Every time that someone asked me, how I became “that” (gay), I fell short of words and also patience. So I sat down one night with the resolve to trace my roots, and I was successful in my quest. Here is the story of how I became gay.
It was like any other day, now that I think of it, I believe that is how each day is. Keeping my existential issues at bay, I continue, it was like any other day for a ninth-grade student. Teachers were teaching, periods were passing, and students were bored (I assume).
Well, the emotion that I experienced the most at school was being under pressure, not with the studies, but from my colon. I offer you the humblest of my apologies to break the piece of information this way, but yeah, ever since my schooling shifted to the morning session, I started having trouble with my bowel movements. I was always mostly constipated in the mornings and the pressure used to build up at the school. Sorry, again. Bear with me, though.
I felt uncomfortable to use the toilets at the school. I was a conscious child (with a lot of issues). It didn’t feel right. It felt like a moral crime to shit at school. You know how at school, the person with the most beautiful handwriting, mostly a girl, gets to decorate the blackboard every morning and squeeze in some space for writing the time table, the thought of the day, and some other unnecessary shit. Only if once she had written, “It is okay to shit at school,” all my life problems would have resolved. Sadly, she never did.
I never paid much attention to anything in school as I had to keep my shit at bay which consumed all my energy. That is how I define a routine day at school. On one such ordinary day, a guy who was sitting next to me asked a question, “What do you call the thing that you make rotis with, in Hindi?”
And I ever so casually replied, “Gehu.”
On hearing my response, this guy, along with everyone who was in the two-bench perimeter range started laughing, and that made me shift my focus away from my colon and reflect on my response.
As I reflected, I sank in the abyss of my existence, and my voice echoed in my ears.
Gehu. Ge hu. Ge hu. Gay hu! Gay hu! Gay hu!
That is the story of how I became gay, and, no, I didn’t shit my pants when I realised it.
It is hard to make someone understand your sexuality when there is not much story to it. Not having a ‘single story’, I feel like I justify more than I have to, and people interpret it as a sign to offer me help and convince me of how I haven’t tried hard enough, or of how I haven’t explored the other side enough. I have stopped coming out to people because it is never about me. It is always about the comfort level of the other person to accept something that he has not experienced. Because everything that is outside the comfort zone is protested, if not ridiculed.
I don’t have a single story. But I do have something that helped me begin my journey toward acceptance. While coming to terms with my sexuality, you know, the time after I was done with drenching myself in self-pity, I remember one night when I had this epiphany. I was meant to be gay, and it was always known. That is the reason I was named; not cloudy; not rainy; not moony; but Sunny, which means cheerful and GAY AF.
