Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

Photo

A few months ago, I found myself shifting nervously in the driver’s seat of a parked rental car and avoiding the rearview mirror, afraid I’d catch a disquieting glimpse of my adolescent self glaring back. I’ve never come entirely to grips with him — or rather, I’ve never entirely forgiven him his lies and his cowardice. And now that I was about to walk into my 20-year high school reunion, his ghost was unbearably palpable.

I hadn’t been to any of my previous reunions. For the 15th, I was living overseas; for the 10th, I was still residing part time in a place — the closet — that didn’t permit such a winsome excursion into other people’s past. For the longest time, that’s what the memory of my high school years felt like: an era belonging not to me, but to my “normal” classmates. When nearly every minute of your teenage years is spent scheming and deceiving in a tireless effort to keep others from finding out who you really are, then you become an absent nonentity, a superficial character in someone else’s life story. What right did I have to claim a history in which I wasn’t even present as my true self?

By the time I entered high school, being someone else was second nature to me. I was by no means overtly masculine, yet, through sheer genetic luck, I wasn’t “obviously gay” and therefore managed to largely avoid the cruelties inflicted on those who were. What’s ironic is that some of those effeminate boys who were so relentlessly bullied are, today, married to women. They’re still effeminate, but they’re not — if you take their lives at face value — gay. Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for my stereotypically “gay” straight classmates, the bigots among us weren’t bright enough to tell the difference.

Yet while I wasn’t bullied, I did forfeit my youth to a colorless heteronormative fairy tale. While my classmates experimented with romantic relationships and sex, I avoided making eye contact or brushing elbows with a crush. My most daring moment was scribbling a boy’s name in my notebook, only to hastily scratch it out for fear someone else might see it.

I dated girls instead, leaving them to languish in their own self-doubts when, without explanation, I rejected their brave attempts at intimacy. For my senior prom, I drank until I passed out, not to celebrate, but in a deliberate attempt to avoid having to kiss, let alone having to sleep with, my stunningly beautiful date. That was 1993, the year when President Clinton instituted the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military, a credo I hoped those in my personal life would follow, too.

Fear. In retrospect, that’s what it all came down to. The fear of being friendless; of fights; of slashed tires and keyed cars; of stares, whispers and epithets potent enough to kill me. “Trust no one,” I reminded myself. Not even the adults: I remember one gossipy high school teacher, glowing in the rapture of a delicious new scandal, sharing a rumor with our class about two boys from a neighboring school caught in flagrante delicto in the baseball dugout. “That’s nasty,” the girl next to me said. “Gross,” hissed the boy behind me. That was the rejection I knew awaited me if I dared to come out of the closet.

That was a long time ago, but I’d be lying if I said that the emotional residue was gone entirely. On entering the banquet hall of the suburban country club where my high school reunion was being held, that cowardly, closeted adolescent me had his ears pricked in defense.

Yet the next few hours were as pleasant as could be. There were only tepid handshakes, awkward embraces and warm faces massaged by the hands of time. It was hard to believe that these welcoming, down-to-earth adults exchanging business cards before me had inspired such a reign of secret terror in my adolescence.

I’d offered my apologies to those I’d misled about my being gay a long time ago in e-mails or phone calls, and many of my former classmates at the reunion already knew my big secret in advance. Most couldn’t care less. “You should have told me,” my friend Angie said to me after we’d rattled off the list of guys we’d both considered “hot” back then and found ourselves strangely in sync with our teenage infatuations. “Seriously,” she went on, “can you just imagine how much fun we would have had?”

I’ve no doubt she means that now, but the reality is that Angie 2013 has as much in common with Angie 1993 as I do with my own cloistered teenage soul. In 1993, Angie was a year away from enrolling in an evangelical college in Missouri, learning, among other biblical tales, about the sins of Sodomites like me.

We shouldn’t be content with the way things stand now for gay and lesbian students, but we should be encouraged by the progress made in such a relatively short time. In most places around the country, high school is no longer the pit of despair for gay students that it was when I attended.

One of the highlights of that reunion night, in fact, was the conversation I had with our school’s former principal, who, pushing 80, still makes a point of attending as many of these events as he can. He told me that one of his proudest achievements was creating a gay-straight student alliance the year before he retired. “That,” he said, “I hope is my legacy.”

My trembling, cowardly adolescent self instinctively reached out to hug him.

Jesse Bering is the author of “Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us.”