make way for wondrous beams of light and the archetypal rainbow, but a shroud was lifted somewhere inside me. I could glimpse a future of fulfillment. I could see myself becoming a full, I-make-my-life-what-I-want-it human. I could see myself openly having a wife (how much more exciting can it get than that?). I felt relief and a new sense of power over my own being. I thought to myself, “maybe I can and will be happy.”
I knew, but I finally came out to myself in the library. The library: where anyone can explore millions of ways of being, millions of ways of knowing. The library: where I found my one, unique way of being…of knowing knowing.
Yes, I do tell this joke: It took a thousand books and a library for me to pry myself out of the closet.
How very
me.
the daily periphery 