From my series Wild Nights, Hot and Crazy Days (This is a true story, these are real people):
12 year old me seeing a hot guy in a yellow speedo and realizing some things:
A very gay (but very closeted) 15 year old me, who had just been coerced into stealing my mother's Chevette and bringing my brother to a stripper bar so we could watch his girlfriend competing in the Miss Nude Canada 1987 pageant. Yes, he was screwing the stripper. He was actually screwing several of them. That is him with the black hair. And yes, we were both very much under age to be in a stripper bar. If I wasn't already certain of those things I was realizing in the pic above, I was now.
My first trip to a gay bar, and the first time I ever met a drag queen in person. This is Miss Vicky, checking me out as I was having four simultaneous heart attacks:
That same night. Of course, my first trip to a gay bar was taken very reluctantly and I wanted to keep a low profile. My friend Johnny was having none of it. He had planned ahead to have the DJ shine a spot light on me and introduce me to the bar. If I hadn't been so determines to kill Johnny I'd have died right there.
Coming out to my father. It was the scariest thing I'd ever done. In retrospect it needn't have been. There was some humour involved, too. This is how it went, pretty much verbatim:
Dad: "Do you think Troy (my 'roommate') might be gay?"
Me: "Probably"
Dad, after mulling things over: "Are you?"
Me: "Absolutely"
Dad: "Ok, we kind of thought so"
The tears in this pic are tears of joy from having the weight of the world lifted off my shoulders:
