If I have one frustration as a gay man, it’s the constant insistence that homosexuality is a choice. I wouldn’t be bothered by this, however, if not for the fact that it is often used as a justification for slandering homosexuals, for judging them, for continuing to keep homosexuality in the domain of the immoral. The simple reality is that homosexuality is not a choice. Perhaps a closer look into what it is like to be a homosexual will help to disabuse some few people of this notion.

I do not recall the day I chose to be gay, just as I doubt there is a single heterosexual in the world that recalls the day he or she chose to be straight. There was no moment when I thought to myself, “I will be a homosexual.” There was, instead, just a subtle progression of development that ultimately ended in the realization that I am gay. I can remember being as young as five or six years old and having crushes on other guys. I had a few crushes on female teachers, but overwhelmingly my heart would lead me toward males.

As puberty began to do its magic on my mind and body, while other boys were beginning to talk about the girls in our class, I was watching the boys. While other boys were sneaking their fathers’ Playboy magazines out of their sock drawers, I was secreting away men's underwear ads. While other boys watched movies and televisions shows, waiting for some beautiful actress to appear in-frame naked, or at least scantily clad, I was watching and waiting for the male actors to take off their shirts.

I knew, just because of the kinds of things that other boys talked about, that there was something different about me. I didn’t know what it was called. I didn’t know that society in general was repulsed by it. I didn’t know that almost no other boy of my acquaintance was experiencing the same things. In fact, I would be almost fourteen years old before I had a name for it and the beginnings of understanding what it would mean for my life. And when that time came, there was no sense within me that I had any choice in the matter. I was what I was, felt how I felt. And no matter how much I tried to hide it, deny it, or change it, it was always there.

When I was a young child, despite this difference growing inside me, I wasn’t immune to the social education that is imposed on all children. I assumed I would have a girlfriend some day. I assumed I would marry. I assumed I would have a career and children. I never had any reason to believe otherwise.

However, as I grew older, and more aware of my sexuality and how that would impact my future, I realized that most of my assumptions were wrong. I could have a girlfriend, if I wanted one. But I knew it wouldn’t be the same for me as it was for all the other boys I knew then. I knew I didn’t have the same kinds of feelings for girls that they had. At some point I also realized that if I never had a girlfriend, I also would never marry. And if I didn’t marry, I wouldn’t have children. Unless I lied to myself and everybody else around me.

I began, by the time I started middle school, to experience a very different life than my contemporaries were experiencing. They were all starting to pair off and socialize as couples. They were learning the social skills that would someday lead them to the “right woman” and a wedding and birth announcements. On the other hand, I was learning to hide. I was learning to be alone. I was learning to lie when pressed about my own social progress.

I was learning to disappear as quickly as possible after school, in order to avoid getting beat up for being a sissy, a fag, a pansy. I didn’t wear my sexuality on my sleeve, but the other boys my age seemed to know anyway. And I was ostracized for it. And knowing that my classmates hated me the way they did, I assumed that most people would feel the same way. So I went even deeper into hiding. I didn’t talk to anybody else about what I was experiencing. I lied to my parents when they asked me about bruises and bloody noses.

I knew my fate was sealed when my parents were driving me to a Christmas party at the home of the man who was the head chef in the restaurant they owned. I was working in the restaurant as a dishwasher, which is why I was invited to the party in the first place. On the way there, my parents, who knew that this man was a homosexual, decided to do the “right thing” and warn me to be careful of him. Homosexuals, they told me, are men who have sex with other men. Homosexuals, they told me, are perverts who prey on teenage boys. Homosexuals, they told me, have a mental disease and they are bad people.

And while I know they had the best of intentions in telling me all of this, I did not have the reaction to their “teaching” they might have hoped I would have. I wasn’t hearing them talk about the chef. I was hearing them talk about me. I was learning that I would some day have sex with other men. I was learning that I would be a pervert some day. I was learning that I had a mental disease and was a bad person. I went deeper yet into hiding.

By the time I was in high school, I was so deep in hiding that nobody even knew I existed. I was quiet in classes, so that nobody would see me. I moved like a shadow in the hallways, to avoid drawing attention to myself. I spoke to no one. I connected with no one. In a world full of people, I was utterly alone.

By the time I graduated from high school, the “gay cancer” was ravaging the American coasts. We were just beginning to hear about it in the Midwest. I was hearing almost every day how this disease was God’s judgment on all these perverts. Now I was afraid, not only of society, but also of God. Even if nobody around me knew what I was, surely God knew. And because he knew, I was just as likely to be targeted by this judgment as anybody else like me.

Ultimately, I chose to be a liar. I lied to everybody. I didn’t feel like I had a great deal of choice in the matter. I started doing all the things that men are supposed to do (except for having sex with women -- I just couldn’t find it in myself). I dated. I started a career. I pursued all the expected goals. I sought to change myself as sincerly as I knew how. Eventually, I met a lovely woman that I found I could love. I told her the truth about myself, and then we got married. And even though she knew the truth about how I felt inside, I still continued to live a lie. My life was not fulfilling me, because I wasn’t living it honestly. In fact, it was killing me, and everything around me. Lies have a way of doing that.

This is the life that many people claim I chose for myself. I was thirty years old, in a failing marriage, when I decided to embrace what I know had been thrust on me. It doesn’t matter whether those who study these things ever discover a genetic marker for homosexuality or an environmental agent for it. It doesn’t matter whether homosexuality is a demon from Hell or just the result of some universal lottery.

It is not a choice. Nobody, not even somebody insane, would choose the live the life that is the fate of almost every homosexual. A life of uncertainty and fear and loneliness and dishonesty. Nobody would choose the almost absolute certainty that the things that make other people feel fulfilled, such as a marriage and a family, will be denied to him. Nobody would choose to incur the wrath of a God they were taught to love. Most humans just aren’t that fond of pain.

So I did make some choices, ultimately. I chose truth, finally. I chose to believe that the God I still loved did not hate me, could not hate me, for being what he created me to be. I chose to believe that I could find fulfillment in the truth. I chose to believe that I did not have to be alone, without love that touched me and made sense to me. I didn’t choose to be gay, but I did choose to find happiness. And I did find it.