…gay. Yep, I’m gay. It wasn’t always easy for me to say that. In fact, I couldn’t say it at all for the longest time.
When I reached my teenage years, I slowly but surely realized that I was attracted to boys and not girls. My immediate reaction was horror and disbelief. I couldn’t be gay. My father had been a notorious ladies’ man until he met my mother. I had been brought up with traditional values, just as my parents had. Just everything about who I felt I was supposed to be told me that I couldn’t be gay.
So I denied the feelings I had. I tried to date girls in high school and in college. But I was fooling myself and everyone else. I never had a serious relationship and I never came close to being physically intimate. But I continued to suppress my feelings. My mother died suddenly during my final year of college. Strangely, I did not feel very upset by this. I just never felt especially close to her. I had an older brother and she always seemed to focus her attention on him. The suddenness of her death did have a profound effect on my father.
My father became much more reserved and withdrawn. He ran a very successful wholesale company. He was very generous with his time and money. He made sure my brother and I never wanted for anything, and he treated his employees like family as well. When my mother died, he slowly stopped going to the normal charitable events he always attended. Soon enough he also began to cede control of his company to his subordinates. My brother and I both worked for the company. My brother was poised to take over, while I was working there just to determine if I wanted to or not.
I just wasn’t happy with the job. It wasn’t for me. It was nothing more than paper-pushing. Nothing against that, but I was just bored. Worse than that, I felt like anyone could do my job, and so I felt like I was holding back someone else in the company. I wasn’t happy in any facet of my life. I continued to try to date women. In fact, it was when I was on a date when something happened that would truly change my life.
I was at a bar with a woman named Marissa. We’d been in grade school and high school together, and now she worked for my father’s company as an in-house accountant. Unfortunately that night there was a loudmouth drunk who was making trouble at the bar for everyone. Marissa went to get us a round of drinks and this drunk immediately started hitting on her. She told him to go away but he got angry. I was afraid something was going to happen, so I ran up to the bar and told him to back off. He responded by picking up his bottle of beer and cracking me over the head with it. I remembered hearing Marissa scream as I hit the floor.
When I came to, there were two faces looking down at me. One was Marissa, and the other was…