I think every one of us has heard at least once in his or her life prejudices about those who have a different sexual orientation: “That one is gay! I don’t think is good to stay near him, maybe it is contagious!” or “Those gays have mental problems”.

Yes, I am gay. I figured out that I like guys when I was little, since I was around five or six years old. It’s hard to be gay in a country with a mentality as the Romanian one. I always tried to hide this aspect, because everywhere around me I constantly heard negative opinions about having a different sexual orientation than the one imposed by society.

It wasn’t easy for me during middle school years and then in high school. My classmates, probably, have discovered this and they were always doing bad jokes that were making me feel inferior: “That one is a fag!”. Around them I was trying to hide the fact that I cared, but when I was alone I ended up crying. I even tried to lie to myself and I got into a relationship with a girl when I was sixteen, and I forced myself to love her, just to be ‘normal’, like the rest of the world. But is this really normality? Isn’t it, perhaps, a word whose definition is subjected to the judgement of the social majority?

The hardest period was during school years, before I got to college. Children were trying, besides offending me, to create situations which could easily lead to physical violence. It happened to me once, during the break between school hours, to hear kids yelling at me that I’m gay and because I told them to leave me alone, they came after me and they wanted to hit me… Besides other family issues, these prejudices and verbal abuse offered by the people around me represented an important factor which at nineteen triggered a serious depression. I wasn’t going out of the house anymore. I got to the point when I wanted to kill myself.

Step by step, I started to accept myself and to be at peace with myself. College life helped me, because my classmates are very open-minded and at the same time the fact that I came to study in the capital, a huge and multicultural city, in which people are more open towards ‘new’ ideas and who judge less, made me see things differently regarding my orientation.  It also helped me that my psychiatrist told me that is nothing wrong with being different, with having other sexual orientation, because these things are since the beginning of time.

It’s hard to be gay in a small town, in a community with a traditionalist and old mentality. But, if you have a bit of courage and trust in yourself, you can be happy exactly as you are! You don’t have to let anyone else to judge you, to corner you or to blame you because you are gay! Being gay doesn’t mean that you hurt someone or you do something bad to that person. You are human, like everyone else, a human which needs to love and be loved! In the end, I think this is the most important thing: to love each other and to respect each other more, despite sexual orientation, beliefs or religion.

It is not a choice to be straight, bi or gay. This is how we are born, different, unique.

Author: Alex