I’m beginning to believe that for many gays there is a concept of a defining year; a year where they come to terms with who they are. I’ve always envied those who had this experience in high school because they were able to come to terms with who they were in the most socially pressurized environment imaginable; if you can become an individual in high school then you can survive anything. My defining year was 2002. Being 24 in Dallas shaped me so much more than years of college as I finally came to terms with who I was.
Unfortunately, I arrived in Dallas in January 2001. Why wasn’t 2001 my defining year? To understand that you have to understand who I was in 2001.
For starters, there was the car situation. I didn’t get my drivers license until Thanksgiving break of 2000. While visiting my family that week I asked my dad if he could help me pay for the car since I figured I’d be able to make car payments once I started working. The first problem was that I only had a drivers permit. When we went to the Minnesota DMV they confused my Kansas permit with a Kansas license, so they made me take the written test and gave me a license without making me take the driving test. Score! The car hunt took a little while, but we found a $5000 1991 Acura Integra on sale. My first driving experience was driving that car from Minnesota back to school in Kansas. That car made me so happy. A week later a drunk driver totaled it in a hit and run.
I actually rode the bus to Multi-National Corp the first few months I worked there. I lived three miles away and it took a hour each way, but for me it was worth it. I could buy another car but I thought they were like dogs; they die just when you start to love them. Dallas is not a commuter city, and eventually I had to break down and buy a new car. I lived in Minnesota for 18 years and Kansas for 6, but I learned to drive in Dallas. I still don’t know how to drive in winter.
Furniture was another thing that took me a long time to acquire. When I first moved in my parents bought me a desk and TV stand from Target. I hated that particle board furniture, as it represented another time my parents refused to listen to me and bought me something of their taste because they figured I couldn’t handle making a decision on my own. I bought my television on a whim after working late one night, but slowly I began to furnish my apartment. It was a slow process.
Another thing that held me back was how far in denial I was about my sexuality. I’d never admitted to myself that I was gay all through college, and had every intention to carry on with my denial. The one person I had ever had feelings for was my high school best friend’s brother. He and I had been in the Orchestra together in high school and we had a very loose dynamic between us, but there was something about him that made me want to be around him. Surely it couldn’t have been his gorgeous eyes or boyish good looks, it was our friendship I cherished! After I had moved away to college I had a dream where the two of us were sitting in the school gymnasium at some sort of pep rally. He turned to me and said, “you know you love me, right?” You know you’re in denial when your subconscious has to go literal on you.
What held me back most of all was my picture of where I wanted to be. Back in middle school, circa 1990, I was in a gifted and talented program and one of the exercises we did was to write an image of who we visualized ourselves to be when we grew up, and put that in our wallets to remind ourselves of that. My image was that I was on a studio set directing an interactive “Casablanca”. I had always thought that as a filmmaker and a computer programmer I would be able to make my career bridging the two fields. Adding fuel to this fire was the independent film movement of the late 1990’s, where filmmakers like Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez had been able to tell their stories with little to no money. I put a lot of money and effort those first months in Dallas trying to find a way to bring my dream to fruition. I wanted that. Making films would no longer just be a hobby, it would be a career.
I have a lot of memories from 2001 – the first paycheck, getting used to a regular job, September 11th – but looking back it didn’t define me because I didn’t try to change my situation. My life was riding on rails and I had no reason to hit the breaks.
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