After high school graduation, my one focus was getting out of the house. My parents had done a full 180 — from relatively worldly to very conservative and narrow-minded, all driven by their religious beliefs. I was 17 and convinced I could think for myself. Their way wasn't for me.
My girlfriend at the time was moving back to the East Coast of Florida to live with her mom, so I followed. I got accepted to a small college in Cocoa, and in August of that year I moved to Merritt Island with a high school buddy and started classes.
By 18 I was on my own — still needing financial help from my parents a few times, but for all intents and purposes making my own life. College didn't last long. I came down with mononucleosis, lost a lot of time from school, and lost my job. Finding new work became the priority, and school got put on hold. I never re-enrolled. Honestly, it hadn't interested me that much to begin with. What interested me was surfing and smoking pot. I became what was known as a hippy. There were a lot of psychedelic trips, and the Peace & Love philosophy became my dogma.
I did a lot of traveling during that stretch, though not to a lot of places. The circuit was Florida to Georgia, then Tennessee, then out to Southern California, and eventually back to Tampa. For much of that time I traveled and lived with a good friend. We were fellow trippers in both senses — the geographic kind and the psychedelic kind.
We were out in a field that had been plowed up, working under a hot Tennessee sun. His grandfather drove a tractor across the furrows while my friend and I walked behind, picking up loose stones and throwing them into a wagon. It was hard, physical work — not the kind you coast through. I was pulling my weight.
At some point, without looking at me, without breaking his focus from the field ahead, the old man acknowledged that I was keeping up. Casual. Dismissive.
I was hurt. I had long hair and a slight build, sure — but so did his grandson. I was out there doing the same work, in the same heat, with the same effort. The remark stung not just because it was mean, but because it came from a man who struck me as deeply provincial — someone who'd spent his whole life in a tiny village outside a tiny town, far removed from the world I'd grown up in. He saw long hair on a slight frame and drew his conclusion. That was the entirety of his analysis.
My friend said nothing. Looking back, I think I understand why. He was drawn to something in me that I wasn't ready to name — an innate femininity I wasn't willing to acknowledge I even had. His silence made sense in a way I couldn't have articulated then.
What I couldn't have predicted — what would have seemed genuinely absurd to that 19-year-old throwing rocks in a Tennessee field — is that decades later I would spend real time and real joy presenting myself as a sexy, feminine woman. And yet, for years, any suggestion that my gender wasn't perfectly legible when I was dressed as a man would make me furious. The grandfather's casual cruelty planted something. A haunting. The idea that my masculinity wasn't self-evident to the outside world would follow me far longer than it had any right to.
I'm still working on that, honestly. These days I try to take an unintended gender misread as an honest mistake and respond with a little grace. It's a practice. I'm not always good at it.
Later, after we had moved on, there was an incident. We had pulled off the road to take naps, and I woke up to find him trying to get into my jeans. There were other incidents like that, and I found them all disturbing. I didn't want that kind of relationship with him.
Eventually we made it out to Southern California. We were at a party when we got busted for pot. Back in those days, they threw you in jail — which is exactly what happened. It was during those three days that I had my first homosexual encounter.
I was in my cell with another inmate. He was taller and much more muscular than me. We talked, and everything seemed fine. Then he came over to my bunk and said, "I want you." My first thought was: uh oh — I'm about to get raped. I told him no. His answer was, "okay, then we can jitterbug" — meaning we could fight. I knew how that would end. So I agreed.
He handed me a magazine and showed me how to hold it — blocking the view from the cells across from us. Then, to my complete surprise, he gave me a blow job. It was good. I had no problem reaching orgasm. Within half an hour, he gave me a second one. Same result.
Three days later I was released and back home. I felt ashamed. Disgusted. I remember standing in the shower and crying.
Looking back, I don't think I considered myself gay or bisexual after that. But it did change something — it opened a door I hadn't known existed. Sex with another man could be pleasurable, even if the circumstances were ones I wouldn't have chosen. There was still a lot more to learn about sexuality in general, and about my own specifically. That understanding would take another decade to start taking shape.