Born This Way by Paul Vitagliano Read Free Book Online Page B

so bad that my school sent me to speech class for three years—a class they created just for me.
    I remember an obsession with swords at this time in my life. Why? So I could pretend to be She-Ra, of course. Never He-Man. But nobody could make out the fact that I was saying, “By the power of Grayskull!” To this day, my family still teases me about shouting, “Baw-dee-aw-nees of Graythkull!” In retrospect, it all worked out really well. I grew up from a little lisping gay boy into a big gay man.

kurt, age 5
    I’m Kurt on the left with my (also gay) twin brother Matt on the right. I didn’t fully realize that I was gay until middle school. But I wasn’t ready to admit it to anyone, including myself, until I was a senior in high school.
    When I stumbled upon this picture at my dad’s house, my first thought was, “How did you all
not
know that we were gay?” Especially when we spent so much time playing Cinderella and adoring our purple My Little Pony dolls? My brother and I have been really lucky to have a supportive family and great friends. Perhaps if we’d stayed in the Mormon church, things would’ve been different. But we stopped attending around eight years old, and we haven’t looked back. Growing up, I never thought that if I came out, my mom would be saying things like, “You should go talk to that cute gay guy at Starbucks.” But she really does.



eamonn, age 4
    To me, girls always made such fabulous friends that I couldn’t conceive of being with them romantically. I was in third grade when I first learned what
gay
meant. By age twelve, I decided that gay was the way I planned to live the rest of my life —and with someone tall, dark, strong, and handsome!

ernesto, age 6
    My teen years were full of angst and could be perfectly narrated by Christina Ricci. I was a little lonesome, with no gay peers. Then high school came, and I began to embrace my homosexuality. I would no longer awkwardly dodge the “Are you gay?” question and I began to taste my freedom.
    Today my favorite color is blue, my favorite animal is a lion (although some would argue it’s a bear), and my favorite game is Scrabble. And my favorite holiday is still Valentine’s Day.

reese, age 5
    I remember having a crush on a classmate named Dustin, and I remember how hard I cried when he moved away just before the start of first grade. I also remember my love of the hand-on-hip pose, as is evident in this photo. If anything, looking back on pictures of me like this makes me remember how unselfconscious I was.
    Once I hit fifth grade, everything changed. That’s when the bullying started, and the name-calling, and getting my butt kicked after school: all those terrible things that so many of us have to deal with as gay kids. My parents were always supportive of me, but one memory in particular sticks out as the first moment that my mother truly offered her love and support. One night when I was about seven years old, we were watching
Melrose Place
together. There was a gay character on the show (a doctor portrayed by Doug Savant), and in one episode he kisses another man, or it’s implied that they’ve had sex or something. I remember when the episode ended and the credits were rolling, my mom turned to me and said, “Reese, that character is gay. And that’s okay.”



lisa, age 8
    This picture sparks many awkward, depressing memories of never fitting in with my perfect, happy friends or my strict Mormon family. I had just convinced my mother to let me cut my long hair. It traumatized me. Since then, I’ve vowed to make myself look as feminine as possible.
    The first time I remember having a real girl crush was at age thirteen. I’d doodled on a piece of paper about loving a girl, and my sister told my mom. When confronted, I cried, “Nooo! I don’t love her like
that
, just as a friend!” But that was when I realized