"I Am"

I Am Brad. I am thirty-one years old. I am gay.

At twelve years old, I believed that something about me was different.

At sixteen, my best friend made me realize that it was true.

At eighteen, I came out to my parents and friends.

At thirty-one, I am still trying to find out what being gay means.

There is no handbook that you magically receive when you realize that you are different. No cheat sheet for what to say when your junior prom date tells you she hates you because you aren't making out with her. All you know is that different equals dangerous and you better sort it out quickly. At least that is how it was for me.

There are of course many ways to find out what gay or lesbian means. The ones I was able involved porn magazines and "18 and over nights" with a fake ID. Believing that the gay ghettos of San Francisco, West Hollywood, and New York were the end all be all, I invested my life with my identity there. Following all the cues of the gay culture, I made some good choices and I made bad choices.

As I reached my 29th birthday, who I found myself to be, overwhelmed me, and I left the country to become an expatriate in Santiago, Chile.

Becoming a complete outsider and looking back at my own life, I saw everything with a new set of eyes. I also developed a strong need to communicate what I was going through. I needed to relate. So I picked up my small video camera and started recording some of the things I was doing, issues I was dealing with, and reflections on the "community" I had left behind. I began posting these videos on the internet. I had no idea at the time, but that simple act, would change my life forever.

There was a global audience.

People started commenting, sharing their ideas and their own stories, relating their own experiences and ever their own sense of isolation and lack of understanding of what it meant to be "gay." I received advice from men that I would later claim as mentors, audio from teens who were crying as they told me how scared they were to come out, letters from gay men in the UAE and from within the US Army and overwhelmingly, contact from men and women that cared so deeply in trying to make sense of the currently LGBT identity.

A man recently wrote me saying…

“You have touched on subject matter that I never had the opportunity to discuss with anyone when I was growing up. I am 39 yrs old. I came from a small town in Texas. When my parents divorced I was thrown into city life. Met some local kids and they took me too the Park on Saturday night. We were all underage age and could not get into the clubs. So going to the park was like going to the club. Then at 2 am the clubs and bars closed and all the people from the clubs would come down the park to continue the partying. The park also was the cruising area. I was totally green and did not know what was going on. I had a guy offer me money to go home with him. I knew I was gay but this had never happened to me. That was my introduction into the gay world. The park is where I learned about the gay life. The Good and the Bad. But I fell into the world of quick anonymous sex. Then I joined that Army and because of the oppression of Homosexuality in the Military I had to hide my sexuality and quick anonymous sex is all the sex I had.”

And you, my friend, my brother, my sister, as you read this, do you know of the two-spirited people from whom we come? Do you know or want to know that we have been on this earth since the beginning of time and that we have many available heroes and heroines? Your family has been here a very long time and has an ancient and distinguished lineage. O do you only believe what you see and what we have become? Who will teach us the extreme beauty of who we are intrinsically if not ourselves? Can we, as a disenfranchised minority, afford to let one day pass without discovering and cultivating our worth? Must we continue on without it as we have been?

I founded I Am Collective to foster this growth, to begin to explore and share the rich identity and gifts that we carry if we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, if we can even acknowledge them. They have bared unspeakable hardships and waited ages for their identities to be known. They yearn to be known as our youth yearn to know them.

We must not wait another day.

A mentor is one who passes on survival skills to another who needs them. Survival skills are many when it comes to being LGBT, the first being Self-Respect. But how can you respect yourself when you don't even know what it is that you are? What piece of the puzzle do you have to share with someone else? What piece do you need? For me, it began here:

Next: We Believe