The first boy I ever had a schoolyard crush on was Cole. I misspelled his name as “Coal” for many months. In first grade, just before the dawn of electronic filing when everything was still written on cards and you actually had to think about the Dewey Decimal System, I took on library duty with Cole. We were tasked with completing the tedious work of shelving and organizing books at our primary school. You know, just boys bein’ boys in the library.

He was a little blond kid with curly hair. I wish I could remember more about him, but that was over 20 years ago and I’ve taken a lot of meds since then. I remember he was kind to me and that I felt safe and authentic around him. I didn’t know what it meant at the time, not really, but in hindsight, I do feel like his friendship did something for me in such an innocent and platonic way. Whether he knew it or not, he allowed me to think about what the future would be like if the person I loved were a boy.

Neither of us — and perhaps I’m speaking for Cole out of turn, but I can assume — really knew what “gay” meant, nor did we think of each other as boyfriends in any perceptible way. I certainly never dreamt of telling other people that I had a crush on him. While I didn’t understand the concept of “gay” per se, it was the early 1990s and I did have a television. I could discern what made Will & Grace special. I was a kid and by nature of my age I was naive, but I wasn’t dumb. I knew that boys like girls and girls like boys. I might not have known what sexuality was, but I did know that boys grow up to marry their wives. It was an immovable fact of life, something that I just understood to be true.

I also knew that I thought boys were attractive to me (even if platonically at the time) and that girls were more like the people I wanted to be friends with. But what is a girlfriend and wife but a lifelong friend? I had no perspective of adult sexuality, so these two things — liking boys and befriending girls — didn’t seem all that weird to me. Television wasn’t real, Dad once told me, unknowingly cementing in my young mind that boys don’t really grow up to like-like boys.

We switched off  Will & Grace and went to bed.

My dad, who had been a bachelor for a few years and had not yet combined families with my mom and siblings, had Maxim sitting on his desk and posters of bikini models pinned to the walls of his bedroom. At night, I would do my best to appear like I was asleep on the couch, hoping he wouldn’t move me to my bed. It was vital to my six-year-old self that I secretly stay up late and watch Baywatch with him. I’m sure he caught me watching along with him loads of times because I couldn’t keep my eyes squinted. Try as I may to watch while appearing to be asleep, I would always catch myself with my eyes wide open and have to consciously re-squint them. He probably thought I was ogling Pamela Anderson, but it was, in fact, all about Mitch.

I did have a girlfriend, in the loosest sense of the word, from first to third grade.

Clara the Girlfriend had been my best friend all those years: back in kindergarten, a friend of hers tapped me on the shoulder one day while a bunch of us K-level kids were gathered in our class “pod” room to watch a movie. She told me Clara was too shy to ask me herself, but would I be Clara’s boyfriend? I said yes because Clara was cool and she liked horses — so did I. My grandparents had horses.

I stopped going to daycare and instead spent many days after school at her house playing with her family’s basset hounds, listening to Britney Spears, or watching Power Puff Girls and proclaiming that Blossom was my favorite because I liked her long hair (how did they not know?). 

At the end of third grade, Clara and I both moved away from the town we had been living in. Her family relocated to Louisiana, and I went to live with my grandparents about an hour and a half into the Texas Hill Country from Houston, outside of a town called Brenham. When I moved to Brenham, I met another friend, Cassidy — who I never asked to be my girlfriend, by the way — who became my best friend for the year I lived there. 

Thanks to the Internet, Cassidy and I have actually reconnected over the last couple years. We’re both hella gay now. Birds of a feather, I guess.

As I continued to grow and experience the microcosms of civilization that is public education, slowly gaining a concept of what gay meant and fully aware that I was different, I began to feel like I had been living three childhoods: The public’s, my parents’, and mine.

I was never the closeted kid who became homophobic in my denial (thank God), but I did solidly deny any assertion that I was gay. I clung to the punks, shit-kickers, and theatre kids, wearing lots of black and hoodies year-round, ill-fitting jeans, and nothing that called attention to my being. The idea was that if you don’t see me, you won’t inquire about me. The very first time I wore a t-shirt without a hoodie overtop it was my senior year of high school, and it was one of the most uncomfortable moments of my entire life, and even though I had joined the high school theatre program, I’d only done so because my older sibling had. But even then, my sibling and I were techies, not actors. I didn’t dare venture on stage until our mom asked us to. My first role was in a black-box play, a supporting role that had my heart pounding the entire time. But that’s another tale for another day.

To the public, I was meek, quiet, and awkward. I seemed to be questionably straight — just a little weird. The theatre upperclassmen called my strange friends, my sibling, and me “the dark techies,” something that I’m still not sure was a good thing?

For my parents, the welded-shut hinges of that iron maiden were allowed to loosen, if only just a tad. I didn’t have to wear a hoodie at home, and could even enjoy wearing shorts around the house from time to time. My parents embraced my weirdness (for now, it seemed), and that was all I needed to get by.

I remained closeted to them, though. I knew they wouldn’t take the news well, so I left it safely tucked away, carefully placed in a shoebox at the back of the highest shelf in my mind’s closet, as it were. I was a weird middle child, but at least I was still straight. I’d still grow up to produce children and marry a nice wife. At the time, that was okay — this facade was easy enough to keep up with since my life hadn’t really started yet. Long-term relationships and marriage were certainly not on the horizon at that time. A partner to have and to hold for the rest of my life? Not on the radar yet, it all still felt so far removed from me. I still had to go away to college, after all. I was putting off the inevitable. 

Within my own head, I finally began to mourn a future that hadn’t happened yet. A life that would never be and a future I would never realize. I loved the idea of discovering love with another guy, and as I had grown, I did come to terms with what “gay” meant and how I fell into that end of the spectrum. But with this understanding came an awareness of a life that I would never know. As university quickly approached, I felt as though I was screaming in outer space — incredibly loud and heard by no one.

I had plenty of crushes on friends and schoolmates that I never explored other than Cole — not that I’m assuming any of those crushes would have been reciprocated. In any case, I didn’t have the courage to come out until after I graduated high school. I was 18 and had been forced by finances to take a gap year before college. I came out during what was recognized by those who were actually in school as Spring Break 2011.

And I’m still on Lexapro because of it.

I wouldn’t go back into the closet for the world, though. I’ve learned to pivot. I’ve learned to set boundaries. I learned what family meant and who it covered.

I can’t help but wonder sometimes what life could have been like for me (and others like me) growing up if sexuality wasn’t stigmatized. How that might have changed my relationships or how well-adjusted an adult I may have become. If I had been allowed — by family, society, or otherwise — to be a little gay kid, exploring my urges, interests, and thoughts as straight children do and are allowed to.

Like when, while I was on a visitation weekend at my birth mother’s place around four or five years old, a little girl the same age as me from the apartments nearby pulled me into a bush so she could ask to kiss me on the lips. I let her. It was weird. I was uncomfortable and I squished a caterpillar about it after she left me alone under the greenery.

What if I, and other kids like me, had the same freedom and confidence as her without being force-fed a dangerous concept of your life as being inherently bad? If my childhood, and that of other queer folks, hadn’t been split into three (or more) modes to switch between, who would we be today? I refuse to allow my story to have an unhappy ending, and part of that refusal includes cultivating space where queer kids in coming generations are allowed to embrace and explore their queerness and to know that it’s absolutely natural to be “different” from your peers. Humanity is not a monolith, and I wish I’d have known that so I could have been one child instead of three.

I beg the question, would the fabric of the planet have buckled had I asked Cole if I could kiss him in the library that day?

– Barrett White