Homecoming for the Out

I'm writing this from my hotel room in Illinois. I'm writing this on my way back home...

Tomorrow will be the first day I am back home after I came out almost six months ago. I am coming home, for the first time, completely and wholly honest and myself. And there is this huge unknown that accompanies this already sobering fact. I feel very much like how I imagine Leonidas the night before the Battle of Thermopylae.  Not in that I plan to come and conquer but that in the same way he was defending himself and the identity of his people against those who would challenge their way of life; I too, am coming to defend my identity among those who would seek to change it. I feel like the candidate on Election Day; the unknown looming over me, yet the finale quickly approaching.

As I sit here and reflect on these things: not only am I wondering if the hotel staff knew of my delusions of grandeur concerning Leonidas and if that is the reason they gave me room number 300, but also, what is different now from just a few short months ago. When I examine the past snapshot of my life, I recognize that a lot of things have changed. Some would even say me and I think this is worth unpacking. I need to know if that's the case. Have I changed? Is the person coming home the same person who left? Have I abandoned my principles? Have I lost sight of who I really am?

You say I've changed. I haven't changed. I just stopped lying. When I peel apart those questions, this is what I am left with. Three sentences that sum up my entire thought process and lay bare where I am at within my journey. And to be frank, I think it is where a lot, if not damn near all of us find ourselves after coming out. Let me explain: I spent 22 years lying to myself. And everyone else saw the manifestation of that in this false me. Now, that isn't to say that I was lying to everyone else. I was lying to myself and they (along with my psyche) were victims in that struggle. I spent years constructing a worldview, a persona, and a life around a lie that I tried desperately to convince myself of. When I finally stopped lying, the real me was able to show. So, the Jacob that is coming home is the same one. His appearance isn't. How you have perceived him isn't. Yet his core, his ideals, his passions are all still there ready to be fully seen and recognized for the first time. All that is seen is how I should have always been. It's how I was inside; I was just too afraid to show it until now.

So now I look to you, the newly out. You may feel like you have changed. You may have been told that. That isn't the case. It is not that you have changed; it is that you have stopped lying. You are letting those close to you gain a more intimate understanding of who you are. We don't go home saying this is who I am. I've accepted it and so should you otherwise we can't have a relationship. We come home saying I've discovered who I am; let me share it with you! We invite our family and friends in to be a part of who we are. We allow them access even unto the point where they can wound us with rejection. Yet this is how it must be. We come home hoping for the best and anticipating the worst. We come home praying for acceptance and preparing for excommunication. Baring ourselves to others makes us vulnerable. I can't think of a more intimate display of trust and love. Know that in any event the are those who love you. You have brothers and sisters who care and celebrate who you are. I have found that some of the best people I have met are 'family members' in a community I am honored to be a part of, the LGBT community.

I write this knowing I am not the only one coming home for the holidays. I know I am not the only one talking about sexuality this season either. I hope I am not the only being honest this Christmas...

World AIDS Day - Do Your Part

Today is World AIDS Day. This isn't a gay disease. This isn't a black disease. It is a human pandemic. Education is how you fight this. WE must fight this together. If you have contracted HIV you will not show symptoms nor will you test positive for 3 months. However, you will still be able to infect others during this period. For this reason alone it is imperative you use protection with your partners and encourage others to do the same. It is also our responsibility to get tested regularly (at least every 6 months to a year). To protect yourself, to protect others, and to save the human race. 
-Jacob Thomas

Why Are Gays the Sluts of the World?

Why are gays the sluts of the world? I ask this question not thinking we are but knowing that we are most definitely perceived that way. This stigma of homosexuals being sex crazed whores is in some cases over-exaggerated and in others just completely baseless. Still, I want to put forth what I think are causes, not excuses, and also offer up that it's not just us gays who get around the town.

Let's start off by noting that the human race as a whole is sex crazed (look at our tv ads) and that expressing the capacity to love in sexual ways is something ingrained into all of our cultures. So what then brings out this condemnation on us, the homos, specifically? Well, I'm glad I asked. I was recently talking with some friends about the marriage limiting amendment that is coming up for vote in Minnesota. The general response I get, even from other gays, is that we don't have long term relationships and that it is rare when one of our couple pairings makes it -- the exception not the norm. Where does this consensus come from? And furthermore, why are we being singled out on this? We have proven statistics that show more than half of marriages end in divorce. Guess what, the gays can't get married yet! So it isn't us!! So, we have over half of our heterosexual counterparts breaking up after making a 'lifetime' commitment to each other and yet us homos are the ones who can't make relationships work?! Who the fuck writes this shit? I have seen relationships, no matter who they are with, end and fade. The sexes of those involved has been a moot point.

Now, I will admit that I think our community has historically not been in the relationship business: more out of necessity than want. It is very difficult to have full fledged relationships when for the majority of our history we feared for our livelihoods, and worse our lives themselves, if we were discovered as lovers. So that fed into this hookup lifestyle: made ever so easy with the advent of bathhouses and gay bars at the turn of the twentieth century. There's a trend of this changing and shifting rather rapidly, and it's been an emerging trend for quite some time. We are relational beings after all (even us gays). We also have to remember that there haven't been services to help us through relationship problems. Until recently there was no major support structure to speak of for our community. However, I believe we are at the point where we are no more likely to break up than our heterosexual counterparts. And it's time people started recognizing that very important fact. I would also predict that when we eventually gain equal rights and the stigma surrounding gay relationships is fully discarded we will quickly see that our love and commitment is just as real and messy and rewarding as everyone else's in this world.

-Jacob, 6 Sep 2012

An Airman's Coming Out

An Airman's Coming Out

When I reflect on my short twenty-two years, I struggle with how to express how every aspect of my life was engulfed by this little thing called homosexuality that eventually would come to be one of my defining traits. I've shared a video of me coming out, but those seven minutes definitely can't tell the full story. So here is a better, less concise attempt...

I was born to a lower middle class family in northwest Georgia. My parents taught Sunday school and we went to church every Sunday, with no exceptions. I went to a small Christian school my entire academic career, so I constantly had voices expressing how wrong homosexuality was and how awful it was. Looking back at my adolescence, I can pick out multiple times where I was operating outside of those normal gender lines, where I was doing and thinking things that an all American straight boy just shouldn't be doing or thinking. My mom used to have this pair of black leather boots that I would always sneak into her closet to try on because I thought they were just the coolest things and I remember staring at boys on the playground. Now here's where the problem comes in: I liked girls too. I struggled with same-sex attraction all the time, and believe me, it has always been much stronger than heterosexual attraction. However, I found girls to be bearable and by god if I wanted to go to Heaven, bearable was just going to have to work! So I kept pushing that struggle to the back of my mind. I expressed interest in girls, tried dating a couple of them, and eventually got married. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The fact that I was attracted to boys really hit me and started solidifying between the ages of ten and twelve. So that by the time I was twelve, I was praying every single night to make it go away. I always felt so ashamed of the thoughts and fantasies that I would have. Then when I was about fifteen, I met a friend who was having a few of those same horrible feelings. We hit it off and became best friends, and then of course, experimented a little. Now we didn't do anything crazy. There was no sex. Neither of us was ready for that but we did become emotionally attached. He was a little older and surer of his orientation than I was, and because of that, he wrote me a love letter. This is where it gets interesting... The summer I turned sixteen, my mom found this love letter and then I thought Hell had come to earth. My mom confronted me with the letter and I vehemently denied that I had any part in it. I created my lie and stuck with it. I did probably the most selfish and horrible thing I could have done, but to me this was life or death, every confused teenager for himself. So, I threw my friend under the bus and then I made sure that bus slammed it in reverse and ran right back over him again. I denied that anything happened and defended myself by claiming the letter made me uncomfortable and I didn't know what to do about it. Now, in truth, the letters did make me uncomfortable, not because I didn't reciprocate the feelings for this boy but because I felt horrible with myself for having those feelings in the first place. And yes, I did write letters back to him. Thank goodness mine were never found (that would have been awkward). So this whole situation prompted a sit down between the families where I had to sit across the table from my best friend, my almost lover, and tell them it was all his doing and I was worried about his salvation. I still feel badly about how that ended. In my mind I had convinced myself that it was his doing: I didn't initiate the letters; I wasn't at the same point he was; I couldn't imagine actually going through with being with a boy at that point. So, yeah, "It was his fault." And that’s what my inner commentary kept screaming at me.

With that it was over. We stopped being friends for a good while and eventually we made up (and out). The real eye opening experience here though was how my parents handled it. Now, I never once thought my parents would stop loving me. That wasn't the issue. However, I knew that as soon as I would have come out, I would have been sent to see pastors and doctors and therapists and eventually to a “straight” camp, a highly monitored and controlled facility sponsored by some churches where parents send their gay teenagers to be ‘converted’ to heterosexuality. And all of that was too much to handle, so I bottled up all of that shame and guilt and fear inside.

I truly thought that if I didn't want it hard enough, or if I just prayed long enough, it would all go away but I couldn't let anyone know about it. I mean, how could this god, this creator, make me suffer like this without offering some form of escape? I decided if I threw myself at the church, if I dedicated everything to Christ then maybe, just maybe, he would swoop down and take away these horrible feelings that I had. Having made that determination, I plunged into service with the church. By sixteen I was on the skit team at my church, I was teaching Bible lessons at church and school, and I was even preaching on youth nights. With all of this advancing the kingdom I was doing, I felt like God would come save me and finally remove those feelings that I couldn't change, even though lord knows I tried.

Two weeks after my eighteenth birthday I went into the Air Force, wholeheartedly convincing myself I was straight and just had some side issues I needed working out. So, once again, I dove into helping the church. Through my schooling with the Air Force I volunteered at the local church as a sound technician, went to bible studies, and the whole nine yards. Then the Air Force sent me to an even more rural area than where I grew up and six states further away. I immediately jumped into a local church and within twenty-four hours of being on the ground was running the sound booth at what would become my home church. I got involved in leading the youth group and singing on the praise team and doing outreach and bible studies, all the while struggling with this little thing called homosexuality, because those thoughts and desires never went away. No matter how much praying I did, no matter how many sermons I preached or lessons I taught, at the end of the day I still hated myself for something I couldn't control. Then I met a girl that I liked, a girl that I truly did love and care about. We got married and stayed married for two years. We didn't work out for multiple reasons, though not because I wanted to sleep with men; at this point I was still convincing myself daily that I didn't like men. But that was that: I was divorced and still completely confused about my sexual orientation. It would take me months from that point to come to terms with the fact that I was gay and that there was nothing that was ever going to change that. From there it still took me a month or two to muster up the courage to tell someone. So, on the verge of my twenty-second birthday, I came out to some of my closest friends, slowly working my way to my coworkers. Then, with the help of those friends, came out to a few more people and then a few more. Until one day, I realized there were probably twenty-five people in North Dakota who knew. But my parents had no idea. Oops. I decided it was best to tell my parents before any rumors or forced outings happened. So, I sat down and made a video that I emailed to my parents (they're six states away at this point remember) and I stayed on the phone with them as they watched the video. We talked for a bit with the theme being disbelief and just saying they would always love me, but also telling me that it was wrong and if I didn't change my ways I was going to end up in Hell.

Now while all of this was going on, I had posted this status on Facebook, "I don't want us to fall out, but we are all out of time. Let’s see who still loves me in an hour." The first part of that is a song lyric from Sam Tsui. This caused the pastor I used to work with to think I was writing a suicide post and he called my boss to check on me. So now halfway through the phone call with my parents, my commander (a Lieutenant Colonel, O-5) and my First Sergeant (Master Sergeant, E-9) show up at my apartment to make sure I'm ok. I applaud them for following through and checking on me, but man that was awkward. It really showed me that they cared about my well being and that I couldn’t have asked for a better leadership team. I was fine but if I hadn't been, they could have made the difference. So my appreciation and thanks go out to them.

Let's go back to my parents though. That conversation ended and then I posted the video to my Facebook and made it public on YouTube, which somewhat upset my parents that everything happened so fast. But the responses from the videos were overwhelming. I received so many emails and comments, 98% of which were extremely supportive and positive. People who I never thought would be accepting of me after that still reached out and comforted me and expressed their love for me. I was dumbfounded at the love that poured out to me. Now, don’t get me wrong, it hasn’t all been rainbows and butterflies. My parents and I still argue about my eternal resting place and how we would never agree on this issue. And I just had an email debate before writing this with someone I used to go to church with about how I was wrong and would answer for my sins. Yet, I cling to hope that this won’t always be the case.

So, I guess that about covers my first twenty-two years. I have been completely and unapologetically out for three months now. It has gotten so much better. Being able to be honest with myself and others has made such a difference in my enjoyment of life. Serving in a military that now allows me to be honest is spectacular. Moreover, because of posting the video on YouTube I have been able to talk with people who are struggling with their sexual identity and help them through the process. I have the amazing opportunity to give advice to people on coming out to their friends and family, all because I struggled with it too. I get to tell people almost daily that it is ok if they’re gay! I get to show them someone still loves them regardless of who they love. Now I have thrust myself into the arena of advancing equality and continuing to help those individuals within the LGBT community deal with coming out. I believe it is imperative that we come out to our parents and coworkers because people need to know we are here and that we matter and that justice, dignity, and human rights for all will wait no longer! So I will fight until the end and help for as long as I am needed. I hope you will do the same, because if you do, if WE do, it will get better not just for us, but for everyone.

Apparently I Would Be Safer as a Smoker Instead of a Fabulous Homo

So for those of you who don't know, New Zealand and Australia are both in intense marriage equality debates. New Zealand actually had an equality bill pass its first reading last week. Well anyway, I have a huge W-T-Fuck moment regarding a Christian lobby group from Australia that decided to propagate some hate. 

    Jim Wallace from the Australian Christian Lobby organization said in a speech, without giving ANY concrete evidence for his claims, that it was safer to be a smoker than a homosexual and went on to extrapolate this crazy notion that if marriage equality were to happen and homosexuals were 'normalized' then the country would face health risks and other such shit that are 'inherent' to the homosexual lifestyle. Those types of things being diseases and drug abuse. Which just to point out, A) these things are not rampant throughout the entire culture, B) they are not unique to the homosexual culture, C) what is true and not grossly exaggerated will dissipate with the acceptance of homosexuality. So, here's the link to that article and ya seriously biggest W-T-Fuck moment of the week. 

http://www.theage.com.au/national/smoking-healthier-than-gay-marriage-20120905-25eca.html 

Locker Room Thoughts

    One gay man to all you straight guys out there, when we shower with you at the gym in the open bays we are not trying to check out your junk! We have no desire to gaze at your penis, we've probably seen better and some of us can go home to a better one waiting on us! I shower at our gym at least two times a week and guess how many times I check out the guys I'm showering with?! The correct answer is zero. Because I don't care!! I have better things to do than ogle at your manhood. So please feel free to get over yourselves and stop freaking the eff out. Thank you and good day!

My Stance on Equality

My Stance on Equality

    I have often wished to have lived in another time of history. To have experienced the building of the Colossus, the splendor of the Pyramids, or the epic of the Hanging Gardens, the wonders of antiquity have always fascinated me and I have longed to have experienced them in their time and glory. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent to me that I was born for such a time as this, we were born for this. Our generation is at a pivotal moment in history. We, the digital generation, are at a point in time where decisions and actions and coming out stories don't just affect those close to you but can have overarching implications that span the globe. Since my coming out story was posted on YouTube and my Facebook, hundreds of people have seen it and responded by email or comments or made videos of their own. There are thousands of stories like this. Stories of others being helped and encouraged by another's action. Our generation has the privilege and opportunity to end bullying and hatred and fear by speaking out. We are caught in a battle that was started before us but can and should be finished by us. We can choose to stand for equality and justice, not just in America, but across this world. You see, these arguments and discussions are not something that is only America's problem. This isn't something that is localized to just us. This is a global issue - a human issue. For far too long people have hurt and killed themselves because of the rhetoric and hate of those over them, or worse yet been killed, murdered, and martyred by those same people and entities. I am so grateful and enthusiastically supportive of campaigns like the Trevor Project and It Gets Better for fighting teen suicide and bullying, but I wish for a world where they don't need to exist. We, as a mature, educated, and supposed wise society, should have no need to tell a child that was bullied for their sexual orientation that they are actually a worthy being, because they shouldn't be bullied in the first place! Acts of violence in any form and especially against someone for how they love has no place in a 'civilized' school system and society. I'm comforted that schools are coming around to help protect those individuals who are being harassed, but we must do more. We fight for equality because that is the only way to stop the bullying, to stop the hatred. Until there is full equality the philosophy of hate and discrimination will continue. Until there is full equality children will continue to kill themselves for being ashamed of who they are. This is why equality is important to me, because this isn't about a single issue. This is about lives, this is about ending teen bullying and suicide. This is about stopping the hate.  I look at the strides the LGBT community has made within this past decade and it astounds me. I look at heroes of our cause, like Harvey Milk, and I am awed and humbled. We have made great progress towards equality, but there is still more that must be done. As I said, we were born for this. We are at a crucible in time. We have been given the opportunity to stand for love, for justice, and for equality. We get to choose if we will be on the right side of history. Our issues are on the global stage. Will we choose to stand for hatred and bigotry, saying, some people aren't worthy of love and respect? Or will we choose to stand for a world without discrimination, saying, everyone has the right to be who they are and to love and live without fear?

    I support marriage equality, not because I wish to undermine its sanctity, but because we cannot say you are separate but equal. This has already been proven false. I wish, for the sake of those who oppose gay marriage, that the government would be completely removed from marriage. If this were the case then we wouldn't have to have this argument at all. If marriage were something completely reserved to the church, then we wouldn't be speaking out. However, the government is involved, so we must cry out for equality. When an atheist can be married and the church say nothing, even though they are still not doing something 'under God', but then that same church scream out against a homosexual couple trying to show commitment in the same way, something is wrong. When benefits are given to one group and kept out of reach of another, something is wrong. I stand for a world free of discrimination and free of hate. I stand for love, for justice. I am stating my support for this because I plan on taking a more active role in LGBT issues, specifically those concerning equality.

    To those who know me, to those who would feel betrayed by my support of this issue, I want to say that I haven't turned my back on you. I haven't forgotten what you have taught me and what I have learned from you. In fact, take solace in knowing that above all else, you have taught me to stand up for what I believe in, no matter the consequences or sacrifices. Take pride in knowing you have taught me to fight for justice. You have taught me to fight for what I believe to be right. I believe in this, I believe we, as a generation were meant for this. We were meant to decide how the next span of our culture will be. We were meant to decide if our children and their children will perpetuate a philosophy of hatred and bigotry or decide if that dogma stops with us. I, for one, choose to stand for love. We are strong, and we are not fearful, we will not be silent, because we are equal.

-Jacob Thomas, August 12th, 2012