Growing Up Gay :: Personal Narrative Writing

Growing Up GayWhen I think underpin of my early childhood, I can remember moving with my parents and little sister to a city in southern Sweden called Trans. I started in a naked school, and I was fascinated, in a rather special way, by a particular boy in my class. While my thoughts at that time were not specially sexual (I was nine at the time), I often thought about whether or not I thought this boy beautiful. I had problems settling the hold out in my mind, but nevertheless, I looked at him ever so often, and I felt pleasure while doing so. As time went on, as I entered puberty, I began to take a more active, albeit still very discrete, interest in other boys. While in the locker room after physical education, I detected that I was sexually attracted to several of the other boys, and I also saw many boys walking around the school corridors who caught my attention. Sometimes I looked them up in the schools photo catalog to see what their names were, and in my free time, I ofte n dreamt about being physically close to them. But during this occlusive of adolescence, I never touchablely thought about what I was. All the things that took place in the emotional-sexual realm were, admittedly, real and concrete to me I experienced real feelings for other boys (love, infatuation, sexual attraction). But at the same time, on an intellectual level, I never confronted these feelings, and so I continued having them without worrying about them or trying to transform them in any way. They just were, and that was fine with me. While some opponents of homosexuality often claim that it is unnatural (a claim which is thoroughly refuted in the essay Homosexuality and the Unnaturalness Argument), for me, my homosexual feelings were very natural indeed. When I was 16, I became a Christian, which complicated matters quite a bit. After a conversion in the summer of 1984, during which I confessed Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, I joined the Pentecostal Church by being bapt ized on celestial latitude 9. While I felt great satisfaction about being a part of the Christian church, I gradually encountered attitudes among fellow Christians and in the playscript which were rather hostile towards homosexuality in any form. I adopted that negative attitude, and I became quite a vocal homophobe.