Today I can boldly affirm that I am a gay man. I don’t necessarily go around with my own G sewn brazenly onto my shirt, but I no longer have to bury it with anguish in the deepest parts of my being. Instead I give out my card when appropriate, and I do so with confident and mayhap defiant pride. I am now free to live an authentic life.

In another environment I might have been able to seek help and counsel from peers and adults. But in fundamentalism – where a reputation (so I heard countless times) is like a pane of glass that, once broken, can never be repaired-. . .I felt trapped by the reputation I had constructed.

I had never come out publicly until now. I hesitated, dreading the influx of sincere, yet condescending, pleas for my soul from friends and acquaintances: the condemnation. I realized, though, that the people I fear reading my story are precisely the ones whom I may have the unique ability to touch, to give them a face and a name for something they fear. And so, my story…