In Real Life: My Journey to a Pixelated World Read online

  Before I could come out to my friends, though, I had to come out to myself. Since I was already aware of those feelings in me, it wasn’t some big flash of light, but a very gradual process of getting comfortable with the fact that these hidden thoughts were becoming dominant. (And truthfully, all the manly LA eye candy probably helped speed things along.)

  In addition to wanting to keep part of my life private, another big reason that it took me so long to publicly come out is that I know there are people who look to me as a role model. I take that responsibility seriously, and I didn’t want to announce something that I was still figuring out for myself. If there were closeted kids watching my videos and they needed a positive figure to look to, I wasn’t the right person for a long time. I still had a lot of learning and growing to do on my own before I could offer any kind of advice to someone else.

  I’m now in a place in my life where I’m proud to be who I am, and I’m tired of hiding and being afraid to share certain experiences. I want to be a person others can look up to and help teach others that liking the same sex is a normal thing. That’s just how you were created, and there is no shame in that. I don’t ever want anyone to have to feel afraid or feel the need to pretend to be someone they’re not. I know firsthand how excruciating that can be, and it’s important to remember that while we live in a time where it’s easy to say things like, “Being gay is no big deal,” a lot of people still aren’t yet comfortable with who they are. It’s a delicate place to be, and my advice to anyone struggling with that mind-set is to take things at your own pace. It’s your life, and you shouldn’t feel any pressure to admit feelings to people when you still haven’t fully processed them for yourself.

  If your feelings for the same sex are getting stronger, try asking yourself what it would take for you to be ready to tell other people. Are you waiting to fall into a relationship first, or do you just want to gain a little experience? That’s fine, but I think some people get too caught up in that waiting game. They feel that they already need to have someone in their life before coming out to family and friends, as if having a companion validates the fact to others. It doesn’t. Remember that the only person you should be trying to make happy while coming out is yourself.

  For all you straight people out there, if you have a guy friend who acts overly feminine or a girlfriend who is super butch, don’t ask them if they’re gay. They might not be, or they might not be ready to admit it. The best thing to do is what my mom and Nicole did so many years ago in our kitchen. They gently and subtly assured me that if I ever realized I was gay, they would be there to support me no matter what. You can’t force anyone out of the closet. It’s a deeply personal decision, and the best thing we can continue to do as a society is keep working at making this world a place where there’s no need to feel shame about who you are, which is why I’m finally choosing to talk about my early experiences with guys.

  Well, early is probably the wrong word. I got a bit of a late start when it came to dating. Actually, a very late start. I didn’t even have my first kiss until I was twenty-one years old.

  That’s right, twenty-one. By that age, most other kids have lost their virginity, had a nude selfie go viral in their school, or been arrested for having sex in public. Not me. But by the time I’d been in Los Angles for almost a year, my feelings about guys were so strong that I couldn’t ignore them anymore. They came to a head at Whitney’s twenty-first birthday party.

  We celebrated at a Mexican restaurant in Santa Monica, and she had invited a bunch of her friends I’d never met before. When I arrived, they were all crowded around her at one end of the table, and I ended up sitting at the other end with Luke and Brittany. But a guy sitting close to Whitney immediately caught my eye. He had a swimmer’s build, with swept-back dark hair and devilish eyes that crinkled when he grinned. I was wishing that I had gotten to sit closer to them when I heard the waitress ask if I wanted anything to drink.

  “A peach margarita,” I said, without hesitation. “No salt.” I wasn’t twenty-one quite yet then, but since we were all obviously there celebrating Whitney’s twenty-first and everyone else was drinking, I hoped I could get away with it. And I did!

  As dinner wound down, everyone started to make plans to take Whitney to a bar, which bummed me out. Our waitress might have turned a blind eye to my drink order, but there was no way I was getting past a bouncer without an ID.

  “Let’s pregame at my place first,” Luke offered. “That way Joey can hang out with us for a while longer.”

  Everyone thought this was a great idea, and as soon as we got to Luke’s house, he whipped out a huge bottle of Captain Morgan rum.

  “Okay, we’re gonna play a game,” Luke said. “Everyone stand in a circle. When the bottle comes to you, take a big chug and pass it to the person to your right, but you have to say ‘cannonball coming’ before it leaves your hand; otherwise you have to drink again.”

  It hardly seemed to qualify as a drinking game. It’s not like anyone forgot to say the words—unless they specifically wanted to take an extra swig. But it did the trick, and before long we were all pretty loopy. I got introduced to the guy I’d been checking out at the dinner table. His name was Kyle, and as the game went on, we kept meeting each other’s eyes. At that point, I’d already discovered that he was gay because he’d mentioned that he thought some male movie star was cute.

  Every time we looked at each other, I’d turn away fast, only to slowly move my eyes back and find he was still staring. I was confused and excited. It was the first time I’d ever been attracted to a guy who seemed to be into me as well. But the feelings were all too new and I didn’t know what to do with them. I couldn’t imagine the attraction leading to anything, but at the same time, part of me wanted it to. I wished I could talk to a friend about what I was going through, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. It was just too scary and big and new.

  About fifteen people were at the party, and it turned out that a lot of the guys were gay. Hanging out with them was totally different from hanging out with straights. Suddenly I could be my own silly self and not have to worry about anyone being a jerk by making some snide remark about my acting feminine or goofy. I pretended to be a pirate and chased Brittany around the house with a foam sword while everyone cheered us on. A little while later, I found myself gnawing on a pumpkin spice–scented candle to see if it tasted the way it smelled. (Big surprise, it didn’t.) I also knew in that moment it was time to sober up. Attempting to eat a candle is hardly the mark of someone who is in control.

  I flopped down on the couch and pointed to one of the guys. “Get me some water!” I shouted in a faux British accent, as if they were all my personal butlers. I was half-kidding, but he actually did, and so I spent the next half hour ordering different gay guys to fetch me water while pretending they were my servant boys. They ate it up.

  After I got tired of ordering them around, I went into the kitchen to refill my water glass. The hard fluorescent lighting hurt my eyes after sitting in the dim living room for so long, and Kyle was squatting next to the fridge, fishing around for a beer. He stood up when I entered. “Watthh up,” he mumbled. “Wanna beer?”

  “No thanks,” I said and leaned against the counter next to Luke’s blackened stovetop. “I’m just getting some water.”

  Kyle crossed the kitchen and leaned strangely close to me, enough to make me a little nervous. “So how do you know Whitney?” I asked.

  He launched into some sort of convoluted list of names and events that I couldn’t quite follow, but I nodded along, pretending to understand what the hell he was talking about. But I couldn’t pay attention at all because I was so distracted by how cute he was.

  He finally stopped talking and there was a bit of awkward silence when suddenly he closed his eyes and lurched toward me. Everything went into slow motion, and I was terrified as his lips crept closer and closer to my face. I looked down and stepped away at the last second, so he stumbled forward. “I
. . . um, I have to check my phone,” I said as I fled from the kitchen into the living room.

  I sat back down on the couch next to Luke and Brittany and watched as Kyle left the kitchen, crawled along the wall to the bathroom, and slammed the door shut. We all heard him start puking, and his friends ran to the door and started pounding on it until he let them in.

  I didn’t leave Luke’s and Brittany’s sides for the rest of the party. I tried to concentrate on what people were saying, but all I could think was, Did Kyle really just try and kiss me? Had I imagined it? Maybe he was just so drunk that he was swaying and he leaned in too close. But no—I may not have ever been kissed before, but I’ve seen enough movies to know what it looks like when someone goes for it. Plus, the more I thought about it, there had been a sort of energy in the air between us—something I’d never felt before, like a chemical reaction was sending out invisible rays signaling that this guy was into me. I started regretting not letting it happen.

  Luke and I and a few other people at the party ended up playing Mario Kart for a couple more hours while I sobered up so I could drive home. I watched Kyle slink out of the bathroom and leave with his friends, but he didn’t turn around to say good-bye to anyone.

  That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept wondering what would have happened if I had just let him kiss me. I did the right thing, I told myself. He may have been cute, but I didn’t want my first kiss ever to be with a guy who was completely trashed. Still, I was sort of mad at myself for chickening out. I volleyed those two conflicting thoughts around in my head until I finally fell asleep around dawn.

  I called Whitney in the morning and told her what happened.

  “No way,” she said. “I’m so sorry. He must have been really drunk. Kyle can get a little out of control.”

  “It’s okay. It was funny, I guess,” I said.

  She was silent for a minute, and I felt I could read her mind through the phone. She was wondering if it was something that maybe I wanted to happen.

  Luke was more direct when I told him what had happened later that day. “So, if he did kiss you, would you have liked that?” he asked.

  “No, definitely not,” I said automatically. He gave me a look, like Really? “I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know about these things. I don’t know what I like.”

  “It’s totally okay if you did want it,” he said. “Or if you ever decide you do. No one is going to judge you. I hope you know that.”

  “I know,” I mumbled and changed the subject.

  Over the next few days, I kept replaying the moment in the kitchen in my head and imagining different scenarios. In one, Kyle started groping me and I slapped him. In another, we had a really gentle, romantic kiss. In yet another, someone walked in on us just as we started to kiss, and I saw myself dying of embarrassment and shame.

  But the more I thought about it, the less shame I felt. Everyone around me was so accepting, it seemed crazy that I couldn’t be as kind to myself.

  Luke had another party at his house about a week later, and Kyle showed up. He walked right up and cornered me in a passageway between the kitchen and dining room. I caught a whiff of a sexy sandalwood cologne, and my palms immediately started to sweat.

  “Whitney told me that I tried to kiss you last week,” he said.

  I saw her standing in the corner over his shoulder and shot her dagger eyes. She shrugged and smiled and turned to talk to someone else.

  “Huh?” I said, playing dumb. “Oh, wait, that? Brittany told me that she thought she saw you trying to kiss me and I didn’t remember it, so I think I mentioned it to Whitney or something. I never actually told anyone you tried to kiss me.” I tried to laugh like it was no big deal, but the only sound that came out of my mouth was an awkward, high-pitched squeak. I wanted to disappear.

  “I probably did try, and I’m so sorry,” he said. “I was smashed, I don’t remember anything about that night. I was sick all the next day, and apparently here too.”

  Great. Kyle trying to kiss me was probably one of the defining moments of my life, and he didn’t even remember it.

  “It’s fine. Whatever,” I said and watched him walk back into the crowd.

  I looked around the party at the rest of the people there. It was about twice the size of the last one, and there were a lot of gay guys around. I prayed that the situation might repeat itself with someone else, and I kept hanging out in the kitchen, hoping that someone would walk in and find me there all alone. I wasn’t about to try and hit on anyone myself, though. I wasn’t ready to take the lead, and I think I knew deep inside that even if someone had tried to kiss me again at that particular party, I still wouldn’t have let it go anywhere. I just wasn’t there yet. But thanks to Kyle’s drunk, stumbling efforts, my closet door was starting to open.

  • • •

  A few weeks later, Luke spent a long, grueling day shooting a video for a song that a friend of his had written. He and the rest of the musicians had worked their butts off, and afterward he invited me out to dinner with the other performers and some of the members of the crew.

  Luke was busy talking with everyone from the shoot, so I got stuck at the other end of the table, mixed in with a bunch of people I didn’t know. It was a pretty big group that included friends of people who were at the shoot, and I felt that Luke was ignoring me, so I sulked a little, but a guy sitting directly across from where I ended up started chatting with me. Sam had short brown hair and was wearing a soft-looking, faded red-and-black-checked flannel shirt. I couldn’t tell if he was gay, but he seemed really interested in talking to me; he kept asking me all these questions about YouTube and my videos. At the end of the night he asked for my number.

  “We should go grab lunch and talk some more,” he said. It didn’t seem that he was asking me out on a date, though. He was so casual about it, and I figured he just wanted to discuss more YouTube stuff. I mean, I thought maybe he was gay because of certain little things, like the way he leaned in close while talking to me, but I didn’t want to assume anything. He told me to meet him the next day at a place called Tender Greens in West Hollywood.

  Now, I’d never been to West Hollywood before. For those of you not from Los Angeles, it’s one of the gayest neighborhoods in the country, right up there with the Castro District in San Francisco. Except that in WeHo, the sidewalks are crawling with cute, toned boys with perfect hair instead of leather daddies. But I was so clueless that none of the area’s personality registered when I first met up with Sam for lunch. To be fair, I was distracted—I’d just found out that I’d booked a modeling gig with a photographer. It was going to be a pretty elaborate shoot, set up like a big joyous birthday party, except that I was going to be really sad and depressed in the photos. I was excited about it, and I told Sam all about it as soon as we sat down, including the photographer’s name.

  “Oh really?” he laughed. “I used to fool around with him.”

  So he was gay. But what the heck did “fooling around” mean exactly? I sort of knew it meant at least kissing, but I reasoned that it could also mean that they were playing video games, tag, or hide-and-go-seek together. God, I was such a prude! I felt utterly clueless.

  He was wearing another flannel shirt, blue and gray this time, and not that what a person wears should necessarily signify anything, but his look still somehow radiated “straight dude.” Even though I was happy for the confirmation that he liked guys, hearing him talk about fooling around with someone else gave me a tiny ping of jealousy.

  “Small world,” I said.

  I changed the subject quickly, and the lunch flew by. He was easy to talk to and seemed genuinely interested in the work I was doing. He was an assistant to an indie film producer so I asked him a lot about that. After we finished up, I figured we were done, but as soon as we got out to the sidewalk, he asked if I wanted to grab some frozen yogurt for dessert.

  “Sure,” I said, and we walked a block to a seemingly innocent place called Yogurt Stop. But when
we got inside, I immediately started blushing. All of the flavors were named after some sort of ridiculous gay innuendo. I scanned the list of options like “I’m Comin’ Out Cake Batter,” “Let Me French Kiss Your Vanilla,” and “Hallelujah, It’s Raining Red Velvet Men.” (I suddenly heard an echo from the past in the back of my head: “It’s raining Joey’s guts, amen!”)

  Most of the names were laughable and didn’t even make sense—I mean, what the hell is a “red velvet man”? But they still made me uncomfortable. I selected the most innocent one I could find: “Love Lipstick Latte.” Sam got “Ride It Real Good Raspberry,” and I felt my cheeks turn bright red.

  We grabbed a table outside, and that’s when I started noticing that the sidewalk was dominated by men, many of them wearing tight clothes, most of them holding hands or walking dogs small enough to fit into an evening clutch.

  “Where are we?” I whispered.

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “West Hollywood.”

  “Why does everyone look so . . . gay?”

  He was cracking up. “Have you seriously never been here before?”

  “No,” I said, my jaw dropping at the sight of a sculpted jogger who was obviously not wearing any underwear.

  “Where have you been hiding?” Sam teased.

  “I mean, I work all the time,” I said. Which was true, but I think I was actually a little too scared to do a lot of city exploring on my own, especially to places like this. “Also, I don’t really have any gay or bi friends,” I added.

  “Well, we should fix that,” he said, staring at me as he licked his spoon. “Hey, you should really come to the Electric Guest concert with me next Wednesday. I bet you’d really like them. A whole bunch of my friends are coming too.”

  I could barely handle being alone with him. I couldn’t imagine how scary it would be to hang out with him surrounded by a bunch of strangers. So I lied and told him I had plans.