On Being Gay In A Straight World

I really love this picture and am so grateful to my friend Apmel Goosson for directing my attention to it! Believe it or not, the questions or reactions on the posters are still the ones we gays sometimes get, well slightly reversed.

Honestly I cannot remember a time when I did not fall in love with boys and men around me, even before I knew there was such a thing as being "gay". For a short while during puberty I fell in love with a girl named Miranda, but soon shifted my attention to Nils who had moved in on her while I stayed passively looking on.

I didn´t know there was anything "wrong" with being gay until I reached fifteen. Between the ages of fifteen and sixteen I would sometimes cry myself to sleep wishing that my "gayness" would go away, so that I could be "normal" and have kids and a family and perhaps even get a Volvo like all the rest of the straight Swedish guys around me.

Sometime around this time my parents sat me down and told me that they knew I was probably gay and that they were perfectly happy with that. They ensured me that they loved me and would always love me. They totally defused my anxieties about being "wrong", they made it "right".

I will always be very proud over my parents for doing that and will love them always.They have given me many reasons to be proud of them, both before and after that, but thats still on my "top three-list".

So I had a very much easier time than most of my gay friends who came out to their families in one disastrous way after another, even if they eventually got reconciled with their families - most of them.

My being gay has since then never been much of an issue in our family, although my parents did take me aside and talked to me on numerous times about the importance of "being careful" and use contraceptives if and when I had sex. AIDS and it´s consequences was, as you all may remember, very much in the news in the eighties and afterwards.

I don´t feel the need to telling everyone I am gay, neither do I lie about it if I am asked about it. Sometimes I chose a higher profile, others a lower but my sexual orientation is always there. Take it or leave it, it´s just an integrated part of me.

I still don´t have a Volvo...