The Interview I Gave at Eighteen, Still in the Closet
From the VAULT. Original publish date: 1994 (Age: 18)
LYD Classic: Editor’s Note, 2026
In 1994, when I was eighteen and still in the closet, I did an interview for a book about queer young people. I hadn’t come out to my parents. I’d come out to exactly four people on my dorm floor. Here, lightly cleaned up from the original scan, is what I said.
I am eighteen years old. I was born in Hayward, California1, and raised in El Sobrante, California, a small suburb a couple of minutes from Berkeley. I’ve lived there ever since junior high (seventh grade). I live with two parents and a sister. My father is currently sixty-two, my mother fifty-nine. My sister is twenty-eight, ten years older than I am.
Since my sister is so old, I consider her more of a mother than anything else. It was difficult living with my sister because I had to live with her through her hardships. She has a learning disability. She had a mental breakdown at fifteen. (I still remember the police dragging her out of the house when I was five.) I saw her life as she became dependent on medication, how she “gave her life to Christ,” how she now lives by herself in a rented room, barely making it month to month. Being Chinese, this puts a lot of pressure on me to succeed.
As a first-generation Chinese American, I was raised speaking English while my parents spoke to me in Chinese. (My mother to this day refuses to speak to me in English.) This causes many communication problems. While I can talk to my parents about conventional things — dinner, money for college, the weather outside — I am unable to talk to them about abstract ideas, such as my being gay, without added bits of fractured English.
I knew I was gay at an early age. Of course, I didn’t know it was being “gay,” but I felt a close desire to be with guys my age as early as age five. I knew the feelings I felt had a name by junior high. It was also about this time when I knew it was “bad.” My parents are Chinese immigrants, very conservative, and Christian. Bad things, when you’re growing up and coming to realize you’re gay. I wanted to be a good son, so I’ve always done what I was told. Unfortunately, that also meant a lot of pain, not being true to my own feelings.
One time, my mother was cleaning my room and read a couple of letters I wrote to friends about guys I had crushes on in high school. When my parents confronted me about this, they suggested therapy to change myself. But instead of telling them that they were wrong about being gay, that I couldn’t just change myself, I freaked out. I told them it was just a phase. They believed me and left it at that. I don’t know what I’m going to do about telling my parents. They’re currently supporting me financially through college, so I do not want to come out to them just yet.
Most of the time, I felt like an outsider. Because I didn’t really get along with the people at my school, I looked to the church for support and soon found a group of Christian friends who went to my church. Finally, these were some people who accepted me for who I was, and I didn’t feel like such an outsider anymore. Of course, I didn’t tell them I was gay; then they wouldn’t like me anymore. During high school, I told three people in my church group. One girl took it very well, while the other two guys accepted me as a friend but condemned “my sin” and didn’t want to talk about my feelings. It was okay at first, but it ended up hurting me because I couldn’t tell my closest friends how I felt toward other people.
Now that I am in college, things are a little different. I live in the dorms, and I am still hesitant every so often about coming out to people because I’m afraid that they will reject me or condemn me. I guess I’m expecting what some of my friends from church did. But so far, all of my coming-out experiences have been positive, even though I’ve only come out to four people on my dorm floor. I’ve been starting to hang around more gay people, also, so I am gradually coming out of my shell.
Six years of church and all your friends being Christian do rub off on you. Through high school, I had learned that while loving another guy wasn’t bad, having sex with him was. I’m not so sure if I believe that anymore. Some of it has gone away after going to college. I’ve told most of my friends that these are my years to “discover myself,” and they’ve taken it rather well that I haven’t gone to church at Davis.
I went to a financially troubled public school for high school, but hell, aren’t all public schools financially troubled these days? It was a very diverse school, with around 30 to 40 percent of the students being black, the rest divided among white, Asian, and some Latino students. I never really felt like I belonged with the people at my school — when I was a freshman, I was in Thespians and had a niche there, but that was gone when my father told me to enroll in computer classes. There were always people to hang around with, but I never got close to them, and they were never close to me. I didn’t need them anyway, since I had my friends from church. Of course, I had lingering crushes on various guys through high school, but I was too scared to tell myself I was gay in high school, much less tell them. Now I go to UC Davis, and I feel a lot more comfortable about my sexuality, although I don’t want to come out of the closet just yet.
As far as meeting other gay folks is concerned, I meet other people through the Internet.
The first time I went to a gay youth “support” group was when I was fifteen. I went to a group in Berkeley. I guess I was expecting there to be people like me. There weren’t. Instead, they were cliquey and arrogant. The only people they would talk to were people who acted and looked like them, and since I wasn’t like them, I didn’t belong in their little group. I ended up never going to a group again, and to this day, going to a support group makes me uncomfortable. Currently, I meet other people online.
I want to find that “perfect guy” as much as the next gay guy. I guess growing up the way I have has made me want the idea of the traditional family, with a wife, three kids, a job, and a picket fence. Being gay, I wouldn’t be able to have that, and that’s my biggest fear, something I’ll have to work out throughout my life. I see myself in a monogamous relationship, with a good job, a decent house, maybe a kid, somehow. I just want to live my life simply with someone.
You’re not alone in the world. I thought I was. I learned in college that many other people thought they were, too. But we’re not alone.
This is, in fact, a lie. I was not born in Hayward — I was born in Fremont. No idea why I would write that.