I'm 22 and every day telling my family and friends the truth about my sexuality seems more pressing, and yet more impossible. I'm sick of the lie, but too embarrassed to face the fact that I've lied this long and elaborately. While most of my family is extremely conservative, I know they would still love me if they knew I was gay. However, they would judge me and talk about me, and for some odd reason I want to be perfect and expected and invisible. I tried hard to be a good person to compensate for what I lack - my interest in men. I started becoming an advocate for natural resources and using environmentally friendly products. This year I decided to eat only organic products and use biodiesel for my car. But still, just because I try to be a good person, it doesn't mean I'll be normal.

I was raped last year, and I am afraid my family will think that this is the reason I am gay, even though I was gay many many moons before the dreadful one that almost took my sanity. I've been seducing innocent girls, or at least clumsily trying to, since I was nine. I didn't have my first girlfriend until college, and I was so surprised and scared that I had succeeded in getting a beautiful, lucid and utterly sexy woman to fall in love with me that I dumped her! I'd always relished flings, but a long-term relationship seemed like something menacing and suspicious. I truly regret losing such a perfect, soulful love and friend just because I was spooked. I contemplated on line dating for awhile after that. Just so I could understand how it felt to love again.

Now I'm at a new college and the Gay and Lesbian Student Center is twenty feet away from my dorm. Coincidence? Or responsibility? I think I'm going to interpret its discomforting but convenient location as a call to arms. So you guys are the first to know...I'm really, really gay. Quite. I'm going to come out to my friends and family, even though I don't have any proof in the form of a serious girlfriend at the moment. I guess I'm proof enough.