![old gay men making out old gay men making out](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/08/08/us/09religion.xlarge1.jpg)
He was looking after his baby sister, but he said she would probably be asleep by late.Īt the time I wanted to meet this boy so bad that I said yes right away, told my parents I was hanging out with a friend, and I made the long journey to Jakub’s house, which I remember being a forty-minute drive, maybe longer. We would be all alone at his house for hours. His mother worked as a prison guard during the graveyard shift and would be leaving by 8pm, not to return until early the next morning. But a date did finally occur in July.Įventually we both wanted to meet each other, and one afternoon he messaged me on MySpace asking if I had interest in driving over to his house later that night. He was so far out there in the north area of Stead that to pick him up and drive him back to civilization would have taken half the day. The problem was he didn’t live near anything. I thought about taking him to lunch or something. And he lived so far away it wouldn’t have been fair or sensible to pick him up and bring him all the way back to my house anyway. I wasn’t out to my parents yet, and so there was no bringing him to my house. I wanted to meet him, but he didn’t have a car. We were both just starting to explore our sexuality, and there was something kind of beautiful about that. I still remember how nervous he was, somehow more nervous than I was. I still remember the way he looked at me the one night we spent together.
![old gay men making out old gay men making out](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/EJfDDb2tMLQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
![old gay men making out old gay men making out](https://i.etsystatic.com/18583005/r/il/edf2d7/2300673294/il_fullxfull.2300673294_kt3f.jpg)
Unlike the first guy I ever kissed, I can actually still picture Jakub in great detail. He was one of the cutest guys I had ever seen. He lived with his mother and baby sister in Stead, an area outside of Reno I had almost no familiarity with. There was only one guy I had immediate interest in.Ī boy who messaged me on MySpace one day in June and who I started chatting with right away. I probably messaged a few of them, but the chats didn’t really go anywhere, at least in that particular summer. More and more guys were messaging me on MySpace. I worked with a personal trainer during the summer and got in the best shape of my life. I was about to study abroad in Germany for four months, so I had that coming up. Nobody else in my world saw the update, and in the summer of 2005, life was normal, for the most part. I thought it was certainly possible a member of my family could be on MySpace and see the update, and so looking back I’m actually surprised I changed it well before I was ready to come out of the closet. I told them through e-mail that it was something I didn’t want out to the world yet, but I was beginning to come to terms with my sexuality and to please respect it. My friends Brandon and Samantha e-mailed me, Brandon in particular wondering if it was a joke or not. So I changed my sexual orientation to Gay, pretty sure most people in my world wouldn’t notice. I was so sick of looking at MySpace every day and seeing Straight in my bio. My sexual orientation had said Straight for the longest time, but one day late in the semester, after I was about to wrap up my classes, I changed my sexual orientation on MySpace to Gay. There was one big change I had made to my MySpace page during my spring semester of college in 2005. Facebook was still in its infancy, but I was on that every day, and I was still active on MySpace, which I continued exploring well into 2006 and maybe even 2007. I came home to Reno from college for the summer, and I remember spending way more time than I should have on social media. At least in March, right? But as it turns out, I didn’t kiss another guy for six more months. Still, you’d think I would have gone out with another guy soon thereafter. One I definitely have never forgotten and one that didn’t necessarily make me want to swap tongue spit with another guy in the weeks to come. I first recognized I was gay in the summer of 2003, and I didn’t kiss my first guy until January of 2005, when I was newly twenty years old. Photo by Zac Cullers at Unsplash 2005 was quite a year.