They wouldn't know I had selected Kid A as my exit score. That one of my flip-flops, the ones Southern Californian kids wore even in Winter, had got lodged on the pedal. That I was punching keys on my bulky Nokia. At the right speed, someone might even think it was an accident. On the way home, I drove my white sedan down a backstreet that T'ed off at a wall. I thought about it sometimes, usually during long drives at night. Getting straight felt like fighting a ring of fire with a squirt gun. I curled up on my bed and tried to think about nothingness for awhile. It was the first time I had felt too tired to plead for God's amnesty. I was 16 years old and so repulsed with what I had done that I vomited.
I was ready to block her when she replied <3.įive months later, I relapsed.
Sara loved this Christian rock band Deliriou5?, a series of fantasy novels about the Rapture, and the boyishness of Paul Rudd, which I hesitantly confessed to liking, too. By the time the JPEG had slugged its way down the screen, a door would slam shut he was gone. He liked football and Jesus and women but possibly men and when we chatted about our guilty mutual habit he took longer than usual to respond and sent photos of his six-pack. Within a few minutes of joining, a box popped up and a trill of marimba tones rattled my speakers. I met Ace around midnight on a school night in a Teens4Christ chatroom. I didn’t have anyone I could talk to about my dilemma but I did have a dial-up connection in 1997, the same year AOL launched Instant Messenger.įor a closeted kid in the '90s, AIM was like a crawlspace from your home into a gay bar. It was like God was telling me in the clearest way possible how my private life had affected my soul. "And if he does it enough, he becomes a homosexual." I hadn't practiced this method, the shaking part, but I assumed what I had been doing, nonstop since the mystery of orgasms revealed itself, definitely counted.
"It's when a man shakes his genitals," he said. A church leader asked me if I knew what masturbation was and I shook my head no. It wasn't until a bible study class in the 7th grade that I heard where gay people come from.