November in New Haven, Connecticut feels damp, chilly, and rainy. That's how it felt one night in November 1989. I recall a hooded T-shirt and denim jacket both hanging heavy with the aftermath of a foggy drizzle. Some time before midnight, I went into a lounge of Yale Law School. I went there to talk to a Mexican woman — let's call her Silvia. I haven't seen or heard from her in almost thirty years. At the time, I considered her one of my closest friends in the world.

At the age of eighteen, I had no boundaries. Having survived multiple forms of abuse, I wandered through life with bizarre survival tactics. Most involved normalizing the abnormal so I wouldn't feel weird on top of feeling injured — and then feeling weird in the end anyway, just with new problems to compound the old ones.

Now I look back at 1989 and cringe. All I want to do is scream, "No, don't do it!" the way you might scream, "Don't go into the house!" when you watch a horror film.

Silvia pranced across campus with her silver hoop earrings, mixing stereotypical gangster words with artsy café argot. She headed various Latino groups and coalitions for constituencies like "women of color" and "artists of color." In 1989, at Yale, gay and pro-gay activists predominated in ethnic power organizations. The Yale Latino scene was no exception.

I had asked her to meet me. I knew that Silvia had a big mouth and would tell everyone on campus what I was going to tell her.

I was about to tell her a lie. I thought if I told it enough, it would become truth. I believed in my heart that life would be so much better if it was the truth.

"I want to come out as bisexual," I told her. Immediately after I told Silvia this, she asked me to wait while she stepped out for a minute. She came back with one of her friends, a militant gay activist who had been tracking me since I'd first arrived. He was a minority, too — like so many Yalies of color, a man who'd grown up incredibly spoiled but now performed constant monologues about his own oppression. Silvia implied that he wanted to help, to show me the ropes, and guide me through the gay scene.

He wanted to sodomize me. I knew that. I was playing the game, in part, at least. At no point during the night did I reveal any of the harsh facts driving my decisions.

The reality was, I was having a mental collapse. My mother had an illness that had already started to look fatal — within a little over a year, she would depart this world. The woman who had been her lesbian lover since my childhood was taking care of her. I feared that with my mother gone, I would be cut off from this person whom I had clung to as a proxy maternal figure all my life.

The years leading up to this moment in 1989 had been rocky. Growing up without a father figure, I had developed effeminate mannerisms and homosexual curiosities. Girls rejected and even mocked me, so I had been tempted since childhood to follow in my mother's footsteps and go into the gay lifestyle.

But I hated the physical part of the gay lifestyle. I had first engaged in homosexuality five years earlier, at the age of thirteen. Two teenage boys, both older than me, had gotten me drunk and did things they had apparently learned from older gay men.

I felt pain and revulsion during intimacy with other males. The two teenagers had convinced me that I had wanted it and they did what they did only because they knew I was gay. Like so many people who are isolated and abused by predators, I succumbed to their manipulations and internalized their falsehoods until I believed them.

With heterosexual masculinity seemingly out of the question, I believed that I had to be gay if I was to have any realistic social standing. What girl would want to be with me? Yet I could not be like the Catholic priests I knew, because I felt strong sexual urges. The contradiction confused me: the other boys had to get me drunk and hold me down.

I wanted to say, "I am gay" and have it not be a lie. But I wanted to be with girls, and I did not like being with boys. Saying, "I am bisexual" looked like a safe option; I wouldn't be hiding my obvious attraction to girls but I would allow myself a way forward that would make sense to the outside world.

Through my late high school years, I resolved this issue with low-quality, high-quantity adventurism, constantly looking for men of incrementally more handsome looks. "Handsome" to me meant middle-aged, perhaps (who knows?) because I was searching for a missing father figure. I started connecting with older and older men until I was blasé about trysts with men in their forties and fifties. I hoped that if I could find an attractive mate, I would like homosexuality.

By the time I was fifteen, I had convinced myself that the problem was me, not men. I needed to have a better physique, more charming looks, and less fat on my bones, to attract the best-looking males possible. Living on caffeine pills and exercising obsessively, I did attract men — old men, who started giving me money and gifts. But no matter how much I did it, I did not like intimacy with males.

When I came to Yale in 1988, I thought I had a chance to start anew. I met a girl the first week of freshman year whom I liked, and who actually liked me! I asked her out, and we dated our freshman year. It seemed during that dreamlike period that all the homosexual angst was in my past, never to haunt me again. But the gay upperclassmen had snooped around us the whole time. They engaged in whisper campaigns, sometimes even allying with macho bullies who mocked the whole idea that my girlfriend was with me. She invited me to visit her family in California. I did, and then she broke up with me in June 1989, in her childhood bedroom, next to her trophies and pennants and collages.

At the beginning of sophomore year, I saw my ex-girlfriend hanging around with a clique of aggressive boys who had all decided I was gay. They believed the nasty gossip from the queeny homosexual upperclassmen who had stalked me all around New Haven. They told me the script twenty-four hours a day: "People are born this way." "Look at how you talk — how can you deny yourself?" "You can't change." "If you don't accept this, you will kill yourself."

None of this had anything to do with helping me as a person or advancing any humanitarian cause. It had nothing to do with human rights. Sleazy men wanted to sleep with me, and these arguments would ostensibly keep me in their dating pool. They were perpetuating a system of abuse that had caught me in its net during my early teenage years. By the time I asked to speak with Silvia the following November, their abuse had beaten me into submission. It is only because of God's mercy that I woke from these delusions in my late twenties and realized that everything about gay ideology had been a series of hideous lies.

Gay culture is a culture of abuse. At its core lies a carefully crafted falsehood: "You are born this way." Pure and simple, this is a pickup line. This seduction worms into the psyche of vulnerable, targeted children. This way, when predators lure them into bed, the luring feels like the caresses of a liberator rather than the harms of a rapist. In the aftermath, you live with doubt and fear that the rapist was right. You start to believe that it was something inside you that asked for it, while anyone who points out that your experience was abusive is now cast as an oppressor.

The roughly 18% of young males who experience some kind of sexual abuse grapple with a wide range of emotions. Some get angry. Some recover and never doubt themselves. Some, like me, turn inward. They wander deeper into gay culture looking for healing, when in fact they will only get more abuse. The deeper they get into it, the more distant and impossible heterosexuality looks. The biological cycles of the body can exact cruel ironies on us. So many teenage boys have outward beauty, while inwardly, they are frightened and nervous. This is a perfect recipe for predators.

Because of popular gay rhetoric, warning signs get lost in a series of delusions and deflections. If the sexual acts are painful, they say this is because you have not done enough to accept yourself. If you don't want to live with the fear of AIDS, they say this is because you have internalized homophobia. If you want to have children in a traditional manner, they say this is because you have allowed unimaginative bigots to brainwash you into middle-class conformity. All their responses work to keep you in their sex pool and discourage you from getting out of it.

And you know that if you wake up and bring the truth about the gay community's abuses to the public square, they will slaughter you. They did that to me. They will do it to countless others.

What resulted from my late-night talk with Silvia? Untold horrors. I gained entry into a powerful clique of gay men on campus, which is what I wanted because I wanted somewhere safe to belong. For a year I avoided engaging in any sexual behavior with any of them, until finally one night, drunk, I had an excruciating and even terrifying encounter. My mother went into a coma shortly after that, and I had to leave campus. Dealing with the aftereffects of an assault and the loss of my mother at the same time, I lost my bearings and dropped out of college.

From 1990 until today, I have never had a minute's rest from the gay community. In the late nineties, I admitted to myself that I didn't like intimacy with men. I hated gay culture and needed to get out of it. By the early 2010s, I felt guilty that I'd never stood up publicly. I needed to come forward to stop other people from enduring what I endured.

Conservatives rushed to make me a poster boy, then dropped me in favor of people with prettier narratives. By 2013, abuse survivors were out, and Christian wedding vendors getting sued were in. (Thanks, conservatives!) Liberals simply sided with gays and doubled down on the narrative of fake victimhood that had shielded gay abusers since the 1980s, when my nightmare started.

Having abused, gaslighted, and harassed me for four decades, gays still believe I owe them an apology. For too long, I negotiated with my past in fruitless ruminations. What if I had "fought back"? What if I had gotten therapy to help with my traumas before allowing them to escalate?

These are the self-crippling questions people ask themselves when they have been abused. For female victims, a whole society has rallied to support them. For male victims, a whole society has rallied to affirm their abusers — a culture, ideology, and social system known as LGBT.

I have written this so people would know what they support when they affirm "the LGBT community." Nobody is born gay. Nobody can turn sodomy into a healthy activity. Nobody deserves to be limited to the dreary confines of homosexuality. Stop believing any of this. Stop enabling predators.