I often say I was a fat kid, but I mostly just felt like one. Realistically, I was just chubbier than my friends, owing to an aversion to participating in sports that I never got over. My parent’s like to tell a funny story about the time they tried to get me to play T-ball as a kid. During the car ride home after the first practice, I asked, “Do games take longer than practice?” When they said, “yes,” I said, “I quit!” and that was that.

Still, despite being decidedly un-athletic, I was one of the cool kids. I never really tried that hard, I just was. In a small town like Dunn, being cool had as much to do with who your parents were as anything else, and which church’s youth group they forced you to attend. (For most of us, at least.) Until high school when we started getting cars, my friends were more determined by whose house my parents felt safe dropping me off at, and whose parents would let their kids walk home with me after school (I lived a few blocks from my middle school.)

So I was cool, by default. I was also a nerd. Everyone copied my homework. I would do my brother’s book reports sometimes, despite a 3 grade difference. I sold my 8th grade science project to a senior in high school, and she got an A+. When the other boys were practicing sports, I was either playing a video game, or reading a book. I think I read as many books before I was 18 as I have since then. (Which is probably true of a lot of Americans, but I digress.) When I was in 8th grade, we got dial-up internet at our house, and my love for video games and fantasy literature combined into one hobby.

At that point, long before World of Warcraft, massively multiplayer online games did exist, but that label hadn’t been invented yet. We called them MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), or MUSHes (Multi-User Shared Hallucinations). There were no graphics, so roleplaying with others wasn't that different from what I'm doing right now. It was collaborative real-time storytelling, and we were the characters. I’d spend countless hours, long nights, and whole weekends playing those games, and my first coding experience was working to expand and improve them.

At that point in my life, my romantic experience had consisted of one girlfriend, in fourth grade. I had been guilt-tripped into dating her by mutual friends, and I liked her alright. We never actually went on any dates, and I don't think we even spent any time together outside of school. One day she kissed me in the hallway, which I found revolting, and I called and broke up with her that night. I didn't really bother trying to date girls after that.

So, when High School began, on nights when my friends were with their boyfriends/girlfriends, I would log onto Dragon’s Fang, or A Moment in Tyme, or Reflections of the Wheel, or whatever MUD was my current favorite, and play. There were stats (strength, intelligence, mana, health, all the usuals), but killing monsters and leveling up was mostly a way to kill time when nobody else was online, or if you didn't feel like roleplaying. Those stats only mattered if your character needed to fight, which wasn't that often. (I prefered games that tended toward cooperation of players vs. the environment, rather than player vs. player combat.)

Roleplaying, as you can guess, often involved romance, and where there is romance, there is… You guessed it, sex. My first sexual experiences were cyber. That might be the strangest part to my coming-of-age story. The first person to get me off could have been a 40 year old female roleplaying as a muscular male warrior, while I was playing as dark haired girl who had visions of the future. I’m not sure, exactly. Maybe the first time I might have been playing as my other favorite character, a knife-throwing pretty boy minstrel. I’ll never know for sure the real life gender of the people playing with me, helping me write those stories, typing our desires into terminal windows hundreds of miles apart. As much as it was an escape, it was also an opportunity to explore all the ways to be human that weren’t available in my normal life. I also went through a crisis of faith at this point, and became an atheist, but that’s another story.

I didn't have a real life sexual experience until I was a junior in High School, but after years of steamy roleplaying as all genders, some romantic and some explicit, the real life encounter was lackluster in comparison. I was at the School of Science and Math, and I had just come out. Conveniently, so had a former all-state wrestling champion (I barely knew him, but his body had the subject of plenty of fantasies), and it was announced by the small group of other “more established” gays, to our excited and anxious approval, that we both thought the other was cute, and that we should hook-up.

I went to his room at the appointed time, we made out awkwardly, he blew me, I tried to blow him, but the taste was new and strange, so I stopped. He blew me again, and we kind of stared at each other in silence for a few minutes before I excused myself. It was cold, it was clinical, and we never did it again. That’s how I lost my virginity. I don't think we exchanged more than passing greetings after that. It’s not a very exciting story, but that’s how it happened.

After that year at Science and Math I returned to Dunn for my last year of high school, so back in the closet I went, more or less. Enough people had heard through the grapevine that I'd come out while away, so I never really re-joined the cool kids on equal terms. I had a car though, so I wasn't restricted to only the friends my parents approved of. I spent most of my social time with a clique of poorer kids, whose lives were full of enough real, day-to-day struggles that the popularity contest at school wasn't a concern. Hanging out with the gay guy didn't phase them, since they're minds weren't focused as much on their reputations.

Senior year ended uneventfully, and so did the summer that followed. It could have been a lot worse. I only recall being called a faggot once, and it was yelled anonymously in the parking lot one day as I was skipping class to get high with friends. Straight boys didn't try to bully me into being an object for their pleasure, although that would happen later in life, at the hands of men who should have known far better.

Physical, attraction-based sex was something I didn't fully experience until college. Dating followed soon after. I was 24 when I came out to my parents. I had my first serious relationship when I was 26. I'm still figuring it all out, honestly. I grew up in a place and a situation where my love and desires were confined to my mind, and to stories I could read online, but never check out of the library.

A friend later in life who could see my sexual frustration would often tell me to “make it happen”, and those words, spoken with good intention, always hurt me more than I let him know. Making it happen is something most boys learn to do, with girls, at an age when my hands were tied by the culture that surrounded me. Learning to read consent is one thing, learning to read orientation before probing for consent is even more complex.

I’m fairly comfortable with myself at this point, more so than I've ever been. It helps that gay rights are more and more prevalent discussion nationally, although I do think the marriage debate sometimes detracts from the broader cultural discussion and the sharing of more alternative gay voices, since the rhetoric that whitewashes gay couples as “just like straight couples” ignores factors that have made our lives quite different.

Maybe it’s different for those finding themselves now, but for the young me, the map of what it meant to be a homosexual man wasn't on TV or visible in my daily life, it was scattered in fragments across the internet and throughout western literature and until long past puberty, there was no person in my life to help me put the pieces together, and be a compass while I oriented myself.