by Bob Hudson

In order to answer that question, I need to go back. Way back to the beginning, to the time, beginning at five or six years of age, when I knew something was different about me. I wasn't sure what it was - just that I was always attracted to and tried my hardest to spend my time with the cutest boys as I was growing up. As I grew older and kind of assumed I was gay (I only knew of it as "queer" at that time), it still wasn't okay because, after all, I grew up in a conservatively religious family in rural Oklahoma with a bigoted father who openly espoused that "damned queers should be taken out and shot," meaning I was not accepted by my own father - not then, and not even at the time of his death.

I also had been programmed to think that you grow up, get a job, get married, have kids, and live happily ever after. So, given those circumstances, I always lived as the tough queer-hating guy who, deep down inside, knew it was me I was hating. Even while pleading and asking God why he had made me this way, I was dreaming of young guys while doing what guys do to themselves.