"Hey, guess what I just found out!"
As soon as I'd figured it out I started telling people. I can't remember if I'd turned 18 yet. The head of Savannah's Armstrong State College's math dept. had arranged for me to leave high school a year early without having to graduate or take a GED (I'd talked the college into doing it when I was 14 but it was blocked by my school's principal).
I told the few guys that I knew from high school. No visible reaction. Some probably weren't surprised as I'd been my high school's most visible eccentric outsider. But I figure that word went around that I was a fag.
I'm sure Pate, a Christian wimp friend, was deeply shocked. Poor guy, his mother wouldn't let him go more than two blocks from his house. Fairly good-looking he'd never been on a date. He really loved pop music but burned all his records because they were the devil's music.
I told my mother. She said she knew something was had happened but had assumed I'd gotten a girl pregnant. She wasn't angry. But she was worried. She'd known a few gay men and they'd seemed unhappy and bitter. Eventually learning that one family member was gay I understood why she'd think that. He was as bitter an old queen as I've ever met.
I didn't tell my daddy. But he eventually asked. I'd been hitchhiking with "mad, bad and dangerous to know." An alcoholic gave us a ride. He passed out so my friend drove the car. He'd never met the pill he wouldn't swallow. So we sampled some of the man's medications.
We work up in Statesboro jail. The cops said we'd been barking at trucks on the highway. My daddy let me stay a few days before bailing me out. Was a clean jail but our cellmate was a murderer.
After he got me out Daddy told me he didn't like the guy I'd been hitching with. He asked me if he wasn't a queer. I said he was. Then he asked if I was too. Since he asked I couldn't say anything other than yes.
Boom!
If I was starving in the gutter or dying in the hospital he wouldn't care or want to know. Never, ever think I could come back to his home. He was a 'man's man' and I was a 'man for man.'
Eventually he'd convince himself I'd said I was gay just to piss him off.
When I was in jail another time I did go into the closet. On a wild whim I tried to cash someone else's stock dividend checks in Eden North Carolina. Part of the county jailed had been condemned by the Feds.
Food would be slid through an opening at the bottom of the cell floor. Powdered eggs, fried bologna, black coffee. The awful agricultural surplus they once gave people instead of foodstamps.
My first night there two guys said they were going to shove a broom handle up my ass. Claimed it was the first nighter's initiation. I don't remember how I talked them out of it.
I was there for about three weeks. A couple of very muscular black men kept asking me if I didn't "have the package." Slang for gay. Never heard it before or since. Rape fantasies are one thing but the real deal is another. I convinced I was straight and emerged unscathed.
Luckily the bank I'd tried to scam was owned by the family of a man I worked for in Atlanta. A very wealthy NC family. When he heard about it a few calls were made, charges were dropped and I was set free. One time I didn't despise the power of the rich.