Hellfire and Homophobia

Names have been changed.  

As a little kid, I hung around girls and envied the ones with perfect, straight hair. When I complimented their hair, they’d say, “You’re weird.” 

Boys noticed too, and starting when I was 8, they called me “gay.” Too young to know the word’s meaning, I still understood I should take offense. “N-no I’m not!” 

I asked my mom what “gay” meant and why other kids called me that. 

“They’re just holding you down, sweetheart, ignore them.” she’d say. She even let me play dress-up in her clothes sometimes. But at our Protestant church, the pastor said it was a sin to be gay, and my mom didn’t disagree. It was confusing. 

I asked, right there in church, with everyone staring, “But what does it mean?”
The pastor answered, “You shall not lust for men, for God created you with a greater purpose. It is a sin.”

“But why?”

“Heaven forbids it. God created women to bear life, and God created men to be with women.”

“Why?”

The pastor just wouldn’t answer. My mother tugged at my arm; I needed to shut up. I sat down.

The pastor finished his sermon with, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Do not let temptation drag you down, where you’ll burn forever.” Along with everyone else, my mother said, “Amen.” 

I believed him, as he was a man of higher power, and felt fear and self-loathing. 

At home, it was just me, my twin brother Michael, and my mom living in our apartment in the projects in Brooklyn. Michael was different from me, more into sports than pretty clothes, but we were still close. We puzzled together over what we heard at church about going to hell.

“What does it matter?” he asked me. “Have you done something bad?”

“No. I don’t think so, other than staying up late.” I didn’t tell Michael that when kids would call me gay, I’d wonder if I was. And if I should try to fix myself.

With age and more knowledge, I began to question. While the other kids were at recess one day, I asked my 6th grade science teacher if it was true that God could send you to hell. She said that religion was a theory and you test theories with data. And since there was no data about God, she said, you have to think about it, adding, “Religion is as true as you want it to be.” My skepticism about church was confirmed.

My mom didn’t seem to mind that I acted gay, but other things set her off and she’d flare into violence. You never knew what could set her off.  One day when I was 12, I went to school with bruises, because I didn’t know it was strange for your mother to hit you. The teachers noticed, and Michael and I went into foster care. 

Suddenly, a Father

Growing up, I’d ask my mom why we didn’t have a father. She said, “Oh, you’ll know when you’re older.” Soon after Michael and I went into care, he appeared at my foster home one day after school.

“It’s been so long since I’ve seen you two…” he said to me and Michael.

I was confused. “Who is this man?” He also looked familiar, somehow, like looking in a dusty, old mirror. His name was Jose.

After he left, the lady who had been taking care of us said, “You’ll be living with Jose now.” 

Then Michael and I went to live with my dad, his wife, and our half-sister. My new sister taught me how to clean the house and wash clothes. It was like learning a new world where things were predictable. Michael and I slept on bunk beds in the living room.  

My dad was calmer, more patient and more consistent as a parent than my mom, but he was more intolerant of homosexuality. He called my mother “mental” for letting me dress up in her clothes.

Soon after I’d moved in with my father, I started going to the Boys and Girls Club, where I made friends with a group of girls. One afternoon, we played Truth or Dare and a girl named Kayana dared me to kiss her. The girls around me giggled and I was nervous. I hesitated, then kissed her cheek.

“That’s not how you kiss, you kiss like this!”

Kayana kissed me on the lips and opened her mouth.

I didn’t like anything about it. Not the feeling of her tongue, or the spittle, or the closeness. EVERYTHING felt wrong. I felt sick to my stomach and ran out of the library. 

Around that same time, I noticed a well-built boy in the locker room. He caught me staring. “You good?” he asked.

I got out of there fast. 

“Gay” was such a confusing word; was it a slur? Was it a compliment? Was it just a description? I searched in google:

– Do I like boys?

– Is liking boys normal?

– Gay test

Online, I found hate and homophobia, but I also found people interacting and liking things I liked. I went on Discord and found friends there, and came out to one of them, Trey. He referred me to The Trevor Project, a website that provides counseling to LGBTQ+ young people and lets them connect to each other. 

From the Trevor Project, I followed links and found more safe spaces to talk openly. Talking online as a gay person helped me figure out more of my feelings and experience acceptance. I found comfort, freedom, and even love chatting on those sites.

“Is It Wrong to Be Gay?”

I found more gay friends on Discord, but in 8th grade, I was still only out online. I had two friends from school, Brianna and Kaitlyn, who brushed out my hair and painted my nails with clear polish. Maybe they were thinking of me as gay, but they never said so, and I just thought we were best friends doing fun stuff.

Maybe because of the nail polish, my dad asked me if I was a f**.

“No! I don’t even know what you’re talking about! I’d never do such a thing.”

“Give me your phone.” 

My dad scrolled through my phone and saw gay flags and my chats about being gay with friends. I cried when he told me to delete it all, but I did it. In an instant, I lost the friends I felt safe around.

But the next day, my family acted like everything was normal. It seemed my dad and stepmother didn’t want to discuss it further. So I got back online and reconnected with some friends and picked up my gay life again. 

Neither my dad nor I spoke of it again until soon after the pandemic started. Around then I told Michael, who had already suspected it, that I was gay. When I said I was thinking about coming out to our dad and stepmom, he said, “You know you’ll be in major trouble, right?” 

I wasn’t being attacked; I was being accepted. I didn’t even realize I was crying until I wiped my eyes.

“Yeah, no sh-t.” I let out a small laugh of anxiety.

But not telling our parents was eating me up inside. I had been compressing myself at school and at home, and it increased my anxiety to pretend to be someone else. I thought of the game Celeste, where the main character Madeline is given a letter that says, “Did you know? It’s impossible to outrun your own reflection.”

So in the spring of 2020, in the middle of watching a movie with my dad and stepmom, I blurted, “I’m gay.”

My dad said, “No, you’re not. That’s a sin.” He paused the movie and started crying. “You can’t be gay. Being gay is a sin. You’ll go to hell just like the rest of those f*****s.”

My stepmother chimed in, “You should date a girl before you decide.”

After that, my father kept trying to convince me I was straight. “You’ve never had a woman before.” “You just haven’t met the right person.” “Just try it first.” He thought I’d been brainwashed to be gay by social media.

He seemed the most worried about my going to hell. “I don’t want to lose my son to the devil,” he yelled at me once.

I shouted back: “If God cares about me so much, where was he when my mother hurt me? And where were you?”

He couldn’t answer that. 

I turned once again to internet friends for guidance. I often confided in an online friend named Allison.

“Is it wrong to be gay?” I asked them.

“Well, do you feel wrong?” they asked.

“Yeah but no.”

“Hm? Why?”

“A lot of people don’t seem to like it.”

“I didn’t ask if anyone else thought it was wrong. I asked you.”

“W-well, no, no, But–”

“Well you got your answer,” they said.

Less Baggage

Soon after that, my dad came into my room and said, “You know I love you, right?”

“Yeah…” I tensed up, awaiting the hate again. My eyes drifted to the floor. I could feel my throat closing up again as the anxiety prickled at my skin, as if there were tiny bugs all over me. I felt sick to my stomach.

“Look at me.” I held my breath, forcing eye contact. 

“I love you. I will always love you. I don’t care if you’re gay, straight, whatever,” he said.

My stepmother appeared behind him in the doorway to my room; she had been listening.
She said, “I have gay clients where I clean. We had a talk and they told us some things about it.”

I wasn’t being attacked; I was being accepted. I didn’t even realize I was crying until I wiped my eyes.

My stepmother repeated what my dad had said: “No matter who you are, I will always love you.” 

The weight on my shoulders grew lighter. Things were different after that. I could come home and be me: I didn’t have to put on a mask. 

My father still has a way to go. He’s overprotective and he likes being in control. He warns me about what “all men want” and tells me what he thinks of all my guy friends. He calls drag queens “disgusting” and mocks people in same-sex relationships. But he’s definitely become more calm and accepting.

In the six months since my parents said they accept me, I’ve grown more open around my family. We don’t fight about our differences, instead normalizing and accepting them, like it should’ve been from the start. They even let me bring my boyfriend over on my 15th birthday (though my dad did tell him not to sit so close to me). 

They can’t fully accept my being LGBTQ, but they are trying, and I feel safer at home.