When I was asked to share my story for this project, something in me immediately said yes.

But something else hesitated.

There is a place inside me that wants to be seen and known, and another place that still wants to hide and be invisible. That tension has lived in my body for as long as I can remember. Even now, at seventy-five, I can feel it.

Growing up gay meant growing up with the constant fear that someone would find out. That I would be rejected. Called out. Exposed.

So I became very skilled at hiding how I felt.

A lot of my life’s work, in one way or another, has been learning to challenge that instinct. So, the question of saying yes to telling my story, or part of my story, touches that place.

That tension between wanting to be seen and wanting to hide has been with me since I was very young.

The clearest moment it first appeared was in seventh grade. I was 12 years old. 

My first day of biology class.

Our teacher was a man named Mr. Record. The moment I saw him, I had a visceral reaction. My knees literally felt weak. Something moved through my body that I didn’t yet understand but could not deny.

I had felt hints of those feelings before, sometimes toward movie stars or comic book characters. But this was different. This was real life, right in front of me, and it broke through my awareness in a completely unavoidable way.

At the same time, my friends were having their own reactions.

They were talking loudly about Miss Morelli, the Italian language teacher. Their attraction to her was very obvious and very vocal, described in the explicit language of teenage boys.

Meanwhile, I was having a very similar reaction, but very quietly, about a male teacher.

I remember sitting there, realizing something about myself that felt undeniable.

This is who I am.

I may not have fully claimed it yet, but somewhere deep in the center of my being, I knew.

I was gay.

There was no long process of figuring it out. The realization arrived whole. The problem was not knowing. The problem was what to do with knowing. 

The world I was growing up in had already answered that question. 

I began looking for ways to fix it. That was the language used back then. Everything I found reinforced the idea that something was wrong.

The Catholic Church, where I was raised, described homosexuals as intrinsically evil and objectively disordered. Heavy words and judgments for a young body to carry.

When you’re twelve years old, and you suddenly discover that the category being condemned includes you, something complicated happens inside.

So I made a promise to myself. No one would ever find out.

No one would ever know. I hid who I was. From my friends. From my family. And, in some ways, even from myself.

From that point on, I spent my adolescence pretending to be straight. I dated girls. I went to prom. I did all the things that were expected.

The strange thing was that the performance worked well enough that no one questioned it. What they couldn’t see was that something essential was missing. I liked the girls I dated as people. I cared about them. But the spark everyone talked about never appeared. The emotional connection everyone talked about was not really there. I was going through the motions. And yet there was never a physical pull.

At the same time, there was a quiet part of me that never fully believed what I was being told about homosexuality. Even as a young man, something in me sensed that the narrative couldn’t be entirely true. That small voice became the fuel that sparked the awareness that there wasn’t something wrong with who I truly was.

I knew many gay men later in life who attempted suicide because of the shame and pressure they experienced. Somehow, that part of me that doubted the story helped me survive it. It allowed me, slowly, to begin accepting myself even while hiding.

One of the ways I tried to solve the problem was by getting married.

When I met my first wife, she wanted to get married. To me, it felt like a kind of miracle. This was my way to a normal life. Society had made it clear that if you lived openly as a gay man, you were likely to end up lonely and miserable.

Marriage felt like a way out of that.

I was attracted to her. That was a kind of gift. It allowed me to believe that maybe this could work.

I was also honest with her before we married. I told her that I was attracted to men. I felt I had to say it. If I didn’t, it would feel like a betrayal.

She said she didn’t care.

She had her own reasons for wanting to marry, and so we did.

I never explored relationships with men before that time. I was too afraid. Yet, the longing was there, buried deep inside.

In college, I had friends who came out as gay. But I didn’t. I hid it and hid it well. I had made a very firm decision with myself that this part of my life would remain buried.

After we married, my wife and I became deeply involved in transcendental meditation. We even became teachers of that practice. Even studying it more deeply in Europe.

Part of me believed that a spiritual path could help me somehow bypass these human problems.

The plan, if I’m honest, was to utilize enlightenment to fulfill my life. Of course, the trade-off for that was my sexuality.

Although I had a sexual relationship with my wife, that was my only experience of sex.

Then life filled up with children.

Our first child was born when I was thirty. Our second followed not long after. Parenting two young girls was all-consuming. Children are there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

In many ways, parenting became a diversion from the deeper questions that were waiting for me.

How could you not lose yourself in the beauty of raising two little girls?

Still, there was a quiet tension running through everything. I had never actually allowed myself to explore the truth I had known since I was twelve.

Fear was a powerful force.

Fear of losing the life I had built.
Fear of hurting people I loved.
Fear of what it might mean if I stopped pretending.

Life, however, has a way of moving us toward the places we avoid.

Everything changed when I went to Shalom at age thirty-seven.

That was the first time I truly considered coming out.

There is a poem on the wall in the Shalom room about vulnerability. Every time I walked past it, one line stopped me.

“Until we confront ourselves in the eyes and hearts of others, we are running.”

That line confronted me every time I entered the room.

There is a part of me that believes, though I can’t prove it, that if I had never gone to Shalom, I might never have come out. It felt that big.

I was married. I had two daughters who were seven and three.

My wife was attending Shalom as well. We were doing couples work together there.

For years, I had kept that realization buried beneath layers of caution and responsibility. But in that environment, it became harder to ignore.

But the men’s retreats took me somewhere deeper.

The connection I felt with other men was profound. There was open affection among the men, both straight and gay, that I had never experienced before.

Something inside me began to open.

Then I fell in love with a man during one of those retreats.

The emotional experience of loving a man felt completely different from anything I had known before. It was as if my heart opened into a space I had never allowed myself to feel. Eventually, I realized I couldn’t see him and stay married, so we parted ways.

After my wife and I separated, I reached out to him again. One night, after spending the night with him, something profound happened. Early in the morning, I woke up and felt something extraordinary. Lying there, I felt like an energetic sponge, absorbing something from the man next to me. Something that had been denied or held back for decades was finally flowing freely.

That moment was one of the moments I experienced what I had been longing for since I was a young twelve-year-old in Mr. Record’s class.

This is what it feels like to be exactly who I am.

My children were ten and fourteen at the time. Being a gay father was complicated. Many of the men I met had no experience with children, and children seemed like aliens to them.

Then I met the man who would become my husband.

His ex had children from a previous relationship, so he understood family life. He knew how to engage with my children and with me as both a father and a partner.

That was just one of the many reasons I loved him so much. Our relationship lasted three decades. During that time, I experienced something I never thought possible in my younger years: a sense of living as my full self.

My ex-wife, who is a therapist, was incredibly supportive during that time. She supported not only me as a divorced father but also me as a gay man. She even supported my relationship with my husband. I’ve been very fortunate in that way. And, I’m also aware how unique that is for a gay man.

Life continues to evolve, as it always does. Eventually, that chapter was completed as well. It truly had run its course. Now I find myself in another phase of life.

I live alone again. Freedom and loneliness often travel together. I feel both. Sometimes I look back and think, I can’t believe I actually lived this full life: marrying my ex-wife, diving fully into parenting, raising my daughters, thirty years with my husband.  I built a life that once felt impossible.

Life requires stepping into uncertainty. 

You cannot have security and growth at the same time when you’re longing for more.

Every major turning point in my life involved choosing growth over safety.

For me, that wisdom is simple. Go for it. Risk it.  Do it anyway.