Coming Out pt 2: Starting Highschool

As I said before, I had a pretty strong Catholic upbringing. I've always believed in God, but I never had a really strong tie to the Catholic church itself. Not that I can remember, anyway. I remember when I was really little that my family would go to church every sunday. We'd go to Christmas and Easter mass, celebrate Advent and Lent, the whole 9 yards. Then, my mom died when I was 6. She committed suicide. After that, my family quit going to church for a long time. I think what happened is that my mom's death caused my dad to lose his faith for a while. This time was particularly hard for me because around this time, most of my close friends had just so happened to move away. I didn't have many people I could talk to. Anyway, my dad met my step-mom, who's a strong catholic, and when they married, we started attending mass regularly again. By we, I mean my dad, step-mom, new little step-sister and me. My older brother was out of the house by this point, so he didn't go, and my older sister refused. I tried to refuse too, but I still had to go.

Anyway, I also started attending Catholic grade school. there wasn't a huge difference between public grade school and Catholic grade school. If it wasn't for the uniforms and the occasional mass, you wouldn't know it was a catholic school at all. Being gay didn't bother me too much there since I was still in denial at that point.

Highschool was a bit different. For one thing, they took religion much more seriously, except they were really bad at it. I don't know what was worse: them severely misrepresenting non-Catholic people and beliefs, or them misrepresenting Catholic beiefs. I won't go into too much detail on this post. The being gay thing was more of a problem here too. I had begun to accept the truth that I was gay, but I was far from being okay with it. The anti-gay stuff was pretty terrible. it wasn't just jokes about stereotypes, sometimes kids would bluntly state how much they hate fags, completely straight-faced. Sometimes it seemed like every other comment was something anti-gay.

You know, the occasional gay joke has never really bothered me. I'm of the mindset that it's okay to make fun of people, as long as it's in moderation and everyone's included/teased. I mean, what would comedy be without making fun of people? What would be left? Puns?
The thing is, when it seems like every other joke is directed at you, it starts to hurt a little. You're not being included, you're being targeted. Sure, you know that a lot of them don't mean what they say, but when you're in the closet, it's impossible to tell who's who. It's really painful not knowing who your real friends are, and who will leave you without second thoughts if they found out you were gay. I don't know if I can even describe the feelings of loneliness. It's like you wake up every morning and think to yourself, "everyone I care about might abandon me if they found out about me." I know that sounds dramatic, but it's the best way I can describe it. What's worse is that I didn't know a single other gay student at my school. I had no one I could talk to about it. I knew I couldn't be the only one, but I might as well have been since I didn't know anyone else. At some schools, you can go talk to a teacher about this stuff. Not at my school. Even the teachers seemed to join in the anti-gay stuff once in a while.