Aaron at Aanthems emailed Monday and alerted me to his invitation to contribute to his collection of “stories about when you first knew, or at least everybody else around you did.”

I thought about the topic all day and struggled with determining what - and how much - I was comfortable sharing. At 11:00pm I finally sat down and just started writing, figuring to hell with comfortable. At 3:00am I was done, and completely exhausted. I haven’t written this personally for a long time and it was kinda difficult. Besides the emotional toll, it was tough to turn fragments of memory into cohesive paragraphs. It’s also a slightly interesting coincidence that this past weekend was the 7th anniversary of my coming out to my parents.

Below is what I ended up with after my four-hour journey. Aaron also posted it today at Aanthems. I’m happy enough with how it turned out, though I tend to revise things like this endlessly.

And yes, I know that less than a week ago I mentioned my discomfort with my face on the internet, but it’s my 7 year-old face so it hardly counts. Plus, I even more recently said to hell with comfortable, right?

In 1987, Whitney Houston ruled the world, or so it seemed to 6 year-old me. Early in the year, while rummaging through my mother’s collection of impulse buys and useless things (otherwise known as our extra bedroom), I discovered a two-year-old cassette of Whitney’s first, self-titled album. Immediately drawn to the cover shot, I ran to ask Mom who the exotic-looking beauty was.
“Oh, I liked one of the songs when it was on the radio,” my mother said.
“Can I have it?” I asked.
“Yes, you may,” she said, clearly amused. “You know, it will play in the same player as your ‘Beep Beep’ story tape does.”

That did it. I listened all day and as far into the night as I was allowed. Over and over and over. I was mesmerized by her voice; it was unlike anything I’d ever heard (on that first album, it still is), and she was more beautiful than anybody I’d ever seen. I made up stories to go along with all the lyrics, too young to realize the words didn’t necessarily apply to real-life Whitney herself. (What? She’s not saving all her love for me? I don’t give good love? The children aren’t our future? And she already knows?)

Nearly twenty years later, my brain continues to automatically anticipate every drumbeat or bad ’80s synthesizer, and my lips move to her vocal inflections before I even realize I’m doing it. Given the appropriate (alcoholic) motivation, I will, to this day, launch into a measure-by-measure analysis of each song on the album, even though now it freaks people out, in an American Psycho sort of way.

That same year, I entered kindergarten and formally began learning to read. My mother, an insatiable reader herself, had been pushing me along for years, so I’d been reading with her for quite a while by then. But the formal beginnings of a reading education prompted my father, always eager to support my learning, to begin buying me books. Garage sales, estate sales, book clubs; you name it, and he bought books there. One evening not long after the Whitney Houston obsession began, he came home from work with a big box of old books and, among the baseball stories, Boy Scout stories and race car stories, I found my youthful literary muse: Nancy Drew.

At that age, I had no interest in the Hardy Boys (that would come later, though probably in a slightly different manner than Franklin W. Dixon intended), but the perky girl sleuth captured my heart. She was so smart! And pretty! And she had a strapping, Ken-like boyfriend, so conveniently named Ned Nickerson!

In the next few months, I read every one of the original 56 Nancy Drew mysteries, never realizing, at six and seven years old, that it was essentially always the same story over and over again, with the evil characters’ names changed.

In the meantime, my parents had endured weeks of the same ten Whitney Houston tracks blaring from my room, so they went out and bought me the just-released Whitney album. It was no coincidence that not long after, I also received a Sony Walkman for my 7th birthday. Everywhere I went, Whitney and Walkman tagged along, often with a Nancy Drew mystery in hand. To my parents’ credit, they never turned down a book request, they never complained about my Whitney love, and they never indicated my tastes were anything but normal.

One night near the end of the year, however, a well-meaning aunt was telling me about her youthful collection of Nancy Drew stories and, when finished, she ruffled my hair and said, “Those Hardy Boys aren’t so great! It’s okay that you like Nancy more - I’m sure lots of other normal little boys do, too.” The way she said it made me consider, for the first time, that other normal little boys weren’t rushing home from kindergarten to read the latest adventures of Nancy and her gung-ho friends Bess and George. Before long, I started thinking a lot about what else I was doing that the other little boys at school weren’t. As far as I could tell at that age, I was just like the other boys in most ways. I built model cars, teased girls about their cooties, created all kinds of Lego constructions, and played on Little League and pee-wee soccer teams. The only other thing that stuck out as strange was my devotion to Whitney.

I didn’t stop reading Nancy or listening to Whitney, but for several years I thought a lot about it. In 1993, I was 12 and had moved far beyond Nancy Drew, but not beyond Whitney, who was riding high on The Bodyguard. My third Walkman had finally died and I, on the verge of junior high, saved my lawn-mowing money and bought a Sony Discman - the first CD player in our house. In the six years since I’d discovered Whitney, I’d acquired no cassette tapes other than The Bodyguard soundtrack and Whitney’s third album, I’m Your Baby Tonight. Believe it or not, I’d listened to nothing besides her that entire time. So when I was ready to upgrade media, it didn’t occur to me to buy other artists’ CDs, too. Nearly another year went by before I realized my CD collection, which has since grown to something like 800 albums, could include CDs without Whitney Houston’s name on them. It was that same time that I discovered what my “I-want-to-be-best-friends!” crush on Forever Young star Elijah Wood really meant to the rest of my life.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, my mother and I had talked about what “gay” was. I don’t remember the details of why it had come up or exactly when it happened, but it was probably around 1990, when I was 9 years old. From schoolyard taunts (though none ever directed at me), I knew, crudely, what “gay” meant and that it was perceived as a bad thing by my peers and probably by more of society, too. I do remember my mother, who’d always been careful to be fair and non-judgmental when telling me anything, spoke hesitantly, but without any hint of negative or positive opinion.

I got quiet, thinking over whatever she’d said. We were in our extra bedroom - where I’d first found the Whitney cassette - and I don’t know if she read something in my face or began thinking about it herself, but after a period of silence she said quietly, “You know Dad and I will still love you if you decide you’re gay. No matter what, we’ll love you.”
“What?!” I asked, surprised she’d known what I was considering, and already knowing it was in my best interests to deny it. “I’m NOT gay!”
“Okay, but … ”
She paused then, a strange look on her face. I suspect she probably began thinking about the ramifications of all she’d just said she accepted. This was, after all, the height of the AIDS crisis, and of Queer Nation and a number of other groups alarming to a Mormon Utah housewife, even a liberal one with a gay friend or two.
“But… ” she continued, sounding a little strangled, “just… ” She inadvertently crinkled up her nose to emphasize that, despite her words of a few minutes before, there was clearly a preference here.
“… just… don’t be gay, okay?”

So that was the day I built my closet. It was 2 or 3 years before I recognized it for what it was, and another 5 before I opened the door wide for my mother and (most of) the rest of the world to see.

I never thought I’d see a day when coming out as a Whitney Houston fan was almost as difficult as coming out as gay. Call it nostalgia if it’s easier for you to accept, but… yes, I still listen to Whitney sometimes. And I am not ashamed.