The years between 1981 and 1985 were hands-down the best years of my entire life. I was free, I was OUT of the closet and did not give a damn who knew! I was never all that obvious; I was never "queeny" or into drag or anything, but I never hid it, flirting with straight friends working at the mall and such. I made friends very easily and was soon a regular at several of the gay bars in Washington, D.C. It was quite an event among my friends and I when my 21st birthday finally arrived and I could finally drink rum and coke (legally, that is)! I also discovered sex clubs where I could spend entire nights having totally-anonymous sex with as many men as I possibly could.
I'm quite certain that it was during this period that I contracted the HIV virus, though I wouldn't know it for five or six years yet.
I was a very-well-read young man, and my studies with Jehovah's Witnesses had been so thorough over the decade since my family met them that I could generally reason circles around most people when it came to the Bible. I had come to believe at my very core that Jehovah's Witnesses had "The Truth". I knew enough about the beliefs of other religions, especially the Baptist Church, to believe with all my heart that the Witnesses had the only answers that actually made sense and were taken straight from the Bible, to boot. At the time, I had no delusions in this regard: Jehovah's Witnesses were the only true religion and that's what I needed to aspire to be. After my last encounter with a group of elders, however, I felt utterly abashed and knew that I could never live up to the image I'd formed of the "perfect Christian."
So I stopped trying, and avoided reminders of such things like the plague; any discussion about God and the Bible became anathema to me. If I saw a preacher on the TV, I would quickly turn the channel; if I didn't, I'd find myself yelling at the TV, citing Scripture after Scripture in refutation of whatever nonsense the preacher was spouting. Seriously, I would get extremely angry at these people, misquoting and misapplying the Bible, jabbering on about things they knew little-to-nothing about, and asking for money in return at every opportunity; it was obscene! My friends learned to avoid such discussions and TV shows when I was around.
Now, there are many gay men and women who have always felt that God made them the way they are and so there is nothing wrong with being gay. While I now believe similarly, such was not always the case. As far as I was concerned back then, since my homosexuality was never actually a choice, it had nothing to do with whether or not God had made me this way. Instead, it had everything to do with the environment in which I was raised: female-dominant, no father-figure—a classbook case of "environmently-induced homosexuality". The nightmarish images/memories of certain events in my early childhood lent much credence to this conclusion, especially since, to this day, I cannot even begin to consider intimate relations with a 'female of the species' without getting nauseous.
Since, in my mind, my being gay was not a choice and could not be genetic (hadn't they proven it was an illness?), it had to be due to the way I was raised. That meant, somewhere in the back of my mind, that there was hope for me, that maybe Jehovah God could somehow, someday forgive me for what I was and that I could change—somehow. However, since I could not reconcile my openly-gay, debauched life with what I'd come to believe was the proper image of a "true Christian," I shut that entire side of myself off and remained free and gay and completely out of the closet for the next four years.
That four-year hiatus was the best time of my life, a time when I actually liked myself and was genuinely happy, with few real cares and virtually no fear—a time spent blissfully unaware of the life-altering crises looming on the horizon.
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