Crushed/Crush

So, Jason Collins of the NBA comes out the other day, and in the middle of all this positive feedback he's getting, Chris Broussard, an ESPN basketball analyst, gives a dissenting and critical opinion on the air.  A friend of a friend on Facebook posted that video and voiced agreement and support for Broussard, and somehow it showed up in my newsfeed. 
    As I watched it, a couple of things stood out.  For one thing, he kept talking about the "gay lifestyle", which is just wrong, in the same way that talking about the "left-handed lifestyle" is just wrong.  But what I commented on was his equating being gay with having sex, to which the original poster responded, "Are you actually gay if you don't have homosexual sex?"
    It's astonishing to me that in a time when an understanding of the nature of being gay is becoming rather mainstream that there are still people out there who regard being gay as a behavior.  Even my own Congressional Representative thinks of it that way.  But I answered the question by telling some of my own story, because in many ways, especially the age of self discovery thing, I'm pretty typical.  (I stayed in the closet a lot longer than most, but that's another story.)  But answering that question made me wonder about the experience of some of my friends, so I asked a few of them a series of questions.
    The first question was When did you know?, and by that I meant, when did you know you were attracted to people of the same sex?  For me, it was around the first grade, when I was six.  Two guys told me they knew when they were five.  One young lady told me that the revelation came in stages, but she had her first "serious" girlfriend when she was eleven.  A fellow at work told me he was in his teens.
    The second question was When did you know that you were different?  It was a difficult question to phrase succinctly because it encompassed the idea that while one may know (he) finds (boys) attractive, (he) may not have any knowledge of the concept of  'gay'.  One said he knew right away (he's younger), while another said it was three years later.  It was four years later for me.
    That knowledge came to me one sunny morning on the playground at my grade school.  I was sitting on the stoop of one of the portable classrooms when a sixth-grader, one year ahead of me, asked me if I ever kissed my brother.  We were an affectionate family, so I said yes.  He said, "That means you're a fag, because only fags kiss other boys."
    It was a stunning revelation.  "It" had a name, and I was "it".  And "it" was bad.  And the notion that it was bad was reinforced by my peers for many years after.
    And it wasn't about kissing my brother --that part was complete nonsense.  It was about whose attention I wanted, and who I wanted to look at, and why I felt so utterly different from every other boy in my school.  And this new knowledge affected my self image and self esteem for the next three decades.
    Question three was, do you remember the name of your first crush, and how old were you?  I asked this question to a few people at work as well, most of them straight, and was amused that, gay or straight, most of the crushes occured about the same time of life, in kindergarten or early grade school.  And the question brought a smile to everyone's face.
    My first crush was a kid in my second grade class named Kent Malave.  He was Argentinian, and had an older brother named Ted, who I still see around town on occasion.  During our third grade year their family had moved back to Argentina, but Kent was back for fourth grade.  He came over to my house once that year, which thrilled me to no end.
    Kent had Mrs. Robinson as his fourth grade teacher and I had Mrs. Clark, but I had Mrs. Robinson for my reading class, and I sat at Kent's desk.  I wrote him a message in pencil for Valentine's Day that covered half his desk.  He was not happy, since he was the one who had to clean it off.
    I saw him at the hotel about three years ago.  His hair was completely white, and shorter, and he was no longer wearing those teardrop shaped glasses with the lenses that got dark when he stepped out into the sunlight.  His beauty had faded a bit.  Age does that sometimes.  I wish we'd had the chance to talk, but I was working, and he was part of a large party that was leaving.
    There were other boys I liked in  grade school:  David Sims, Kirk Neimeyer, Grant Hartzog, Steve Parduhn, Larry Ethridge. I was the dorky kid with the bad haircut, the bad jokes, the strange clothes, and the obsession with the Osmond Brothers (and, yes, I know I'm showing my age.)  One more thing to make me different was all I needed.
    It took me decades to figure out that deciding to be gay or straight was like deciding to be right or left handed.  There's only so much one's will-power can accomplish.  And the closet is a very bad place to be.  At some point in your life, you have to decide to be happy.
    So congratulations, Jason.  I think you'll find that the freedom of living without fear is worth a lot more than someone else's opinion.