Read Online It Gets Better by Dan Savage - Free Book Online

years ago, Ely has been an activist for the gay Orthodox Jewish community through social media tools such as Blogger and Facebook.
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GOING BACK IN
    by Michael Cunningham
    NEW YORK, NY
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    L ike so many gay kids, I had a secret childhood.
    There was the conventional outward childhood: school and birthday parties, family trips, all that. And there was the darker inner childhood that started before I can remember. The sense that there was something deeply wrong about me. That I was impersonating someone. That I had to keep my strangeness to myself, or it would all come toppling down.
    It was a little like having an unwholesome imaginary friend. A friend who hung around even though I detested his company.
    Like so many gay kids, I grew adept at impersonation. I got fluent in normalese.
    I grew so fluent that, by the time I got to high school, I had a crew of guy friends, a girlfriend, all that. There were times when I believed that the nasty imaginary friend, my own personal Gollum, had gone away. But he was always there.
    I went to considerable lengths to keep him hidden. I became ultranormal. I did well in school. I hung out. I hooted along with my friends about all the girls we wanted to do nasty things to. And, yes, I laughed at the gay jokes.
    Here I am on an ordinary Saturday night, getting stoned with my friends. Their names were Craig, Peter, Bronson, and Rob.
    Linda’s tits got bigger over the summer. She bounces really nice now.
I’d like to bounce on her.
Dream on.
I’ve got a thing for Vicky’s ass.
You’re an ass man.
I’m Vicky’s ass man.
Faggot!
You’re a faggot.
Yeah, right.
Who brought it up first?
Eat me.
You’d like that.
I hereby vow I’m going to nail Linda by Thanksgiving.
Dream on, faggot.
    It doesn’t matter which of us said what. We were all working from the same script.
    I was a spy in a hostile country. I had to be perfectly adept at its ways and customs, or my true identity would be revealed, and I’d be deported. I was nervous almost all the time.
    I didn’t come out until I went away to college. In college, it seemed I could be somebody new, and could befriend the outcasts and miscreants, the ones who loved David Bowie and who dressed extravagantly and went to the bars in San Francisco on the weekends.
    It was, in a sense, the beginning of my real life.
    But still. A beginning implies an end. I felt as if I couldn’t go home anymore. I couldn’t act like the high school boy I’d been, and I couldn’t present myself in my new, mutated form, either. When I had to go back, over the holidays, I didn’t see much of my old friends. They assumed it was snobbery. I’d gone off to a fancy college and left them behind.
    What I wanted to leave behind, of course, was that perpetually frightened boy, that imposter.
    I told myself it didn’t matter. I had a new life, after all. My history started at the age of seventeen. Everything before that was more or less erased. The secret agent had gone to his true home.
    Years passed. I published a novel, A Home at the End of the World, about a gay boy in love with his straight best friend.
    I wasn’t private anymore. I was taking it out into the world. Terry Gross, on NPR, asked me if I was a gay writer, and I told her I was.
    I decided, after much debate, to send copies of the book to Craig, Peter, Bronson, and Rob. I didn’t want an obliterated past anymore.
    Craig called me a few weeks later.
    Hey, buddy. I loved the book.
Did you really?
Yeah. Are you ever coming back to LA?
Yeah, for Christmas.
Let’s have a drink when you’re in town.
Okay. I’d like that
    We did. The five of us. Here we are on that night, in a local bar festooned with garlands and blinking lights .
    So. I’m gay. Ta-da.
We knew.
You did not.
We sort of did.
Hey, as long as