I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much a single person can change another person’s life–often without actually actively trying.

I’ve been thinking about the importance of living authentically; of self-examination in the pursuit of personal truth; of embracing and having pride in oneself.

To that end, today I want to write about someone who I owe a great deal of my life’s happiness to, whether he realizes it or not…today, I’d like to tell you a story about Adam Hardy.

My first concrete memory of hearing about homosexuals (save, perhaps, in church) was on my tenth birthday: October 11, 1987. This day was to become the reason why October 11th is now known as National Coming Out Day; on the day of my tenth birthday, hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and their supporters marched on Washington, D.C.–demanding their rights and decriminalization of homosexual acts, demanding acknowledgement of and response to the AIDS epidemic, decrying racism, and generally asserting the human rights of all individuals.

In my home in Huntsville, Alabama, dinner was typically accompanied by the ABC Nightly News, most evenings (Saturdays were a notable exception, with takeout food and entertainment television: classic Star Trek reruns, Hee-Haw, or whatever else happened to be on). That particular Sunday was no exception, and as the reporters covered the March and showed footage of the nearly one million people gathered, I remember my father angrily yelling, “Faggots! Nothing but a bunch of goddamn faggots.” This was how and when I learned that being a faggot must be something very bad, indeed.

Flash forward five years. I’d already fooled around with several of the boys in my neighborhood; I’d begun fishing my mother’s Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogues out of the trash to tear out the page or two of men’s underwear ads; I was getting erections watching Soloflex ads. I knew that my same-sex attractions far overshadowed my opposite-sex ones…but surely, I couldn’t be gay; after all, being gay was something bad. Horrible. A “goddamn faggot”.

At my 16th birthday party, my friends pushed me to ask out my close friend Donald’s younger sister Tiffanie, who was a high school Junior, like me. I did, and she said yes. When the party had ended, I went down the street (as I often did) to visit my neighbor Kelly. He was a grade or two below me, and on the wrestling team. That night, we finally moved from mutual masturbation to full-on oral sex.

Tiffanie and I dated throughout the remainder of our Junior year. Conveniently, she was as nervous about sex as I was (I’m sure her Mormon upbringing had something to do with that), so our relations were limited to hand-holding, some light cuddling, and pecks on the lips. I continued with my mansex fantasies and occasional explorations with my friend on the wrestling team. Eventually, summer arrived…

Summers always brought with them an expanded opportunity for meeting new friends, as it was break time for colleges, as well. My first best friend, Colleen Campbell (who attended the prestigious Birmingham Southern College and was even then a rather accomplished playwright) and I would spend long nights staying up (and out), talking of every subject under the sun, and when we returned to her home, I’d often bound off to a different adventure with her brother Andrew (who I met in my freshman year) or sister Heather (who was also in my class and who was my date to the senior prom). These were good times.

One night, another friend in my class, Jenni Ludwig, told me that she had an amazing friend she wanted me to meet, who was back in Huntsville from a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts called Simon’s Rock. My memories of the specifics of our first meeting are cloudy after over 20 years (and all the friends I spoke with who were around at that time seem to remember the sequence of events slightly differently), but I do clearly recall that I connected immediately with Adam around a geeky common interest in comic books, fantasy literature, and tabletop role-playing games. As many nights and experiences seemed to do back then, this interaction felt like it went on forever, in my recollection. Its repercussions sincerely and certainly have, at the very least.

See, it had been divulged to me prior to meeting Adam that he was gay. So after that evening of our making acquaintance had finally ended and I was back at my parents’ house, my mind was racing with thoughts. The most obvious and prevalent of these thoughts being: I’m gay. It suddenly seemed so obvious; this person who I’d just met and felt so in awe of…he liked the same perfectly normal things that I did. He was just a guy. Like me. He wasn’t this insidious, shadowy “other” thing that I had witnessed provoking my Father’s ire; I was not that thing either, surely. Of COURSE I was gay. Why hadn’t it all come into focus until that moment?

The answer to that is obvious, of course. This was an era before the ubiquity of the internet; before cell phones and way before smart phones; even before cable television media was so pervasive. Also, this was the American Southeast. Culturally, we’re talking a near-vacuum. A lot has changed in the last two decades…back then, and perhaps even now to a lesser extent, homosexuals just weren’t a visible presence in that part of the world. Until they did start to be a presence, that is.

Again, my memory fails me as to the precise sequence of events which followed. I may or may not have already broken up with Tiffanie within a week of meeting Adam; or perhaps I broke up with her immediately following that meeting and my subsequent epiphany. Either way, there was certainly a lot of awkwardness and “it’s not you, it’s me” sort of fumbling in that step of the process, and I do occasionally still feel some lingering guilt for living even that much of a lie for that short of a time (mostly because of how it might have affected her). I wasted little time, however, once that boulder had been pushed off the top of the hill. Soon I’d confessed my same-sex desires to Colleen, Heather, and Andrew; to Donald, to Jenni, to Adam…to everyone (save for my family). Adam–whether he ever fully realized it or not–instantly became my gay mentor, a lifeline to the culture that existed beyond the confines of the Alabama state borders and my own sheltered neighborhood. A petrol tank of self-actualization which had already been encroached on by a blaze of curiosity now exploded into a full-time mission of self-discovery.

Once that closet door had opened, it was very clear that there was no going back.

I entered my senior year of high school as the (to the very best of my knowledge) first ever openly gay student at Grissom High. It wasn’t exactly front-page news, and to be honest, it was rarely ever any controversy. I knew though, that no matter how scared I may feel in any moment, I had to be true to myself, and I had to be honest in the world. I couldn’t hide, and I didn’t want to.

Not much has changed there, for me. After all this time, authenticity and radical self-expression are still qualities on the forefront of my conscious process most all the time. Although now, with me being a good bit older, my thoughts have started lingering more frequently on what the impact of that might have been–not so much for me personally (of course, the impact has been indescribably vast there), but more, I’ve ruminated on the impact that I might have had and hopefully am still having on the world.

Just as I said at the start of this post: it is often not an active decision that one makes: to change the world, or to have an impact on another person. But there can be no question that to live one’s life without shame and without self-limitation creates a ripple effect in all the people one’s life intersects with. It is modeling a behavior. Setting an example. Visibility–which is a concept that applies far, far beyond mere sexuality–is a key step in acceptance; much more importantly, however, it is the spark which can set off innumerable blazes of self-awareness in the human population and by extension, the world at large.

I can never doubt the value of these ideas; indeed, I consider myself to be living proof of them. I wish to convey the importance of this to my readers, more than anything else I’ve shared: never question the power of one. The more people there are in the world who do the demanding work of self-discovery and maintain the practice of self-expression, the more that we convey permission to those who are too afraid to do the same.