I was 18 and had just returned from a summer tour with a Little Rock Arkansas based christian music team, I was the bass player and sound man. A few days into the tour we played at a little church about 45 miles north of Houston, Tx. My best friend from HS was living in Houston and I asked the team leader if it would be ok for me to drive down for a quick visit. He lived in the "montrose" section of Houston and boy were my virgin evangelical christian eyes in for a shock, but we'll talk about that in a different blog entry. A year earlier he had invited me to lunch, I was a senior in HS and he has just graduated, so we didn't see as much of each other as when we were in the same building every day. Over lunch he told me why I didn't see him in church anymore, he had lost weight, was wearing stylish clothes and seemed much happier than I had ever seen him before. I sat speechless, I wanted to be happy for him but how could I? He had gone over to the dark side, he was gay! OK, back to Houston, the shock was gone and I had had a little time to process his coming out and even begin my own process of rebuking the demons that were trying to tell me I knew what he was going thru. My friend was a part of a group called the "Ancient Practitioners of Light Energy" and his explanations of this group made his coming out seem tame by comparison. He told me he had traveled out of body on several occasions and checked up on me back in Detroit. While all of these things were firsts, they are not the first eluded to in the title.
After arriving back home in Michigan I had a conversation with a family member who knew my friend and knew of the previous "coming out" conversation. When I told them about the out of body travel, they jokingly replied, " so he might be hovering up in the corner of the ceiling watching us right now?" Now, here comes the first I can never forget. My family member went on to look up into the corner and said my friends' name, followed by "YOU'RE A FAG"
Now, I had probably done this before, but this is the first time I ever knew exactly what i was doing while I was doing it, I laughed, not because it was funny? I laughed to deflect any suspicion anyone in the room might have that I too, was a fag.
