When I was about 10 years old, I blurted out a sentence that would reshape my life.

"Marky Mark," I said, "is sexy."

I had only a partial understanding at the time of what that word meant, but I knew it applied to Mark Wahlberg, who in 1995 was a young rapper and muscled Calvin Klein model. I also knew, suddenly and irrevocably from that moment forward, that boys like me were not expected to have thoughts like that.

My oldest brother, then about 14, immediately started teasing me as I clumsily tried to walk back the comment. I can still remember the pang of embarrassment. It was the epiphany so many LGBTQ+ people have in childhood, when we first realize that others see something different in us.

If no one has prepared us for that moment, if no one reassures us that being queer is perfectly normal, then the experience of being ridiculed or simply categorized apart from our peers can lead us to the opposite conclusion: that it is not normal. That it is bad.

It is in these moments that many of us promise ourselves that we will smother this difference. And by the time we realize, often years later, that doing so was a mistake, we have to dig and dig to uncover ourselves. We have to peel off masks, undo affectations and rediscover interests we had long denied as tells.

It takes even longer to truly love the difference, which is to say, ourselves.

I consider myself extremely lucky. I am a 38-year-old white cisgender millennial who was raised with tremendous privilege in a liberal Catholic family that has been nothing but supportive of me as a gay man. My parents are the best people I know. My oldest brother, the one who teased me, is gay. He and his friends, less than a decade after my Marky Mark comment, helped usher me out of the closet with tremendous care and encouragement.

For all those reasons, coming out was easier for me than it was for generations of older LGBTQ+ people who faced greater societal discrimination. It was easier for me than for many of my LGBTQ+ peers and those younger than me who lack my privileges — particularly those of color and who are transgender, and especially those who are both.

Still, there were years in which I was distracted from being happy by all the hiding and digging out I was doing. And it was because queer kids like me who grew up in the 1990s were rarely told that we were normal and deserving of happiness, and even less that we were full of potential.

...continued

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.