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The Swimsuit Edition: When Boys Become Men

posted by Liam Reed at 9:54 am.

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Coming out to my parents was one of the easiest things I’ve ever had to do. Actually, coming out to my entire family was one of the easiest things I’ve ever had to do. It was so easy and to think that I did so at 14 (maybe 15?) years old! Man, I had balls.

Well. Yes. I do, and they’re what got me into trouble in the first place. I didn’t get to choose to come out to my parents because a little tool in Internet Explorer (which has since been replaced with FireFox, thank god) known as the History Folder decided to do all the work for me. The next part of this gets a little graphic, so reader beware. If masturbation frightens you, I highly suggest you hit the back button on your browser right now.

So, when you’re 13 or 14 years old you tend to still be in this whole “puberty” phase. I remember really enjoying the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated and the fact that we happened to keep all issues of SI in the downstairs bathroom. It was a godsend. This was probably my first real encounter with the Germans and Heidi Klum and I became really close friends that year.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, going through all those girls got kind of boring after a while. I was flipping through the magazine looking for some new meat and it turns out my new victim would be the star of a cigarette ad. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I liked Brokeback Mountain before it was cool (even though that movie sucks major balls). I decided to try my hand at the cowboy. I’m pretty sure that this ad with the muscular cowboy smoking a cigarette with bare arms, sweaty and dirty, was put in this magazine simply to help young guys like me “discover themselves.” But I hate that term and therefore it will forever be doomed to living within quotation marks.

this is the one, boys

That damn cowboy. He is what got me to look to the internet to see what was wrong with me. Why was doing the business with this MAN more fun than with Heidi Klum. I mean, I could actually see her breasts, and they were wet, and I was on a page with a guy!? Well, thanks to friends like Napster and Kazaa (which one still existed then?) I was able to quickly download pictures and eventually videos which would indeed prove to myself that yes, I was indeed one of those queers, even though I wasn’t really sure I knew what that meant. Who knew that it meant I had to develop a lisp and become an extreme liberal who thinks of nothing other than sex, all day every day? Go figure.

Well, a few months later I had decided to try my hand at websites (no pun intended), which was clearly a bad idea. I knew how to use computers really well, but I was also stupid. I didn’t think to delete the history that was collecting every time I needed to uh … question my sexual orientation. One fine weekend my mother called me downstairs, “Bill,” (yes, Bill. Fuck you!) “I have to ask you a question.”

I’ve blocked a lot of this from my memory because it was incredibly embarrassing. I don’t recall the exact details, but it involved my mother asking me if I had been going to any websites I shouldn’t be going to. I do remember the first sentence I said though, “I think I might be bisexual.”
That’s bullshit. I knew damn well that I wanted the co- …. country home goodness of a cowboy. Yes. I knew I was gay but I didn’t want to admit it to her, and possibly not to myself either.

Actually, the transition between 8th grade and my freshman year is really fuzzy. I came out to my best friends at the end of 8th grade, so this masturbation stint must have happened then, but my mom didn’t question me on the subject until high school, which also happens to be when I was dating my first boyfriend/kiss/etc. What I’m saying is, if you ever write my biography, you may want to reference my journals for exact dates and details.

My mom told me that it was probably was just a phase but that she would love me no matter what. She said I was too young to know what I wanted sexually. Well, she was wrong and she came to see that after a while. She’s currently a member of HRC (but I didn’t tell her about that hippie PFLAG shit) and she’s pretty freakin’ cool. I mean, she’s going for her blackbelt in Judo right now. Just sayin’.

But yeah, she agreed to not tell my dad because at this point in my very short life I really really hated him. A lot. A lot of it had to do with how I felt he treated me unfairly and I felt he hated my boyfriend Adam because he was very flamboyant and, yes, around the 4th or 5th grade, he made me feel I was fat. I probably wasn’t but I still feel to this day that I was indeed a chubby little middle-schooler who couldn’t find a date.

Then, it was my sophomore year of high school and I told my family that I didn’t want to go on vacation with them to Disney World. I told them I would be a pain in the ass like I was on our last vacation and that it would just make everyone miserable. They remembered the last vacation and they decided to let me stay at Amy’s for the week, but I would have to spend Easter with my cousins and would spend the first two nights of break at Uncle Tim’s.

I was earning hours for my driver’s license so I was driving myself with my dad as a co-pilot. It was just the two of us driving from our little southside suburb to a very Irish part of southern Chicago. He turned to me, “Bill,” (Fuck you!) “I know that you and Nathan are … a couple. I just want you to know that no matter if you are gay or straight or bisexual or whatever, you’ll always be my son, and I am very proud of you and I will love you no matter what.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about it that entire break. It terrified me. My mom had told him. I said something like, “Ok,” and “I love you too.” Something along those lines. Since then, my relationship with my dad has gotten a million times better. I love hanging out with him and making him laugh with my weird humor and building stuff with him or drinking a beer with him and his buddies in the garage (we’re classy southsiders) or whatever. Having my parents come out for me was one of the greatest things that could have happened for my relationship with my family. I know that I’m lucky and that not everyone has this. A kid I knew in high school got chased out of his house by his dad who was threatening to shoot him if he ever came back. I’m pretty damn lucky.

But yeah, that got me to being really “out” at school, wearing rainbow pins and starting a GSA and having interviews in the local paper. It was the paper thing made me realize, oh wait, now my whole family can see this, I better tell everybody. And so we (my family and I) did. And it also happens that no one ever talks about it. The only time anyone has ever mentioned anything was my Uncle Joe when he asked if one of the organizations I was in at UIUC was LGBT-affiliated. It wasn’t.

Up until last Christmas I thought my Nana hated me. I set up this weird projection clock for her that she got for her birthday/Christmas (yeah, by the way, I share a birthday with Jesus Christ AND my incredibly religious grandmother) and after that she was just praising me all the time. It was awesome. Someone should have bought her that clock years ago.

Liam Reed: 1987 model, runs fairly well, few dents, starts in cold weather, no baggage, loves flea markets and canned soup. Send all hate mail, love mail, and sexual advances to withtongue@gmail.com