My story

Hello all,

I’m a thirty-year-old man from the North Carolina that’s struggling to come to terms with my sexuality. While I’ve secretly questioned my sexuality since I was a teenager, recently, I’ve been driven to deal head-on with this issue and contemplate the prospect of living my life as a gay or bisexual man. The driving force behind this change is my separation last year from my wife and longtime partner, who I’ve been married to for several years and had been in a relationship with for a decade.

I wanted to share my story here, as I’ve been following this forum for several weeks now, and I’ve found it to be tremendously helpful to read the stories of other people that have traveled similar paths as my own.

To begin with, despite a lifetime of denial, I now realize that my primary sexual attraction is to other men. On the Kinsey scale, I probably register at a five. To paraphrase another poster on this forum, I am functionally bisexual but primarily gay.

Growing up in the conservative South, I learned to suppress and deny these feelings. From a young age, it was always inculcated in me that the worst thing anyone could ever be was a “faggot.” (I apologize for using this heinous word, but I know of no other way to express the type of homophobia that surrounded me growing up.) On top of this, my father has always been an extremely homophobic person. (Fortunately, my mother – who is divorced from him and lives out-of-state with her second husband – does not share my father’s bigoted views.) As a result of this, from puberty onward, I’ve been in a state of denial and, at times, self-hatred about my sexuality. Until recently, I had never even allowed myself to fantasize or entertain romantic thoughts about being with other men – only women. Anytime I’ve ever found myself attracted to a man, I’ve always immediately pushed away the thought and been stricken with a sense of shame. Needless to say, as I’ve grown older, such suppression has become increasingly distressing on an emotional level and difficult to sustain.

As noted above, until my wife and I separated last year, I had been in a committed relationship with her for years – since we were in college. After getting married several years ago, the two of us then split up (or, more accurately, my wife made the decision to leave me) last spring. At the time she left me, my life was in a mess: I was heavily addicted to an attention-deficit-disorder drug, which, until recently, I had been prescribed to take for years. I was also in a deep state of depression – a condition that often manifested itself as an anger problem. But despite our painful separation, and despite the fact that my wife now lives across the country, the two of us are still extremely close. We talk every day on the phone and we still tell each other, “I love you.” Over the holidays, we also saw each other, spent several nights together, and made love when she came to town for a week. Notably, my wife has been phenomenally supportive as I’ve grappled with questions about my sexuality and struggled with deep depression. (I first told her a few months ago that I think I might be bisexual or gay.) All in all, I love and trust my wife more than anyone in the entire world; regardless of where life leads us in the future, I know that I want to have her in my life. At this point, though, the two of us are still figuring out just what our relationship is and will be.

Unfortunately, at present, my long-distance relationship with my wife is one of the only sources of optimism and support that I have. To put it mildly, my current situation is downright depressing. In terms of work, I am presently employed as a low-wage temp worker at a crappy non-union factory in the area. The atmosphere on the shopfloor at work is characterized, to some extent, by the same type of homophobia that I’ve been surrounded by my entire life. Thus, at work, I find myself falling into the same habit that I’ve always adopted around others: I present myself as being completely straight. I tell people that my wife and I are planning on getting back together; I flirt with girls; and I talk with male co-workers about girls. Doing this often has the effect of forcing me back into a state of internal denial and self-loathing. On top of this, the pay at my job is so low that it poses a serious obstacle to securing my own independence and finding a path forward. Because of the low pay, for the past several months, I’ve been living at my dad’s house and attempting to save up enough money to move out on my own. Needless to say, living with my dad – someone who would likely never, ever accept me if I were to come out – is very difficult and has the effect of forcing me further into the closet. Fortunately, at this point, I’ve managed to save up some money – though it’s clear that I’m going to have to find a better job before I can set out on my own.

Beyond this, on a strictly emotional level, there are a number of issues that I’ve been struggling with in terms of my sexuality. At this point, it’s very hard to imagine living my life as a gay or bisexual man. While I’ve made some progress in this regard – thanks, in part, to the assistance of a therapist that I’ve been seeing for about two months – I still find it difficult to even look at other men and allow myself to find them attractive. After years of internally denying my attraction to the same sex and forcing myself to flirt exclusively with women, it’s tough to break out of this cycle. All this is exacerbated by the fact that, at this point, I have no idea where I could go to meet other gay people in person or find a real-life support network of people that have gone through what I’m currently going through.

Where is this “gay community” that I hear so much about?

Also, how will I overcome my own internalized homophobia and fear of being gay?

How will I find the courage to come out of the closet to old friends and family members – most of whom, I’m sad to say, I have avoided being in contact with since separating from my wife?