Who Were You In High School

I've mentioned before how I didn't get introduced to gay culture until I was 27. For the five years before that, I was in a isolating relationship with the 4th guy I'd ever kissed. The four years before that, I was an asexual college engineering student who, when not chained to his desk doing physics and computer science homework, was seeing lots of live music at the old 9:30 Club. And before that, I was in high school.

Nowadays, kids are out in high school. They take their same-sex sweethearts to the prom. They found gay/straight alliances. And they end up with many fewer emotional scars than someone who attended high school in earlier times. Back then, before we had the non-stigmatized option of being "the gay kid", we had to be someone else in high school.

When I first started organizing alternative queer events, the first step was to organize a small group of people and come up with a name for ourselves. The name I came up with was QUALM. Another guy suggested a different name: KPLIGC -- Kids Picked Last in Gym Class. I rejected the name for being too limiting and totally unpronounceable, but it definitely resonated with me. Another friend of mine at the time objected for different reasons. He was a total jock in high school. I imagined him strolling arm-in-arm down the hallways of his middle-American high school wearing a letterman jacket. And I wondered what his coming out process must have been like.

I was a geek in high school. I started off a band geek, but transitioned over the course of my sophomore and junior years into a drama geek. I don't know about your high school, but in mine that was definitely a step up. In band, my friends introduced me to REM. In drama, the Jesus and Mary Chain. (In my opinion, another step up.) In band, I had to lug a big black case around with me to and from school every day and wear scratchy, high-necked wool uniforms on hot Indian Summer days. As a drama tech, I got to wear all black on days we had in-school assemblies when the new plays were previewed to the student body, and felt the pride of pulling open the curtain to start the presentation. In band, I sat next to a guy on the wrestling team who smelled of tuna fish and spat into a Styrofoam cup while wearing three sweaters to lose weight for an upcoming match. In drama, I sat on a stool next to a really cute but slightly off-center kid who put grape jelly in his hair to style it every morning, who was just odd enough to probably make out with me behind a dumpster during a break in the drama club inductions if I'd had the balls to propose it to him.

I dated a few girls in high school, but there really was rarely any spark. There were two girls that I found myself really attracted to. And I met both of them at pretty much the same time, providing me with my first opportunity to break some hearts by trying to pursue romantic encounters (and build self confidence) with two people simultaneously. But mostly, I crushed on guys. Crushed hard. But never to any avail. (I had to wait until my junior year of college before I got any action with a guy.)

In high school, I decided I was going to be a rock star. I wrote poetry in the form of song lyrics. I penned one-sided conversations with unseen lovers, optimistic songs prescribing advice to lonely young men, descriptions of familial frustrations and unobtainable desires. I strummed a guitar but never figured out how fit lyrics to music.

In high school, I was always picked last in gym class. I enjoyed volleyball, but all other sports involving flying spherical objects instilled in me great fear. Two-on-two basketball, shirts versus skins: an inner circle of hell. The highest mark I ever got in gym class was from an assignment where teams of students were to design aerobics routines. My little team of geeks took the top prize demonstrating our routine, which was set to a Communards song and aided by the instruction of a mother of a team mate who had been an aerobics instructor.

I had always thought that who I was in high school had informed the fact that I turned out gay. I had thought that people were just born gay and we would always have a hard time on the ball fields, in the locker rooms, with the members of the opposite sex. Years after high school, when I started to finally make some gay friends, I learned the truth: That the queers might have been high school athletes, cheerleaders, plastics, prom kings, debate team champions, dweebs, AV club presidents and everyone in between.

And learning this was not necessarily a good thing, for me at least. I was hoping that new gay friends I was planning to make were going to be like me: socially awkward and naive in high school, still recovering from that experience and interested in a variety of non-mainstream activities and culture as a result. However, that new culture I was hoping to embrace and to be embraced by -- gay culture -- was just as alien to me as those other cliques in high school.

Slowly and carefully, I found a few gay people who shared my perspectives on life, my taste in music, my core values. And now, 8 years later, TNG is the latest incarnation of my efforts to bring those people together. But still I wonder, is there a correlation between the high school geeks and us queers who refuse to conform to the gay stereotypes? Are any of those gay high-school cool kids TNG readers?

Who were you in high school?