The Last 12 Years

Chapter 2

Okay so when you're, uh gay, and in the 7thgrade, there's kind of a lot of pressure. Like that's when everybody, or every prepubescent boy adds the "so what are you gay" or the "that's gay" to anything that doesn't fit whatever the current 7thgrade status quo is. Like why one brand of clothes is gay, and the other brand isn't. 7thgrade boys are all about shoes, cars, and whatever gives there little lives a rise. I remember the first time I got invited to a friend's house wasn't a girl, shocker really, and seeing a half-naked girl on the wall. It was like one of those women who are half dressed for a sport illustrated magazine or like a woman whose job is to walk around the ring of a boxing match or a wrestling match. Speaking of wrestling, I think WWE was one of the first signs that I might have been one of the first clues that I wasn't straight. I mean, I was way more interested in the wrestler's enormous pecs than him slamming that chair into someone's back.

Back to that friends very provocative room. Besides that, poster which did nothing for me in the party in my pants department, another tell-tale sign that I was gay is that I never got into first person shooter games that were all the rage. Call of Duty was just a glorified guts festival with no actual point. I still played them if I had to, like when I went to his house, but I was never any good at them. I screamed whenever I got killed or just in general whenever someone got the jump on me. Pretty hard to pretend I'm just one of the boys when I'm sounding like one of the girls.

7thgrade was not the worst grade of my life, we'll leave that to one of the four grades in high school. 7thgrade was a year of a lot of inner monologuing and suppressing who I am, because the only thing worse than 7thgrade boys, are 7thgrade boys living in a republican state with severely closed minds. That's what being gay in Kentucky for you.