PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Warning: Contains Sexual Content - To all of the friends and family who may end up reading this, don't say I didn't warn you beforehand.

I see you on the sidelines, on the northside of the soccer field, warming the bench. You're in the fifth grade, happy to have made the team! Realizing that everyone made the team... Everyone made the team and here you are again, warming the bench like you will be for the next two years. Most fifth graders do warm the bench, so it's not like you've been left out in the cold, but it seems like you sit there a lot more than the other kids. Don't get me wrong, you do get to play some, but not when the game is close. You only get to play for a couple minutes in the first quarter or a couple minutes in the fourth. You're realizing that if you hadn't joined the team no one would have noticed at all.

You're learning how to accept the fact that you are a benchwarmer, which is good. You'll warm a lot more benches in your life, so you better get comfortable keeping them warm. You'll warm the bench of singleness. You'll warm the bench of infertility. You'll warm the bench of miscarriage. You'll warm the bench of heartbreak. You'll warm the bench of infidelity. You'll warm the bench of mental illness. You'll warm the bench of unemployment. You'll warm the bench of depression. You'll warm the bench of suicidal thoughts. You'll warm the bench of therapy. You'll warm the bench of addiction. You'll warm the bench of incarceration. You'll warm the bench of friendlessness. You'll warm the bench of being mistreated, misunderstood and not being noticed at all. I'm warming the bench of separation right now. 

It's lonely on the bench, warming a seat for the kid who gets to play all the time; but you're not the only benchwarmer and you've even made a friend. He's in eighth grade! You've made friends with an upper classman! His name is Zach and he's really nice to you. He seems as happy to have made a friend as you do. He always listens to you patiently even though most kids your age don't. You don't really understand why Zach doesn't have any other friends. He's nice. He's smart. He's a good listener. Yeah, maybe he's a little chubby and not so good at sports, but he's a good friend too. You're a little sad that he's going away to high school next year. You really hope he makes some new friends while he's there because you know he deserves to have friends. He gets you, Evan. He gets picked on by bullies even worse than you do. You don't know it now because the thought never crossed your mind, but Zach is gay.

The other kids call him all kinds of mean names that he doesn't deserve to be called. He didn't choose to be the way he is. He didn't choose to be soft spoken. He didn't choose to be on the effeminate side. He certainly didn't choose to be attracted to other boys (though he hasn't come out of the closet yet). He didn't choose the life he was given, just like you didn't choose the life that you were given. But I still admire him, even as an adult, because even though people put him down, made fun of him and left him out when all he wanted was a friend, he still remained kind. I hope you remain kind, too; and when you lose your way, when you let the world make you mean, just remember that it's never too late to be a kind person again. 
 

You've known from a very young age that you like girls. Whenever you think about being married someday you picture yourself married to a woman. You want to kiss girls, hold their hands, pass them love notes and call them your girlfriend. The thought has never crossed your mind to be in a relationship with a boy. But you'll come to find when you get to be my age that sexuality isn't so black and white. You'll come to find that you don't really fit into the cut and dry category of straight either. Can I let you in on a little secret? I'm guessing many people you meet in your life probably don't either. Sexuality is seldom so simple as straight or gay. For some, maybe, but not for everyone.

When you get to be sixteen, a turning point in your life, you'll start to explore your sexuality with pornography; and the pornography is going to impact you in ways that you'll find are irreversible. This is a difficult letter to write, but like I said in my previous letter, every sentence of the narrative is important. You're gonna have a crush on a girl named Ashley. She's pretty and she'll seem to like you. I'm glad that you'll take a chance, even though it doesn't work out. Bear with me as I tell you this story, because I promise that it's important.

Ashley sits behind you in Spanish class. You noticed her last semester but never had the courage to walk up and say hi; but after hearing her talk about Journey when she introduced herself to the class you figured you'd found an in. Classic rock is your favorite genre of music and now you know what to talk with her about. A day will come up when the two of you are practicing Spanish together and you'll ask her about Journey, letting her know that you really like their music too! She'll be so excited to talk to you about them and you'll talk about music almost every day from then on out.

One day she's gonna see you pull out your i-pod nano and she'll ask to see it. You'll oblige her, of course. She's gonna go through your MP3 player and she's gonna tell you, "Oh my God! You are my music soulmate! You have the same taste in music as I do!" Your heart is pounding when she says this, you immediately become convinced that it's only a matter of time before Ashley becomes your first real girlfriend. That's why you offer to burn her a CD with some of your favorite songs, that way she can listen to the same music as you do when she gets home. She smiles and says she'd love to have a CD that you made for her. 
 

You go home and get to work, knowing that the CD has to be perfect. Oh boy, Little Evan, I have to smile at how cheesy I could be back then. I don't remember all of the 20 or so songs I put on there, but I do remember a few. Don't Stop Believin', Faithfully, Open Arms, Don't Wanna Miss a Thing, Angel, Waiting for a Girl Like You, and oh so many more. The weekend passes by, and you're nervous, but excited too. You just know that she has to feel the same way about you, why else would she call you her music soulmate? So you give her the mixed CD and she gives you a hug, telling you that she'll listen to it as soon as she gets home.

A week or so goes by and she hasn't said anything, but she's still really nice to you. So you ask her, trying to play it cool, if she had a chance to listen to the CD yet. She says no, that she was really busy and hasn't had the chance to yet, but she'll let you know as soon as she does. Two more weeks pass, you don't bring it up cause you don't want to sound desperate but you're wondering why she hasn't brought it up. A full month has gone by now, and you can't keep your cool any longer, so you ask her if she got around to listening to your CD. She says she did, still smiling, and she really loved all the songs you picked out for her. She tells you that her best friend spent the weekend with her and they listened to it together. Your heart drops, you blush, you're incredibly embarrassed. Then she says, "She told me that she thinks that you have a crush on me. Can you believe that? I laughed and told her, 'no, he's gay!'" I was so incredibly taken aback. I didn't know what to say. My tongue was tied and my expectations dashed. I didn't tell her that I did in fact like her and no, I'm not gay. Instead I just curled up inside of myself and turned around, never correcting her false assumption. She probably thinks I'm gay to this day. 

A couple months later you're sitting at a lunch table with another girl you like. Her name is Autumn. The two of you have been really good friends since Freshman year. She's really fun to be around and you have a crush on her too, but you've learned better than to ask her out. You valued your friendship with her too much to risk complicating things. Anyway, one day when Autumn wasn't at school another friend of yours at the table asks you why you haven't asked out Autumn yet. He thinks the two of you would make a cute couple and he thinks that maybe she likes you, too. You're excited of course, maybe putting yourself out there isn't such a bad idea after all! This excitement doesn't last very long though. Some other girl at the table laughs and says, "Don't you know that he's gay?" I didn't correct her either. I just curled up inside of myself and found a new place to eat lunch...

Oh, Little Evan, you're going to develop a pattern of thinking that is known as HOCD, which stands for homosexual obsessive compulsive disorder. In spite of being attracted to women all your life, you will spend well over a decade wondering if you are gay. It starts off small enough, you'd never really considered the possibility until Ashley implanted the idea in your mind. Then, when the other girl at your lunch table, who knew nothing about you at all, said you were gay, part of you believed her. The summer before your junior year in high school you watched gay porn for the first time; and while it did nothing for you, you still were unable to shake the suspicion that you were gay. Everybody else seemed to think so, even your older brother asked you once, they couldn't all be wrong could they?

You continue masturbating to normal enough porn, mostly in magazines that your friend John swiped off his stepdad, and that's when you notice a transgender porn actress in one of the back page ads. And suddenly, you found yourself being aroused to a form of gay porn. You figured out the internet, as it isn't that hard to do, and before you know it you become hooked. To this day that is your porn fetish. I won't use the derogatory terms that the porn industry uses, but you learn all the key words and find all your favorite porn stars. 

As all porn addicts come to find with time, once a sexual fetish grounds itself in your mind it becomes nearly impossible to shake. I'm neither a scientist nor an expert in sexuality, so everything I'm sharing here is only from personal experience. You weren't born gay, though I don't deny that some people are, you just happened to find porn at a young age and the type of porn you watched influenced your sexual tastes. You're going to carry a lot of shame because of this. You're going to hate yourself at times. You're going to try and pray it away, and it's not going to leave. But I want you to know, even when it seems so far from the truth, that God still loves you; and he doesn't think less of you for the trap you caught yourself in.

You'll be 21 years old before make out with a girl for the first time. You'll touch each other's private parts and you'll find yourself completely and entirely sexually aroused. Even so, you'll still struggle with HOCD and you'll watch way more transgender porn than you care to admit. But believe me when I tell you, Little Evan, you aren't gay; and even if you were, God wouldn't love you any less. He loves you exactly as you are, even though you aren't exactly straight either. You aren't bi-sexual. You aren't pan-sexual. You aren't (insert prefix here)-sexual. Our society is far too concerned with our sexual identity and far too unconcerned with our identity in Christ. I wish I could tell you where you end up falling on the sexual spectrum, Little Evan, but I still don't know. Truth is, that's not what matters anyway. What really matters is that you are loved by God and Jesus died for every single one of your sins. That's the identity that really matters. 

From me to you,

Big Evan