How It All Blew Up

by Arvin Ahmadi

When you’re gay, you grow up doing a lot of mental math. Your brain is basically a big rainbow scoreboard, logging every little thing your parents say—their offhand remarks, the way they react to two men holding hands at the mall or the latest Nike commercial with a queer couple in it. You assign each event a point value. Plus or minus. When the time comes, you tally up all the points—and believe me, you don’t forget a single one—and based on the final score, you decide what your coming out is going to look like.

“Made you feel something, didn’t it?” She shook her head. “Just write something personal. From the heart. Put yourself out there and make yourself vulnerable . . . vulnerable as fuck.”