Gay, for most of us isn't an all at once thing, it is a gradual dawning, a realization, sometimes a frightening one, that one is different from others in a fundamental way that matters. So for most of us, there is the growing realization that we are gay.
It is what makes it so easy for me to understand and empathize with transgender people who are male, assigned female at birth or female, assigned male at birth.
Our stories and their stories are very similar, sometimes identical.
For each of us gay men, there were growing, triggering moments where we realized that we were attracted to other men.
These start at prepubescence, as one might imagine, as one's body and mind are getting ready for the toxic chemical bath that is adolescence, and grow in frequency and insistence. For me, when I finally had sex with another man, it was electric, like fireworks, like having my mind and soul set on fire -- because it finally all made sense - I am gay.
But those small moments and realizations, they occur without fanfare, and without much significance.
My gay anthem is "Jose Cuervo" written in 1978 by Cindy Jordan and recorded in 1983 (the year I turned 11) by country alto singer Shelly West, when I heard it as a boy on the verge of preadolescence, I realized that I wanted to "be the life of the party, I wanted to dance on the bar, kiss all the cowboys, and shoot out the lights. I wanted to wake up grinning next to a cute cowboy the next morning." (Ironically Jose Cuervo is a terrible tequila, give me a nice sipping tequila - neat, no ice or even a flavored Mexican tequila - usually best cold, but Jose Cuervo is terrible).
I was born in 1972, the first female oral contraceptive (often known as THE pill) was FDA approved in 1960, the year my mother turned 19 -- she was a nun in the convent at the time. For the first time women could engage in sex and not get pregnant, and it changed our culture and the world. I grew up in a culture and an era that was exploring its sexuality and becoming more overtly sexual and it was spilling into popular culture.
Blues music of the late 1930s, early 1940s explored themes of human sexuality, even women's sexuality gasp but in increasingly thinly veiled allegory and metaphor:
"Well it's blues in my house, from the roof to the ground,
And it's blues everywhere since muy [sic] good man left town.
Blues in my mail-box cause I cain't get no mail,
Says blues in my bread-box 'cause my bread got stale.
Blues in my meal-barrel and there's blues upon my shelf
And there's blues in my bed, 'cause I'm sleepin' by myself."
[Merline Johnson]
But in 1960 the US FDA approved "THE pill" - 12 years before I was born, and our America became a place of sexual exploration before AIDS came along at the very end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s and shut the party down -- realizing that I was gay as very young men who were just 10 years older than me were dying of a sexually transmitted plague was psychologically traumatizing.
But prior to then our culture was waist deep in sex -- another gay theme for me, prior to "Jose Cuervo" was Terri Gibbs's "Somebody's Knockin" which was all about being lit on fire, being feverish with sexual desire for a man.
So as a proto-gay, prepubescent boy burgeoning on the toxic chemical stew of adolescence, these songs about sexual desire for men, I identified them, and they stirred something deep within me, which aside from perking up my prepubescent penis, included self-identification.
Photo by @kellyjanderson shot on the Nikon D5100