The House Where I Grew Up, and the Queer Boy Next Door.

Reflections on becoming who I’ve always been

Image by freepik

On a recent trip to Los Angeles, a colleague invited me to have lunch at a Mexican restaurant in North Hollywood. As I got out of the Lyft, I looked around and realized I was standing at the cross-street where I grew up.

This Papa John’s and a parking lot could easily be found on the corner of any remote town across the country. To look at it, you’d never think this was a street in one of the most vibrant metropolitan areas in the world.

So as a child, that vacant, beige, nondescript corner drove me crazy. I felt like I was drowning in the complacent mediocrity of the suburbs. I’d look around and think — “This can’t be all there is!”

Photo by the author, of the cross-street where he grew up.

But standing on the corner just a few weeks ago, as a grown man in my 30s, I was no longer suffocating, because I know there’s a world elsewhere.

As a kid who wanted to make a life in the theatre, I longed for New York City. I longed to escape the anonymity of an endless stretch of highways, and to go to a place where my life was right outside the front door, and people were…