This part of the story is probably one of the most difficult parts to tell. As difficult as it is, it needs to be told. I can vividly remember it so well, there I was sitting on the couch in my comfortable living room. It was a Monday evening, so I was catching up with the latest news. My dogs were by my side, I remember feeling a little tired from enjoying a long weekend, and then I was hit with the first workday of the week. “Ah, to relax on Monday evening.” Well, maybe not so much.
“I saw this letter on your computer, it was written to a man, are you gay?” Yeah, it’s difficult to even write that sentence even today over four years later. I am not really sure what the exact conversation happened after that moment. It’s a moment when you feel three inches tall, confused, upset, deceitful, and challenged. It’s a moment when every deceitful cheater is faced with his crime. It is as if the prosecutor comes into the courtroom with the bloody knife with your finger prints on it. This situation is a moment that I don’t want to glide over in my story. You see, this is the actual moment my comfortable life forever changed. Yes, I am guilty, and yes, I have entirely done something incredibly wrong. And, yes, I was just as confused and irrational as any man could be. Besides knowing the pain and the emotional hurt I caused to someone I really love, I was also being confronted with the truth. The truth of my actions, the truth of my homosexuality. The truth of admitting who I really am. The exact moment of the argument, all of the crying and the fear of the uncertainty to follow are all distorted in my memory, but there is one moment that I will never forget. There in my comfortable living room which had now become a torturous courtroom, I can still remember the pivotal moment of my life, it is as if a big spot light came shining down on me, the sounds of the television seemed no more, and a stillness overcame the room. Here is where my lovely wife with tears in her large green blue eyes asked the question, “Do you love him?” Four simple torturous words, asking for me to be honest, to be honest to her, to be honest with myself, to be honest to everyone. I am thinking there would be many people in a moment like this one, that would scramble to try to put something coherent together to tell the person you married and love, some type of reasonable explanation for everything. I just couldn’t think of one. I just had to quit running, running from the truth. Three nervous breakdowns that led to the hospital, the pills for the deep depression, the alcohol to ease the pain, the dishonesty of cheating, the tiredness of trying to be two people, I don’t know what else to say here, but “I was just tired”, I wanted the depression to end, I wanted the uncertainty of not knowing what was really right or wrong anymore to just stop, I wanted to just stop running.” So here is where I decided to be completely honest with her and with myself. I said, “Yes, I did find myself in love with him.” So, at 47, I said to myself, “Just quit lying.” You see, this dishonesty was deep rooted within me. The truth was I was living a life that others expected of me. What I thought was completely wrong, was actually a lie, men can really fall in love with one another. If homosexual love is a sin, then why did it seem so right? The gay man wasn’t those people, the gay man was me, and it was time that I acknowledge it. Yes, there are times even now that I still fool myself, I see a woman, and I find myself very attracted to her, but by acknowledging that I have loved a man, I am reminded that my pain and my deception have caused serious emotional damage to another person, to another person that I loved, so I detach myself from the unsuspecting woman. What I did was wrong on all accounts, but I knew I didn’t want to keep lying, I knew it was time to start being honest.
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Christian Cantu
Coming Out Late Archives
December 2019
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