This question has actually been sitting in my inbox for a few days now. I knew that if I thought about it hard enough, I’d start stringing together an essay that I probably don’t have the time to write very well. But then I read this coming out story earlier today and I thought, OK. I’ll try. For the sake of brevity, however, I’ll stick to the questions.

Growing up, I knew only three things about being gay: First and foremost, my mother let it be known that homosexuality was a sin against God, and that if there were a hierarchy of sinful behavior, being gay would sit near the top. Apart from that, I knew that masturbating makes you gay because my older brother said so. Also, I knew that Christians didn’t watch Three’s Company because Jack Tripper merely pretended to be gay, and that being gay is so horrible that simply feigning homosexuality is enough to spite the Lord. That’s all I knew for sure.

Of course, there were other things — things that I knew, but didn’t have a name for. Like the way I always seemed to linger around the underwear page in the J.C. Penney circular when nobody was looking. Or the way I pretended to watch Knight Rider for the car when I was actually hoping for David Hasselhoff to lose his shirt in a street fight. (Sad, but true.) But the feelings I recall most fondly were nonsexual and shrewdly intuitive.

I remember the day I met Mr. Warner¹. He was tall and lanky, with a slightly thinning head of hair. Like many men his age in the late ’70s and early ’80s, he wore a mustache. Up to this point, my teachers at school had been exclusively female and typically keen on coddling their students. But Mr. Warner presented a masculine archetype that was both new and familiar to me at the same time. He was firm and demanding, empathetic without being indulgent. He could also be incredibly sensitive and thoughtfully encouraging. He was a wonderful teacher. Even as an eight-year-old, I was cheerfully certain that Mr. Warner and I shared more in common than a classroom.

One night, upon returning from a parent-teacher conference, my mother pulled me away from the television.

“I want you to be careful,” she said. “There is something about Mr. Warner that I don’t like.”

Mr. Warner was never inappropriate with me, of course, but I somehow understood that this thing — that thing I couldn’t find a name for — was most likely the thing that endeared him to me. It was most likely the thing that made me just like him. It was most likely the thing that my mother didn’t like about me. I knew I was a “fag” before I knew I was gay, but I realized I was “gay” as soon as I knew what the word meant. Processing this took time.

Some of it was literal fear: I came of age in the hardcore punk scene in New York City, which — as liberal as it might seem now — wasn’t very gay-friendly in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I know of at least two kids from the local scene who, in fact, went to jail for murdering gay men. That’s how serious things were. But in the subsequent years, there was a sea change in attitudes about sexuality, and much of my fear subsided. Other friends from that scene were beginning to come out and no one was getting beaten up; no one was losing friends. For a while I played around with gay symbolism — a rainbow ribbon on my backpack, a SILENCE=DEATH pin on my jacket — to very little fanfare. My best friend Rob figured it out right away and always made it a point to stick up for gay people whenever the opportunity came up. Even my parents — who I didn’t actually come out to until I was 30 years old — stopped asking me when I’d be getting married. Somehow, it just happened where everyone knew I was gay without me ever really having to “come out.”

I look back on it now and my perception is that it was probably much harder than I remember. But I think that’s the most amazing thing about coming out: Before you actually say the words I’M GAY, they become the two biggest syllables in the world; your entire life feels as if it hangs on the balance of letting those words vibrate off your tongue. The first time I said it out loud — on a plane, coming home from Europe with a bandmate — I had to excuse myself so I could laugh and shake and clap my hands in the bathroom for a second. But once I composed myself and returned to my seat, it was as if I’d always been an openly gay man. I was already jaded by the second time I said it.

¹ Names have been changed, obviously. Unfortunately, I found out Mr. Warner died in the late ’80s — still a young man. They said it was “cancer.”

Thanks for asking.