Come out come out wherever you are, part 3

So, the year was still 1994 and my parents had found out I was gay in January, we had already signed me up for musical theater camp in the Catskills months earlier (as if THAT shouldn't have been warning enough about my gayness) , I remember my dad giving me a whole speech about being worried that “those theater gays” being a corruptive bunch...little did he know I was the one going around corrupting everyone else.

Anyway right before going to camp, my mom and I flew into NYC to catch some Broadway shows, and explore the city. My mom is such a trouper , she indulged me and walked around the Village with me, and she did the coolest thing: she bought me a pride necklace and my first copy of Out magazine (with Sandra Bernhard on the cover). After a couple of fabulous days enjoying the city, she dropped me off at the bus station and on I got on my bus up to the Catskills to enjoy my three weeks of musical theater heaven. I got off the bus, and got picked up, and when I was driving up to the property, I pulled out my pride necklace out of my bag and put it on. I fell in love with the place instantly, I had arrived at Stagedoor Manor (which is the camp that the movie CAMP is based on and shot in). Most kids were oblivious to what my necklace meant, they just thought it was cute. It took me a couple of days to acclimate, but I quickly got into groove of things, and became comfortable enough to shout it out from the rooftops, “I AM A BIG HOMO”. I had no shame whatsoever, I was finally free and able to be who I was without worrying about any repercussions.

So for the next two summers I would ecstatically await my departure to the gayest place on earth to be who I truly was, and come back home, to machismo-filled Puerto Rico, back to my closeted high school life. I mean, my best friend knew, and my family, but that was about the extent of it. Then my junior year came along, I was 100% sure that musical theater was what I wanted to do with my life, and so I convinced my parents to send me to a performing arts boarding school for my senior year. Midway through my junior year, I had already been accepted into boarding school, and I guess knowing that I would be away next year gave me a set of balls I didn't know I would grow. Well thats not true, I had been growing them little by little. I was the first full time male cheerleader in ALL of Puerto Rico, and when I came in 2nd and 3rd during my fictional writing competitions they were both about gay runaways, but I finally grew a pair and decided to come out in school.

I first came out to my fellow juniors during a class retreat, I sat in the middle of the whole class and said “I know most of you have guessed it already, but I want you all to know officially that I am gay”...silence, silence...and then...RIOTOUS applause! Which was followed by classmate after classmate sharing their admiration in my honesty, and bravery; that choked me up of course. I made them all promise to keep it a secret till I found the right way to come out to the whole school. I had remembered we had learned about acronyms in English class, so I wrote a poem for the school paper called “My dirty little acronym”, and the first letter of every stanza spelled out “ I A M G A Y”, I remember before it went out to print, I sat down with some of the teachers and the school guidance counselor to help them prepare for the onslaught of possible backlash, as I was the first person in my school to come out while they were still in school. Surprisingly enough there wasn't much backlash, I was a little bummed out to be honest, as being a little gay boy, having watched documentary after documentary about Stonewall, and coming out stories, I wanted to have a vivid discussion about sexuality, but it wasn't really that big of a deal. I am very happy that I was able to live my last 6 months or so of high school in homophobic Puerto Rico, as an out and proud young man. I have, as Madonna says at the end of her Human Nature video ,“absolutely no regrets”.