I wasn't particularly religious. So it didn't bother me that homosexuality is supposedly a sin. It was the people around me. It was the memories that I had. None of these memories had involved me, but indirectly they did.
It started off small, when I was young. Hearing the kids a couple years older than me talking about a boy in their class. "Look at the faggot," they'd say. They didn't know I was listening, but I was. The boy they were referring to didn't have very many friends. He was quiet. He just minded his own business. But the slurs kept coming. The bullies kept at it. I didn't want to be like him. I started to hate him because I saw him as a version of myself, the version that I was terrified to become.
As I grew older, the comments started to involve me more and more. "Stay away from him. He's not right," my parents and friends would tell me when I asked something about him. I learned to stop asking. I didn't want to upset anyone and I could tell that, for some reason, this boy did. I didn't want to be the same.
There's one specific memory, it's engraved in my brain. My parents were watching the news in the living room. I was about 10 years old. And they started yelling about "Fucking faggots." Saying how they're such a disgrace and on and on and on. And I yelled at them to shut up. Their comments then turned on me. "Are you one of them?" I was bawling. "Stop fucking crying they deserve it." I denied it. I shoved that part of myself into the darkest corner I could find. I acted like it never happened, like I wasn't me.