CRUSHES ON BOYS BEFORE I CAME OUT

It's important for marginalized people to put their work into the world, so i'll be doing that in the medium of comics because they're approachable and just make sense for short stories/experiences.

I'm gay. I came out at age twenty-five, avoiding my true identity because of fear and general disinterest in romance/sexuality. However, i had crushes on boys before then, but i didn't really understand what that meant, mostly because i'm gray-asexual*.

I want to make comics about this not only to relate to other gay men, but to relay these experiences to heteronormative people who have no idea what it's like to be a minority in this sense.

The following are quick sketches so they wouldn't only live inside my head. They don't quite communicate what i need them to, but it's a start. These are presented in chronological order.

Shawn (sp?) from Kindergarten. At the time, i thought he looked "cool," not understanding what that actually meant. I also thought he looked great in the black-and-orange Orioles Little League uniform. I was jealous i wasn't on his team. As far as the image... i'm not exactly sure what i was going for. lol.

Rahul is the first person i ever fell in love with (in community college). The story is long, so i won't go into too much detail, but the gist of it is this: i had a crush on him, i didn't know how to be his friend, i spent an entire summer desperately wishing to at least know if we were going to be friends, becoming his friend, spending a lot of time with him, drifting apart, coming out to him and not being accepted, and finally not knowing how to get ahold of him. I'm confident that he loved me too, but due to his upbringing, he would probably never come to terms with not being straight.

I worked at the community college i went to school at. I was in charge of lockers, so i was able to meet people needing to rent them. Nathan was a very cute boy whom i helped. I tried to conenct with him. He gave me his DeviantArt page, but it didn't work, and it still didn't work when he gave me the corrected version. I took that as a rejection, even though that may not have been his intention. The last time i saw him was when i was on break on the balcony, watching him walk away from my building.

I crushed on Moises hard when i helped him rent a locker. During an artist filming, he sat next to me, and when he said bye, he put his hand on my shoulder. It was electrifying. I later found him or a doppelganger on an asexual website. I wrote the username on a piece of paper, and when i bumped into him, i asked if that was him. He said there's a lot of look-alikes on the internet. I'm still not sure if i believed him, since asexuality is still kinda taboo. Finally, during the day before Spring Break, i asked him what he was doing that week, and he said, "Nothing." Instead of asking him to hang out, i froze and just said "Cool."

I'm not sure what's going on with these drawings of Michael, lol. The gist of our friendship: we were immediately attracted to each other, he told me he reminded me of his late boyfriend, we were physically affectionate, but i didn't want to do anything 'gay' unless i did the equivalent with a girl first. He knew i was gay, but he never pushed it. I often think about what would have happened if i did come to terms with my homosexuality.

Now that I wrote all of that out, i realize that i have plenty of material to expand these with. I'm just not sure on how the visuals will manifest. However, it just feels really good to put these out into the world.

Thank you.

*The definition of gray-asexual is changes with each individual; this is a blanket term that places us between sexual and asexual.

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