justen

I never knew I was gay. And I didn’t wake up one day and realize that I was gay. It was just something that was there, almost like subconscious, not something I paid any attention to for the longest time.

I was never the most popular kid, but I had friends and I never had any major problems in school. I was smarter than some kids, but never the smartest. My favorite subjects were history and language, and I really hated math. Still do, in fact.

My life was fairly simple for the longest time. Things were a little fuzzy when my mum told my brother and me that we were adopted. It was more difficult for my brother than for me, but it really did not have a major impact on my family.

I had a peachy life, really, until my eighth grade year. I was used to boring classes, and that autumn was no exception. I had some great teachers, but most of what we were “learning” seemed pretty useless to me.

September passed, the leaves were falling early that year. I had been on an email list for gay kids for a while, and it really helped me deal with my feelings. There was nobody in my life that I felt entirely comfortable discussing the whole gay thing with. So the list helped.

I guess it was late in the evening a few days before my birthday. Somebody had posted to the list a link to a news article online. Breaking news the site said. I decided to go to the site and see what was up.

A kid had been beaten. That doesn’t seem like an adequate word for what happened to him. Beaten? No, he was brutalized. What happened to him is not something you think happens to people. He was beaten, and left in the dark, cold night, to die. The temperature was so cold that night, the article said. His condition was critical. But he was still alive. He was on life support.

Matthew Shepard. I never met him. Never heard of him before that fall. But what happened to him changed my life. I think it changed everybody’s life.

I had been checking the website from his hospital every chance I could for updates. Just before I left for school that day, I checked, and I just felt helpless. Scared. I thought about Judy Shepard. I thought about my mother. What if that had been me? Three days before my fourteenth birthday.

I went to school. I wasn’t there, though. I was somewhere else. I don’t really know where. That evening I finally started to think about what had happened. I cried.

For the rest of that week, and the next, I wore a yellow armband with three blue circles. It was the only way I could express any part of what I was feeling to other people. It was not a powerful statement, but it was my statement.

I will never forget what happened to Matthew Shepard. I couldn’t. It is forever a part of my life. I think many people feel the same way. He seemed so much like he could be your friend. Your best friend. For me, I felt like he could have been me.

America moved on. Everybody learned something that October. Every mom did go home, and she did give her kid a hug and tell him she loved him. It took me a long time to realize that I could still be me. Laramie is not unique. Neither is Wyoming. But for everything that Matthew’s family and the world lost, every kid gained something. They gained the courage to be themselves.

I wrote this in March 2002. I added it to my blog in July 2004. It was published in XY edition 38, The Nation.