Just Jon is an obvious pseudonym that I am using, in part because I am not open to everyone, but more importantly because it does not matter who I am.\u00a0 The events of my life have formed me to who I am, and many people have been able to identify with similar events.\u00a0 In the early 90\u2019s Earl Hindman played an interesting character on a very popular TV sitcom, without ever showing his face.\u00a0 That character portrayed the voice of reason to me.\u00a0 He offered sound advice, without ever knowing what he looked like.\u00a0 I would like to think that this book can offer sound advice without the \u201cme\u201d.<\/p>\n
Jon is my real first name, and it seems like I need to spell it to everyone.\u00a0 Oftentimes I would need to correct someone by saying \u201cjust j o n\u201d.\u00a0 Some would ask, \u201cOh, is that short for Jonathon?\u201d and I would reply, \u201cNo, just jon\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 But what is in a name?\u00a0 That is not who I am.<\/p>\n
Early childhood memories for me include feeling different to the point that I thought that I was from a different planet and was \u201cbeing observed\u201d.\u00a0 Some psychiatrists may call that social anxiety or depersonalization, but I believe I understand why I had those feelings.\u00a0 Being the youngest of many children, mostly boys, there were plenty of toys handed down to me that I should have been excited to play with.\u00a0 The cap guns, the cowboy hats, sports toys\u2026.they just didn\u2019t do anything for me.\u00a0 A picture of one of my brothers and myself dressed as cowboys told the story.\u00a0 My brother was all into the character, and my facial expression showed how uncomfortable I was.\u00a0 My sister had a Barbie\u2122 doll, and of course she also had Ken\u2122.\u00a0 Ken\u2122 was much better looking than Barbie\u2122, she was too skinny.\u00a0 I was also quite aware that he was devoid of all of his anatomical parts.\u00a0 I guess I was different\u2026..from the norm, whatever that is.<\/p>\n
Family and friends were sure to notice that my \u201cinterests\u201d were a bit different than all of the other boys in the neighborhood.\u00a0 So my feelings of \u201cbeing observed\u201d were not unfounded.\u00a0 People were making observations, and seeing something different about me that I was not yet aware of.\u00a0 I remember around the age of 5 or 6, my father asked me to walk from the living room to the bathroom down a hallway.\u00a0 He made the comment that I walked like a girl.<\/p>\n
Neighbor kids laughed at the way I threw a baseball\u2026.like a girl.\u00a0 Sports of any kind were usually embarrassing for me.\u00a0 In gym class when the Captain\u2019s were picking their team player\u2019s I was usually the next to last one picked.\u00a0 I felt sad for the boy that was picked last.\u00a0 Gym class was one of those embarrassing experiences.\u00a0 When the teacher wasn\u2019t looking, other kids found great pleasure by pulling my gym shorts down, exposing my small penis.\u00a0 I just didn\u2019t fit\u2026.the mold of being a boy.\u00a0 Different.<\/p>\n
Puberty is never kind.\u00a0 The body starts to change, and \u201cfeelings\u201d start to stir in the groin.\u00a0 There was no-one in my life to help me understand why I would get a boner skinny dipping in the pond with other guys when the cold water had the opposite effect on them.\u00a0 Girls made me nervous to even to talk to.\u00a0 Questioning my sexuality through my teen years without anyone to talk to about it was disastrous.\u00a0 Being baptized and raised into a Christian denomination, I was certain that if I were homosexual, that I was going to hell.\u00a0 Then it was confirmed.<\/p>\n
My father and I had a very distant relationship.\u00a0 My oldest brother and Dad were very close.\u00a0 My oldest brother died suddenly at the age of 28 from a heart problem that he had his entire life.\u00a0 It devastated my father.\u00a0 I witnessed his pain, and realized that it is not right for a parent to bury a child.\u00a0 The night of the viewing at the funeral home is one of those memories that had been tattooed into my memory\u2026.in full color.\u00a0 Dad asked me to join him outside for a \u201cbreath of fresh air\u201d, which really meant that he needed to deal with the stress by having a cigarette.<\/p>\n
He expressed his feelings and his inability to deal with his feelings, his pain was overwhelming.\u00a0 Then he turned to me and said, \u201cBut I would rather have a son that is dead than one that is queer.\u201d\u00a0 The hell that the church talked about was surrounding me, engulfing me, and consuming me.\u00a0 His feelings were typical of his generation though.\u00a0 Years later, when I saw the movie \u201cJ. Edgar\u201d, I learned that his mother had the same feelings.\u00a0 As difficult as it is to understand how a parent can feel that way, we see youth kicked out of their homes because of their expressed sexuality all of the time.\u00a0 The teenage homeless shelters in the cities are overwhelmingly youth that might be able to relate to this.<\/p>\n
The National Conference of State Legislatures reported in October of 2013 that in America there are approximately 1.3 million homeless youth.1<\/sup>\u00a0 They also reported that between 20 and 40 percent of homeless youth identify as Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender or Questioning (GLBTQ).\u00a0 That percentage is extremely higher than the percentage of GLBTQ in the general population, and is unacceptable.\u00a0 They also reported that 46 percent of runaway and homeless reported being physically abused, 38 percent emotionally abused and 17 percent were forced into unwanted sexual activity by a family or household member.<\/p>\n Not all LGBTQ youth are abused, abandoned or homeless.\u00a0 Many are loved and respected by their family, friends and accepted by their communities for who they are.\u00a0 I hope to explore what it takes to initiate social change to increase the percentage of LGBTQ youth that are loved and respected.<\/p>\n What my father told me at the funeral home that night echoed in my mind for many years.\u00a0 I knew that I was a huge disappointment to him.\u00a0 Legal problems from my drug and alcohol use did not help mend that bridge, but since I was going to hell anyway, I didn\u2019t care that much either.\u00a0 My mother was suffering from a lung disease that would eventually take her life, and I wanted to \u201ccome out\u201d to her before she died.\u00a0 I thought she would understand, and accept it, but it was just the opposite.\u00a0 She said that she was afraid for my soul, and I knew that I had also disappointed her.\u00a0 She asked me to promise her that I would try to change.\u00a0 I promised her that.<\/p>\n I met a girl that obviously wanted to get to know me better.\u00a0 We started dating and I used her as what we use to call a \u201csleeve\u201d.\u00a0 She was someone that I could wear on my arm to dispel any rumors or concerns.\u00a0 We really had a lot of fun together, but she was also aware of my attraction to men, and seemed to be OK with that.\u00a0 When I announced our engagement to be married, my mom was relieved.\u00a0 We never announced a wedding date, and there were many dates that I was in a hurry to end the date to be able to bar hop and prowl.<\/p>\n An industrial accident changed all of that.\u00a0 The accident could have very easily taken my life, but fast action by my supervisor and 9 and half hours of emergency surgery, I am still here many years later.\u00a0 When I was awakening in the hospital, and between vomiting from the morphine, my outlook on life was changing.\u00a0 My fianc\u00e9, my dad, and one co-worker were the only people to visit me while I was hospitalized.\u00a0 The accident made me realize how short life really is.\u00a0 With my brother dying young, and as close as I came to it, I realized that life is way too short to live lies.\u00a0 I was stealing the life of my fianc\u00e9 for my selfish reasons, and living a double life would take a lot of work.\u00a0\u00a0 I could not destroy her life with mine.\u00a0 I did not think that I would ever be a \u201cwhole\u201d man again after the accident, so even though she never really understood why, I had to end our engagement, to free her to have a life that I did not see possible with me.\u00a0 And I believe that I was right, as years later, I saw her, and saw a happily married mother with a career.<\/p>\n My life continued to spiral downward.\u00a0 Being laid off and out of work, I found myself following a guy that I liked to a bigger city.\u00a0 Living in my car, he went on a date with a girl, and I ended up sitting on a curb sharing a bottle of wine with some homeless guy.\u00a0 I was comfortable and finally at peace at a new low.\u00a0 Was being a homeless wino in the gutter \u201cmy place in society\u201d?\u00a0 I sold plasma as often as possible to buy drugs and alcohol.\u00a0 That ended when I got hepatitis.\u00a0 The only work that someone like me was going to get was not the most desirable or high paying.\u00a0 Working as an attendant at a bath house was not something to be proud of.\u00a0 The guy that I had wanted had moved on, and I stayed\u2026.wallowing in self pity, escaping through drugs, alcohol and anonymous sex.\u00a0 Remembering what my father had told me at my brother\u2019s funeral echoed in my head. \u00a0I pointed a gun to my head many times, thinking if he wanted a dead son, I would give him that. I was too chicken, and I am grateful for that.<\/p>\n The ugliness that I felt about myself is really not describable in words.\u00a0 Hopeless desperation comes close, but that doesn\u2019t account for the feeling of being lost, not knowing where to turn next.\u00a0 \u00a0Having been through an alcohol rehab, I had been introduced to one of the 12 step fellowships but it wasn\u2019t for me.\u00a0 They did tell me in the rehab that they were going to destroy the \u201cgood times\u201d.\u00a0 They were right.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t stop, and I couldn\u2019t go on.\u00a0 I was living in the hell that my church had warned me about.<\/p>\n I stole a joint to have something to offer a guy to share as a way to get to know him, and hopefully have meaningless sex with.\u00a0 I asked him if he want to get high, and he responded with, \u201cNo thank you, I choose not to use today.\u201d\u00a0 Sometimes we hear things from strangers that many people have tried to tell us before.\u00a0 Somewhere inside, I heard the one word that changed everything about me.\u00a0 \u201cChoose\u201d.\u00a0 Failure to make a choice is a choice.\u00a0 The choices that I made, and the choices I failed to act on, had taken me to the place where I didn\u2019t see a way out of.\u00a0 This stranger was handing me a key that began opening doors.<\/p>\n This book is not intended to be a testimonial for any 12 step fellowship, but I am extremely grateful to the fellowship that this stranger helped me to get in touch with me. He helped me to find a meeting, where I immediately felt hope for the first time in a long time.\u00a0 It is a simple program that helped me to understand how to make decisions by studying my history and the history of others.\u00a0 Oh, and there is that spiritual thing too, but please don\u2019t get ahead of me with this.<\/p>\n No one promised me that if I give up the alcohol and drugs that life would magically become perfect, and I am glad they didn\u2019t because the first disappointment would have been enough for me to return to my old ways.\u00a0 They did tell me that I would learn how to make decisions that I could live with.\u00a0 That was 1981, and nothing terrible has happened in my life since then that using drugs wouldn\u2019t have made the situation worse.<\/p>\n 1<\/sup>National Conference of State Legislatures Report, October 1, 2013. http:\/\/www.ncsl.org\/research\/human-services\/homeless-and-runaway-youth.aspx <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just Jon is an obvious pseudonym that I am using, in part because I am not open to everyone, but more importantly because it does not matter who I am.\u00a0 The events of my life have formed me to who I am, and many people have been able to identify with similar events.\u00a0 In the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":4,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-13","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/str8talk4gays.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/str8talk4gays.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/str8talk4gays.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/str8talk4gays.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/str8talk4gays.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/str8talk4gays.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14,"href":"https:\/\/str8talk4gays.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13\/revisions\/14"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/str8talk4gays.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/str8talk4gays.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}