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Why The First Time I Came Out Was So Hard
Even the most deeply engrained denial can only hold for so long
I’m gay. I have been all my life.
And would have known it when I was seven years old, if I had known about sex and all that ‘grown-up stuff’.
But we attended a Baptist ‘Missionary’ every Sunday and the word ‘sex’ was never mentioned in my house.
The first time I learned anything about it, I was ten years old.
My cousin, ‘Mike’, lived on a farm and wanted to show me the loaner hog they got to keep for a month. I followed him past the cow pasture and old barn to where we could see the pig pen. It was a barbed-wire enclosure that spanned a slow, wide stream they called ‘the branch’. The pen was shaded, and pigs wallowed in mud holes they’d made in the soaked ground.
Mike pointed out the hog. It was huge and dark-colored while the other pigs were smaller and had pink skin and sparse white hair. The hog was on top the rear end of a pig. I told my cousin they were fighting, and the hog might hurt the smaller pig. He looked at them and got a weird, almost scary, sort of smile and a glint in his eyes. He said they were not fighting; it was sex and he liked watching them do that. They would have more piglets before long. His mama would be happy about that.