My First Day - Original Writing

Then, high school came along and I received a rude awakening that I was no longer top dog on the wrestling team. I lost more matches that first year of highschool wrestling then I had my whole junior high career combined. I was devastated that year I thought that I would never want to wrestle again. However, when wrestling rolled around that next year I was the first in line to show up.

I knew something was off in sixth grade when I realized that maybe, possibly, it wasn’t “normal” to have a crush on both the female and male lead in every disney channel original movie. I chose to ignore it until the age of 14 when my best friend told me that she had a crush on me. We fell madly in love (or at least as madly in love as 14 year olds can be). After that, I just kind of assumed that I was a lesbian because I didn’t know there was anything else. We eventually split, because her mom sent her to conversion therapy where we weren’t allowed to contact each other, but that is a

I started wrestling in sixth grade. Even though I didn’t win one of my first seven matches, I developed into a successful wrestler. In high school I won tournaments and beat high-quality wrestlers. During my junior year I was determined to become a great wrestler. I worked harder than ever and didn’t let anyone stop me. That year I lost the Illinois state wrestling tournament championship match by one point. Over the next six months between my junior and senior season I was runner up at AAU national tournament and wrestled at Disney Land in Florida at the Disney Duals with over 50 other teams and only lost 1 of 8 matches. These are a few of my achievements in high school. Now that I am in college there are many

Five long years ago, I was a seventh grader in junior high school. I hated almost every minute of it. I was picked on and was subjected to the “out” crowd, but honestly, that was important to me.

Growing up I was different from all the other boys; for example, during recess in elementary school most boys would elect to go play “Power Rangers”, but I would always choose to play house with the girls. If we had a free day during Physical Education the boys would generally chose to play some sport that requires a ball, and I would choose to go play double Dutch with the girls, pretty much anyone I chose to hang out was a girl. At the time I didn’t think it was weird that I generally enjoyed doing things that were traditionally considered girly, It was just an aspect of who I was, But once I went to middle school I learned that meant people would call me gay. It would later take me over eight years to have the courage the courage to come out of my closet, and admit that I was gay.

Around my middle school years, I knew something about myself was unique, but I could not quite put my finger on it. No one in my family was gay, the word gay was rarely spoken and I did not even know queerness existed. My family lived a very heteronormative lifestyle and I always assumed I would marry a girl and have children. I remember very clearly a day when I was in sixth grade, I was standing in the hallway after class and someone asked me, “are you gay?” I did not know how to react, I did not even know what the word “gay” meant. I immediately replied “NO” as the term gay was always used synonymously with stupid. After school that day, I asked my grandma what it meant to be gay and she described what it mean to be gay. In that moment,

This summer, I worked at a television production company in the development department. I applied to the internship very last minute and was hired just a couple of days after applying. Before going into my first day of work, I memorized the company’s website, trying to gather as much information as I could from it. I was excited to learn that the development department was female lead and, according to the website, composed of mostly women. In fact, the majority of the leadership positions at the company were occupied by women. Both my family and I were happy and pleasantly surprised that I would be getting the opportunity to work in such a rare entertainment environment where it seemed that appeared be equally men and women.

Once I began high school, I began noticing little things that didn’t seem quite right. Most of them centered on the fact that I seemed to find guys more attractive than girls. Ashamed of myself, I pushed these feelings to the furthest reaches of my mind. Boys had girlfriends; girls had boyfriends. It was the way things were meant to be; anything else was wrong and perverse. Despite constant self-reassurance that I was straight, I never really convinced myself.

I was around eight years old when I realized I wasn’t like the other kids in my grade. I had no interest in dating -- whatever dating is, in elementary school -- and had never had a crush on a boy. My friends were confused and thought it weird. They told me so, and I felt ashamed about my feelings, or lack thereof, for the first time.

What I needed then was someone who could tell me it was okay and someone who would give me the courage to handle the tough stack of cards I had been dealt. I needed a role model who had been through this before me. There was one activist who I researched who helped me come to terms with who I was more than anything. His name is Harvey Milk. Milk spoke about how LGBT people weren't going to get the rights they wanted until people came out of the closet and claimed them. He famously said, “We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets”. This resonated to 12 years old me more than anything that a parent or a teacher could tell me and I took it to heart. Harvey Milk was the first openly gay political leader. He inspired me not because he was a gay activist but because he was courageous in the face of homophobia and ignorance. Then I could come be as brave as him. Everyone reaches a point in their life when they are fearful of what is going to happen. He didn't teach me it was all going to be alright, he taught me that people are going to hurt you, and scare you and threaten you and harm

The first time I came across the word homosexual and gay was in a teen magazine that I read then. It was the first article I read about homosexual individuals and trans-persons, which was in a positive note. That day I said to myself “I am gay” - I was fourteen then. Later, from time to time I read about homosexual men in last pages of Tamil pulp fictions. The reporting would be that of disgust and outrage. But these meager resources - positive and negative - kept me going. I knew I wasn’t alone.

On the second evening of my two week bachelorhood, I boldly toured the two big bars that I was sure were gay. This night I first inhaled what is now ingrained into my memory:

First days are usually the best and sometimes the scariest, in some cases they turn out to be the worst of days of a person’s life. On our first days of doing something, we all have expectations; everyone expects to have the best experience on his/her first day, but these expectations sometimes end up to be the opposite of what we expected. Sometimes they turn out to be a mixture of both the best moments and the worst. Similarly, I have a first day that I think will forever be in my mind; that is my first at the zoo.

Well, turns out, I was a lesbian, and I came to that conclusion 9th-grade year. I’m not sure I had ever seen someone as angry as my mother had been when she found out that I had been going around with another girl, better yet, kissed one, but why? All of my friends were fine with me being attracted to other girls. They even urged me to date almost any girl that seemed to have the slightest interest in me.

As years went by, as I began to enter puberty, I started to take more interest in boys. While in the locker room during physical education, I detected that I was sexually attracted to boys. Although, I did date a few girls here in there it was nothing serious (specially because we did not even kiss.) During my period of adolescence, I never thought about what I was. All the things that took place in the emotional and sexual real were, admittedly, real and concrete to me. I experienced real feelings for other boys, such as love and sexual attraction. At the same time, I never really confronted my feelings, so I continued to have them without having to worry about them. They just were, and that was fine with me. While some people claimed that my sexuality was “unnatural” (a claim which did not affect me in any shape or form), for me, my homosexuality was very natural indeed.