Atticus   

We were driving back from the courthouse in LaFayette, in the middle of nowhere in northwestern Georgia and still 10-15 miles from Trenton.

He had been there to collect fines from some of his probationers; I had been instructing new ones of my own who had just been sentenced by a judge. He was my boss and my best friend.

“Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong with you?” he pleaded. “If you finally get it out there, it might not be so bad.”

I was in the middle of one of my recent battles with a personal demon. Yet for the first time of the innumerable times we’d had discussions about it, the thought crossed my mind: Maybe he knew what I was wrestling with. How could he know? Was I that obvious?

“I don’t know, Tony. This is just something I need to figure out on my own. I’ll be fine.”

He raised his voice and with a sudden outburst broke through the melancholy I was filling the car with. “Goddamnit, Stephen! Just say it. Finally say it.”

I vented a loud sigh from deep in my lungs. I was gonna do it.

“All right, then. You can’t look at me while I’m talking to you.”

“OK,” he said.

Later he told me he’d thought, “Oh, shit. He’s about to really tell me.” For a good minute, the car radio was the only sound between us. Then I started.

I continued to look out the passenger-side window. “Remember when you were a little boy and puberty hit?” I asked.

“EmmHmm, yep.”

“And remember how you didn’t pay attention to girls before and suddenly you started noticing them in a different way?”

“EmmHmm.”

“Well, it didn’t quite work out that way for me. When puberty hit, I was noticing us rather than them.”

He left the last sentence to hang in the air for a few seconds.

“Stephen, what are you trying to tell me?”

I sighed again. Silence for another 20-30 seconds. And then he said it.

“Are you trying to tell me you’re gay?”

In a calm and even tone, I replied. “Yep – and if you need to stop the car and let me out right here, I totally understand.”

Part of Tony wanted to erupt into laughter. A bigger part of him wanted to cry like a grieving widow. He later told me I broke his heart in that moment because he knew I was serious.

He kept control, though. I didn’t. I wouldn’t look at him for probably the next 30 minutes. After 15 years, I’d finally admitted to another human being the secret I’d been carrying.

That was 12 years ago. I was 26, single and renting a house that the word “modest” would be generous in describing. I worked as a reporter at a weekly newspaper and volunteered as the youth leader of my home church 30 miles away.

It all began to unravel one random Saturday night when I was washing dishes by hand.

I don’t know what in particular triggered it. But looking out that kitchen window, suddenly I saw an almost unending string of solitary weekend nights ahead of me. I broke down. I distinctly remember my words, spoken aloud in a cracking voice.

“Is this it, God? Just you and me all these nights to come?”

My sexuality had refused to go ignored any longer. It rattled and popped and pushed from just below the surface much like steam struggling to escape from a pressure cooker until it finally blew the lid off in Tony’s Avalon on a backcountry Georgia road.

I’m amazed when I look back at what’s transpired since that day. Three years of reparative therapy. My first date with another man. My first kiss. My first love. My first heartbreak. Good memories and good times with guys I’ve become friends with that I might otherwise have never met.

Just as I was back in that tiny rental more than a decade ago, I’m still single. But I’ve been in love twice, and I’ve never been more confident, self-assured and secure about who I am.

There’s no guarantee I’ll ever have someone to share dishwashing duty with me, but I’m thankful I took the steps to put myself in position for it all those years ago.