Born This Way (18 page)

My parents and I spent the summer of 1989 with my mom's cousins in California. Thirteen years later, my mom told the same cousins that her son was gay. “We knew since he was a little kid,” they replied. “You didn't know?”
My relationship with my mom got so much better after I came out to her.
It took her a few months to digest the news. But soon enough,
she was telling all her close friends and relatives all about me.

At this age, I didn't realize that I was gay—although I imagine others around me suspected. It wasn't until late elementary school, around age eleven, that I started to become aware. As time went on, the Internet helped me make it through, by connecting me with other gay men around the globe. Eventually, the media provided me with great outlets to understand that
life for a gay man could be great.
Queer as Folk
became one of my favorite shows during high school.

Working through these feelings was far from easy,
especially growing up in rural West Virginia, where the redneck-and-Republican-to-homosexual ratios are greatly skewed. My mother frequently reminded me that gays would burn in hell. Fortunately, my mom has since become very supportive.

In this photo, you'll notice I had all of four teeth. For some reason, my adult teeth took forever to grow in, leaving me with the
thickest lisp
possible; thus,
I thounded like the gayeth little boy in the whole thcool.
It also didn't help that I wore that same mock turtleneck every day, like it was a full-time job. Things got so bad that my school sent me to speech class for three years—a class they created just for me.

I remember an obsession with swords at this time in my life. Why? So I could pretend to be She-Ra, of course. Never He-Man. But nobody could make out the fact that I was saying, “By the power of Grayskull!” To this day, my family still teases me about shouting, “Baw-dee-aw-nees of Graythkull!” In retrospect, it all worked out really well. I grew up from a little lisping gay boy into a big gay man.

I'm Kurt on the left with my (also gay) twin brother Matt on the right. I didn't fully realize that I was gay until middle school. But
I wasn't ready to admit it to anyone, including myself, until I was a senior in high school.

When I stumbled upon this picture at my dad's house, my first thought was, “How did you all
not
know that we were gay?” Especially when we spent so much time playing Cinderella and adoring our
purple My Little Pony
dolls? My brother and I have been really lucky to have a supportive family and great friends. Perhaps if we'd stayed in the Mormon church, things would've been different. But we stopped attending around eight years old, and we haven't looked back. Growing up, I never thought that if I came out, my mom would be saying things like,
“You should go talk to that cute gay guy at Starbucks.”
But she really does.

To me, girls always made such fabulous friends that I couldn't conceive of being with them romantically. I was in third grade when I first learned what
gay
meant.
By age twelve, I decided that gay was the way I planned to live the rest of my life
—and with someone tall, dark, strong, and handsome!