The unexpected haunting part watching his final days was the realization that both his book and the documentary were out there in my 20’s. I was in college when his book came out; in grad school when the documentary was released. It’s not really a matter of “gosh I wish I had known…” I wasn’t looking for it. At that age I didn’t have the desire to ask those questions or delve deeper. That’s the weird thing when I look back.

I have always been the person who goes into super research mode when making decisions. Spontaneous? Ha! Buying an appliance? Let’s read 300 reviews and watch 15 YouTube videos. Coming out at 51, first let’s read a dozen books and more. That’s classic me. In college I researched and agonized each time I changed majors, but I didn’t do that about my own queerness and coming out until 2023.

I’ve said before, I strongly think I’ve masked neurodivergence most of my life. There was no external pressure like dirty laundry or a need to keep food cold. There was this little compartmentalized part of me that lacking motivation from elsewhere went unexamined.

That’s one thing that often feels so different when I read or hear other people’s coming out stories. There was no agonizing, bargaining, wishing to be different. It was unexamined until I had a lot of alone time.

This was my journey last night along with a lot of tears for the death of someone I never knew. Watched the documentary on YouTube. I don’t think it’s available otherwise. Like so many other LGBTQ stories from that time, it deserves to be heard by those too young to remember.

The post The Unexamined Life: Coming Out, Paul Monette, and Neurodivergence appeared first on Prezactly!.

Well the last time I got my eyes checked was in 2019. Mom was already well on her way down the dementia trail and had to go with me. She sat in the waiting room where she would periodically forget where we were and start calling my name. By the time we left that afternoon, my nerves were shredded. And then right on the heels of that, the pandemic started, and her dementia worsened as social contact diminished. I just hit the point that I didn’t feel like I had time to deal with my vision and even after she went into the nursing home I put it off.

Now it was clear to me that something was going wrong but the anxiety feedback loop combined with needing to ASK someone to drive me to an eye appointment out of town. I have never been great at asking for help. I would walk over hot lava first most of the time. But living in a rural place, that’s a lot of hot lava to walk to another city. So I put it off and put it off.

Finally I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had the suspicion it was cataracts. My father had his removed about 50 and I was already past that hump in the road by a few years. If I had ever been sure that’s “all” it was, it would have been easier to get moving but what if it was something far worse? But I finally gathered my courage and unloaded all that was going on and asked for help. They will never know how much I appreciate it because as I said my whole psyche recoils at the idea.

A couple of weeks ago, I sat with my collected nerves in an exam room in Macon, Georgia. I had to pay fully out of pocket for that appointment as getting an ophthalmologist in network without waiting for months was not in the cards. But it was worth it to finally get the ball rolling. I do have cataracts. They are both well past the point they should be removed. In fact the right eye has reached the point he can’t properly see the back of the eye and my next appointment is with a retina specialist. He wants them to do some sort of test to verify the back of the eye is alright before moving forward with surgery.

That will be in early November. And until then my anxiety will cycle in and out. He said the back of the left eye was fine and he really doesn’t expect anything to be wrong with the right eye but he wants to verify first. After that, another consultation to determine when the surgeries will be. And yes, we are getting painfully close to the end of the year which is a whole other layer of insurance anxiety.

Me Asking For Your Help

Which finally leads me to a plea for help. And I’ve already told you how much I hate asking for help. Asking for a ride is monumental. Asking for money is just.. not something I’m accustomed to doing. But I have a $2000 out of pocket maximum with my current health insurance. And I honestly don’t know where it’s coming from.

I wish there was something more I could say than simply if you read this and you have a few dollars to chip in, I would greatly appreciate it. Not having to wonder how exactly I’m going to pay for my part of this will be one less anxiety in the cavalcade of anxieties I’m facing at the moment. Thanks for considering chipping in and I would also appreciate it if you passed this on to anyone who might be willing and able to help as well.

Here are a few options to help:

• My Venmo @tismark – https://venmo.com/tismark
• My Paypal – https://paypal.me/metisdale
• My Ko-Fi – https://ko-fi.com/marketisdale

Update – Week of 11/11/2025

Saw the retina specialist and was told things look okay for cataract surgery! Next stop back to the doctor to discuss the details, plan a time, etc.

The post Cataracts & Mark’s Closet of Anxieties appeared first on Prezactly!.

I’m not going to go into a lot more depth about the people involved out of respect for their privacy. I suspect in the unlikely chance any of them would ever stumble over this essay they would recognize themselves already. But we hit a bump in the road that was 99% my immaturity possibly with a little helping of bottled up rage from my own closeted life. Not for the first or last time, I felt left out and instead of saying that to the people involved, I burned my bridges spectacularly.

Within about a year of having severed ties, I heard from friends that we still had in common. They told me that that one of my former friends had come out as trans. And all these years later I feel guilty that on hearing the news I said that I was glad that I had cut ties because it was “just too weird” for me. Despite being deeply in my own closet, I still had friends in my life who had come out as gay. And not understanding what it really meant to be trans I said to the friend who passed on the news that I did not understand why they needed to transition instead of just being gay. I have no idea that any of what I said ever made it back to them but I still feel very ignorant for having said it at all.

In the years that followed, I’d run across random people in the world who were trans. I would eventually have friends who were trans. After coming to know trans people, some briefly and others as friends, the ignorance melted away. The initial feelings of discomfort simply faded with time. And this was still before I had come out as queer myself.

It’s not even that I would claim deep understanding of what it must feel like to be a trans person. Basic empathy alone should be enough, but the shared queer experience should certainly provide an inside track. Part of why I’m writing this is to simply say that if you’re open to it, you can grow beyond that initial ignorant level of discomfort. I wish it had happened in my case much longer ago. I don’t have any deep secret to share, just be willing to get to know people whose experience doesn’t match your own.

I find it fascinating how frequently people in my life turned out to be some flavor of the LGBTQ+ going back to friends I made as a toddler. It does make me think there’s some sort of internal recognition even when no one is flashing any rainbows or telling you their life story. And it makes me wonder if part of that long ago connection wasn’t somehow at the root of the inexplicable ease I had connecting with them.

Considering the volume of queer friends that were part of my life all these years I’m not lamenting the loss as anything like “maybe I’d have come out sooner.” That was an internal journey that although helped by people I knew was deeper than that. I just regret that I didn’t work harder to save a friendship that would have undoubtedly sped up my journey from ignorance to trans acceptance.

I wrote this essay for two reasons. The first is to show that we can all, if willing, learn to accept people for themselves, in whatever form that takes. I regret that my first reaction was what it was but I’m glad that I was never so closed off that I was unwilling to open my mind and heart to experiences other than my own. People can change if they are open to it.

And the second reason I’m writing this is as an apology. Although unlikely, if the people involved ever stumble across this essay I’m sorry that the only way I knew to handle feeling excluded was to blow it all up. Your friendship was worth talking it out but I didn’t know how then.

The post From Ignorance to Trans Acceptance appeared first on Prezactly!.

Outside of two younger cousins, I didn’t really know any other fans until I wrote a letter to another fan, Brendan Crispin, whose address was published in the letters column of the comic. I think this was 1990 to early 1991. All I’m positive about was that this was before Liane Elliott’s letter was published in the final issue because I do remember that I was already involved with the Transmasters fan club before the influx of new fans when her letter was published. But I think it may have only been as little as a few months before.

For people who weren’t around back then, this is before the internet was really a thing. Club business and contact between fans was mostly by mail. Some of those early “pen pals” all those years ago are still people I consider close friends today. Even the ones I’ve regrettably lost touch with I do look back on fondly.

It was somewhere in this pre-internet world that I created my short-lived ‘zine TransVerse. I wish I could tell you a year it began and ended but after several moves I have very little left from that era. I just remember being inspired by some of the other ‘zines I saw. TransVerse was not a newsletter but text-based stories told in a universe that was my own concoction. It blended the cartoon and comic book histories together picking what I considered the best of both worlds. It focused on some original characters as well as the actual Transformers characters. It lived in a period where the only new Transformers stories we had were ones written by fans.

I don’t remember the actual stories in my ‘zine anymore but I remember all the work that went into publishing it. Typing up the stories, laying it out and printing it. When it started, with no scanner, art was either done on my computer or when it came from one of my artist friends I had to leave space for it when I laid out the text and physically pasted it in so that it would be part of the copied pages that were eventually mailed out. Lots of barely digital and analog steps in a world that was just beginning to move to digital.

To me the art part is really interesting looking back because those very basic robot line drawings I did on the computer were done without a pen input or even a mouse. I did that on a keyboard in a very rudimentary computer drawing program. They were heavily inspired by art from the comics. About the same time I almost signed up for an art class in college but chickened out after the first day. A decade later I got interested in photography and started selling prints online. Soon after I got my first Wacom tablet and mostly taught myself digital editing and painting. What began as a hobby would later turn into a full time profession.

I haven’t written any fan stories since TransVerse finished. I think the last issue may have been around 1996. I feel like I had just started grad school when I mailed out what would be the last issue. Sadly i don’t think there was any conclusion to the stories I was telling either, just ended when I never put out another issue. If you were one of the readers who was left waiting for the next issue, I’m sorry!

I never entirely left the fandom but I definitely became a less prominent part of it. I was years ago VP and later Co-president for Transmasters. I have never aspired to any sort of club office before or since so it says a lot about my devotion to Transformers that I was up for that. I went to the first four BotCons. Sat out a few years when I was first out of college and couldn’t afford to travel so far. At this point I was living in Atlanta and helped start a listserv fan group “TFATL” on “Topica” for fans who lived in the area. About once a month, we would pick a place to meet and chat. Around the same time I attended the last BotCon I ever made it to in North Carolina in 2001.

I still love the Transformers. I rarely collect the toys anymore but I periodically get caught up in new shows or comics or what have you. The original show and movie and those long ago friendships I formed around it will always be a special part of my life even if I can’t remember what year X happened in.

Thanks to Tony Buchanan who asked me to write about this subject… Maybe I’ll reminisce more about those long ago years in the Transformers fandom someday…

The post Transformers, Transmasters and More Than Meets The Eye appeared first on Prezactly!.

As I discussed in my post acknowledging my autism, my mental image of myself has always been the “smart kid” – and I think as an adult the feeling stuck around, but had far less social significance. It was more like being a one-hit wonder in radio terms. But it carried with it the self-perception that I thought I was a fast learner. And it very much depends on the content. While social and emotional processing was a challenge, my brain excelled at structured information like names, dates or even narratives. If I wanted to learn arcane trivia about Transformers, superheroes, or science fiction shows then I was in my element.

When it came to absorbing facts and details, my brain was not necessarily special but it certainly excelled. Yet at the same time, people’s names eluded me, and I bought a house for which I could describe no detail of the kitchen when a friend asked later that afternoon. I could remember every room around it, but not the room that held no real interest for me.

By contrast, in other parts of life, I felt very slow to grasp what others would have considered instinctual. Parts of life others seemed to take in as if they were downloading a map update on broadband internet. Meanwhile, I felt like I was trying to gather those same updates through a 14.4 modem. It wasn’t fast, and I’m not even sure that analogy is wholly correct. In retrospect, it seems like I needed exposure to the same map update over and over before it finally updated. It was as if someone added a whole new subdivision to the map, and I needed more time to find it.

Being Vulnerable
(Maybe too much so for some)

I’ve mentioned a few times feeling very behind my peers in my teens and early adulthood. To be honest, I have probably always felt that way, but it was very profound then. I don’t think I’ve ever really explained how deeply it ran. Do you remember the first time you discovered masturbation? I know I was in 9th grade, and I know I had vaguely heard it discussed around me in ways that never quite landed for me. I don’t remember the exact context, but I know it came up in 9th grade health class, and the little light bulb connection finally came on. It was far from innate, and I was on the late end of the scale from what I’ve since read. I even wonder if the place, a classroom, had some role in taking on new information.

The next detail is something I almost mentioned when I was in therapy a couple of years ago. I didn’t know how to broach the subject then, but it’s related. In those early days of masturbation, it was like I had the physical understanding, but I lacked the emotional fantasy world that usually goes along with the act. There was no imagining being with someone. If I imagined anything, it was usually being someone else rather than being with someone else. For further abstraction, it was typically a guy in a magazine, a TV star, or someone otherwise unknown. Years later, when I first heard the phrase, “Do I want to be with him, or do I want to be him?”, it was eerily familiar. I think the beginning of my internal world revolved around an inherent confusion about what it meant to have an object of desire.

I’ve written a lot about the lack of representation and how it affected me, but I never explained how fundamentally I feel that is true. I think this lack of role models is a large part of the confusion that I expressed in the previous paragraph. I think so much of my lack of understanding could have been far less severe in a world with more examples of queer relationships. Although I was born after Stonewall, most of the early examples of gay characters in popular culture were abstract, extremely one-note characters.

If a queer character was ever explicitly said to be gay, they were usually lone queer characters depicted in opposition to the “normal” main characters in the show or movie. It was vanishingly rare they were depicted in relationships with friends or lovers or anyone else. I’m not exactly sure when I saw my first gay movie, but I think it was either The Truth About Alex or Maurice on HBO. Both of those would have been when I was 16 or 17 years old. The former was a story of being outed, so not an ideal example of representation. Maurice did offer a tiny glimpse into queer relationships, but largely it was a movie centered on queer characters struggling to live in an unaccepting world.

I think Tales Of The City in 1994 was probably the first time I remember seeing queer characters who were the focus of the narrative and straight characters were the tokens. When I saw it in 1994, I was 22, and although I didn’t really connect with the characters, I still give it credit for being my first glimpse of queer community. By that point I already had gay friends who had come out to me, but there’s a parallel with TV and movie characters. Simply knowing someone who is gay is not the same as being part of their daily lives. It’s similar to someone telling you they have six toes on each foot, but they are always wearing shoes. Unless you express some curiosity or desire to know more, it’s a surface detail at best.

The process of writing this has made me even more aware of how much I looked for and relied on external narratives to understand and relate to others. Not just mass media narratives, but also those playing out in the lives of people around me. My experience is just one person’s, which is rooted in a time and place. But I can recall so few examples of visibly queer behavior in public. I’ve written before that I was in my mid 30s on a trip to London before I saw a gay couple hold hands on the street and kiss briefly. I think even though I had queer friends, that part of their life wasn’t as visible because I never made a point of meeting them in queer spaces. So even those near and dear to me didn’t add a lot to my picture.

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

The lack of connection with characters in media or friends I actually knew was part and parcel of new maps being slow to digest. It also felt very vulnerable to ask questions or inquire. On one hand at the time I would have said I didn’t ask questions of my gay friends because I felt it was an intrusion, but on a deeper level I suspect it just boiled down to not knowing what to ask or where to begin. The first friend who came out to me, I asked some very perfunctory “how/when did you know” type questions but as far as I can remember it stopped there. Undoubtedly I had some desire to know more, but I didn’t really know where to begin. My narrow lived experience didn’t expand the order of things that governed my internal and external worlds.

I started an essay last year about how I had recently discovered a wealth of queer films from the late 90s and early 00’s. I may still finish writing it later but the primary point of it was about how utterly blind I had been to it. My original hypothesis was more akin to the concept of filter bubbles, but I think fundamentally my curiosity ran out sometime after Tales Of The City. And on reflection I suspect that cut-off point was the murder of Matthew Shepard which I’ve written about multiple times before.

By then spicy content online had provided the basic mechanics of what happened between men which informed my internal fantasy world. Yet it remained very separate from the concept of queer relationships. Why people sought out connections in the queer community remained a mystery. I think, not only was the map slow to load, I may have been subconsciously avoiding the acknowledgement of any interest in subjects that were outside my lived experience. I centered my life on just trying to survive in a very functional utilitarian way with work and with sporadic, often failed, attempts, at cultivating friendships.

I understood what happened between queer people physically, but not in an emotional, relational, or communal sense. More broadly, I also lacked an understanding of heterosexual relationships. In my autistic fashion I tried to make them conform to a specific pattern. Most of my limited dating experience with women in my late 20’s and 30’s amounted to attempting to perform roles I’d seen modeled in popular media. Where some people would have seen those failures as confirmation they were gay, I took it more generally as a fundamental failure to relate. In a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees, without realizing I was missing a bigger picture, I didn’t make the next deductive leap.

You’ve Got New Maps

The understanding I have now is new. But the process of taking on new maps is essentially a lifelong process that likely never ends. In the past, if not now, it was largely unconscious. It’s taken me a bit of work to try to understand what changed in the last couple decades of my life. How was two years ago when I came out substantively different to 25 years ago? On reflection, my world grew in little pieces. I had more queer friends online and saw them sharing photos and stories about their friends and loved ones. And even if I wasn’t actively seeking it out, I saw more queer media than ever before.

A vivid example of queer media I accidentally encountered was Schitt’s Creek. In 2020, in the most random way, I discovered Dan Levy’s beautiful little world. For months, maybe far longer, I had been sharing Schitt’s Creek animated gifs on Facebook. If you’re my friend online, you’ve learned I lean into gifs a lot. I think they are my way of summarizing how I feel and how I want to show it. And I kept finding David Rose gifs that perfectly fit the moment in my eyes. And yet I had no idea who Dan Levy or David Rose were.

Somehow those gifs captured a little piece of my internal landscape. It’s genius how the show’s social media team used those gifs as a marketing campaign with Schitt’s Creek as a watermark on each gif. I finally looked up the name and discovered there was a widely acclaimed show that was in its final season. I managed somehow to catch up before the conclusion.

I truly believe seeing David and Patrick’s relationship in a world where there was no question about their right to exist made a huge difference. Only now have I come to understand how much it mattered.

A New Way Forward

The past two years since coming out as queer have been a steady aggregation of queer community. It’s been a story of deepening existing ties as well as making new friends. Living in a small rural town, the bulk of it is online but it’s been no less real to have people who see me in a way that no one has before. So far I have been on the slower path, and it’s unclear if that’s subject to change. But the journey has helped me not only have a deeper understanding of the maps I lacked as well as the very autistic way I have been experiencing the world all these years. I am not sure I would have made these leaps as easily if I reckoned with autism frist, but it’s impossible to be certain.

Much of my explanation about how my brain is wired may come across as quite abstract, and maybe it is. I have found very few accounts that mirror either my queer or neurodivergent experiences. Maybe there are others like me but we are explaining similar experiences with a different language. Perhaps we will stumble across each other yet. Perhaps how I understand it may evolve as well. Regardless what comes next, this new realization has helped me put my experience in a framework that previously eluded me. And having a new way of seeing my past has been well worth it.

What has changed now goes beyond understanding myself more fully. It’s the ability to sometimes recognize when I’m editing myself. Even before autism felt like the right explanation, I would reflect on something a therapist told me when I talked about being afraid of being perceived as weird. He said to “lean into the weird.” I’m unsure how he intended me to take this, but I came to realize that holding back my genuine responses watered down who I am. Holding back just delayed the eventual moment when I would slip. Or even if I didn’t slip it was inauthentic when being myself was valued more than ever before.

That shift began before I recognized my autistic traits, but now, with more clarity than before, I feel more committed to this path.

The post Autism – Mapping The World Was Never Instinctual appeared first on Prezactly!.

But it was an idea that never entirely went away. It lingered in the background. I kept feeling like I didn’t have the full picture I continued to read and watch videos. I think I was constantly looking for queer stories more like mine. I think in the big picture that was always part of the problem. Last year I wrote at length about my outsider experience.

It’s hard to even fully explain what I mean sometimes. It wasn’t just that I lacked the confidence to say “I’m gay.” It was deeper than that. I didn’t feel like I fully understood who I was, or how I fit into the world around me. For a great deal of my life, I felt more like an outsider looking in, an observer rather than an active participant in my own story. I felt like I struggled to find a place I fit in, and every failure to feel that sense of connection with individuals or a sense of real community caused me to try a little less.

Excerpt from my Coming Out Late Post – October 2, 2024

Looking Beneath The Surface

Looking back at past posts and essays I’ve written, I realized that it felt like I kept describing the symptoms and was never quite looking beyond the surface level. It was when I read about masking in autism that I had my a-ha moment. I was unaware that people could consciously or unconsciously cover up autistic behaviors. I would read about phenomenon like stimming and think, “well I don’t have that so it’s not me.” And then after hearing others describe their masking on YouTube and in various articles, it deeply resonated.

It’s particularly apparent in my online persona. I don’t relish being the first person to comment on a post. I like to read how others responded first. Unless it’s something that I have a script for. And having social scripts was something that came up when I was in therapy a couple of years ago. I mentioned that a lot of my anxiety was when people went off script or if it was a situation that I lacked a script for. These scripts I think are examples of autistic masking. They were me trying to cope with uncertainty and preserve social energy.

I have a long held order of preference in communication. First level is text based (i.e. email, social media, or texting). In written communication I have more time and less pressure when responding. Next is in person and last is phone. Phone is last because I have no way to gauge a reaction. If someone is in front of me I can read their face for clues. I have almost always rehearsed what I had to say when making a phone call to a stranger. Sometimes I even rehearse before calling friends depending on the reason for the call or how long it’s been since we talked.

The more I looked backwards at my past, the more clarity I felt. There are so many examples that I feel overwhelmed trying to pick out the important ones, but funny enough overwhelm is a major part of the landscape. I have always said that I didn’t like being in large groups like at a party because I couldn’t focus with multiple conversations going on within earshot. Yet concerts, despite being a large crowd, never bothered me. The difference is in a concert I was only paying attention to the loudest “voice” – i.e. the musical instruments and the singer(s).

I’ve always had a strong need for predictability and an aversion to uncertainty. Of course, the world is wildly unpredictable, and I tried to impose my own order on it. This took many forms from planning and careful research to avoiding open-ended decisions. As a child I was very rigid about what I would eat and even as an adult most friends would still say that I’m a picky eater. Simple decisions such as buying a vacuum cleaner could take weeks of research, and bigger decisions are often only made in the wake of burnout. I lived a life with very little experimentation because the choices felt binary and irreversible to me.

Overregulation & Consequences

Big decisions were often simply unthinkable. With a full course load it took me six years to get my degree because I kept switching majors as if there was one right path and I was terrified I’d miss it. Because I was on a scholarship, I had to choose before time ran out, but bigger life choices without external pressure tended to get lost. I remember many late nights agonizing over a major but in the same time period never about coming out.

I can’t point to a single moment or outside force that prompted me to come out. With my all-in or all-out thinking, there was no tiptoeing into a gay club or chat room. Some people, especially when young, try on identities like a new jacket, but when my time came, like a student with a term paper, I felt I needed to learn everything I could.

I took a deep dive into books, blogs, and YouTube videos. Some were scholarly while others were a quest to find voices like mine. I’ve said before that the first friends I told were carefully selected, but I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it was so methodical that I had a ranked list, with the most supportive at the top. After months of working through the list, I finally had the energy to make my social media debut. It wasn’t a spontaneous announcement. Instead of writing it on Facebook, I carefully drafted my message as a document. Not only did I choose how and what I wanted to say, I picked the date thoughtfully. I held off until Saturday because I thought it would be more visible and because I noticed it was 9/9 which would be an easy to remember anniversary.

My coming out story is one example from a lifetime of trying to manage uncertainty. Much of it was unconscious masking to blend in. It was never just about being queer. There were always multiple fronts I was trying to manage. It’s hard to pick what examples best paint the picture. For me, coping with anxiety included things like rehearsing a phone call. Always pre-booking accommodations was another coping strategy, because the thought of ending up without a place to stay, whether for a night or a month, was paralyzing. Or ruminating over a lifetime of social missteps that replay like a personal cautionary tale, possibly even a form of stimming, I’ve come to realize.

Learning about the neurodivergent experience has led me to look back at a lifetime of patterns in my own life through a new lens. I recently recalled a foundational story my parents used to tell about when I was learning to talk. If they didn’t understand me and asked me to repeat myself I would meltdown fast. It was apparently so dramatic they stopped asking and started trying to respond as if they knew what I said. With little effort, I can identify meltdowns in adulthood when I felt misunderstood or unable to get my point across. Later in life, I had the self awareness to recognize a meltdown and sometimes mended fences, but I didn’t see the bigger picture until now.

Tales From An Unreliable Narrator

I’ve given examples before illustrating that I find I’m an unreliable narrator of my own story. When I first started working with a therapist two years ago and he asked if I had ever been bullied, I said no. Then some weeks later I remembered an ordeal with a 7th grade bully. And before that there was the sudden reconnection with how Matthew Shepard’s murder affected me in 1998. I can remember some things in crazy detail while friends have mentioned moments we shared years ago that are just not there. The latter makes me feel a pang of guilt because anyone who has remained in my life that long means something to me.

I’ve attempted, perhaps incorrectly, to place the question of my memory into an autism framework, and it’s possible there’s some explanation. There’s some research that suggests people with autism in some circumstances have difficulty storing or accessing memories. There are other possibilities I’ve ruminated on in the past and I’m really uncertain where this fits into the bigger picture. I may be experiencing something we all do and I’m just looking at it harder than others do. I’m honestly unsure but thought it was worth mentioning.

The Cost of Passing

The origin stories I held about myself clashed with, and made it difficult to accept, the possibility I was actually autistic. “The smart kid: was my self image throughout my school years. I always performed the part well, whether it was being in the top reading groups excelling on tests, or meeting any metric that mattered in schools of the day. I was in my school’s gifted program, which reinforced the idea I was exceptional. Since eligibility depended on test scores, it was ultimately a measure that aligned with how my brain operates. When high school graduation rolled around, I wrapped up only a tenth of a point behind the valedictorian. On paper, I may have seemed to flourish because school offered the kind of structure and routine that suited how my brain worked.

The schools of my Gen-X youth were not equipped to recognize autism. As long as you weren’t failing or disrupting class, chances are you would pass through the system unnoticed. In my case, both school and my first long-term career in data processing both played to the detail-oriented pattern-seeking side of my brain. Outwardly I excelled in school and built a solid reputation in my career. Inwardly I felt rudderless in every aspect of life with little recognition of the cause. I never considered that my strengths in one part of my life could be closely tied to high masking autism.

I think this “role self” I developed as the trouble-free “smart kid” may have been an intersectional one. In my generation, but maybe not for younger ones, there’s an often-observed tendency for little gay boys to be “the best little boy in the world.” It’s the kids that make all A’s and are a delight to their teachers. Many psychologists who have written about this suggest it’s not an innate trait, but a survival tactic. One can see how it could also function as a form of masking that helped me conceal both queerness and autism in school and well beyond. I held onto that mask tightly, at the cost of being authentic with others and with myself.

Concluding Thoughts

Coming out of the closet two years ago came with a wide array of emotions, sometimes laced with feelings of regret. Not regret for coming out but regret for not having done so sooner. II believe this is an incredily human experince. I’ve encountered many who came out “late” who said the exact same thing. I’ve also experienced moments of imposter syndrome. Have I “earned the right” to feel this way about XYZ issue when I’m so new to the club?

And now as I perch on the cliff’s edge, feeling as if much of my life may be explained by having an autistic brain, I feel a similar sense of imposter syndrome. There’s no way I could get a formal diagnosis right now, but I did take a few of the widely used self-assessments and scored high, which added weight to what I was already feeling. For the first time I feel some sense of understanding why I am the way I am. I’ve read and listened to so much on the subject recently that I can’t remember where I encountered some ideas. One that stayed with me is the observation that, generally speaking, neurotypical people don’t spend years wondering if they are neurodivergent. If I’m not neurodivergent, I feel like I am at least from a neighboring country.

The twin experiences of accepting my queerness and neurodivergence in the span of two years in my early 50’s is… a lot. This latest revelation has brought waves of emotions that include joy, relief, and yes, additional regret. I recently mentioned to a friend that I see people my age who have partners they’ve been with for decades. And there’s a wistful part of me that wonders, what if I missed the chance of finding that? I’m attempting to reframe that thought by recognizing that I was concentrating on one group’s experience. On reflection I recognize that I have also encountered single men my age and older who have been out for most of their lives. Some are delighted with their single lives while others are still hoping to find their Mister Right.

Ultimately, the reframing involves recognizing that life is unpredictable. My brain finds comfort in predictability, but real life is far messier. Whether you came out at 14 or 94, you had a lifetime of experiences. It was a life that likely had its share of happiness and sorrow, highs and lows, ebbs and flows… the list goes on. Life is the ultimate find-your-fate book. Whatever choices you made led you to the current version of yourself and the task is embracing all the rich possibilities of living in the now.

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This photo of two men sitting cheek to cheek, one with his arm around the other, is the one in question. It appears to be from the early 20th century. No one in the family has been able to identify either man. It was among my maternal grandfather’s photos, and many agreed that the man on the right bears a family resemblance.

The body language stood out to me the first time I saw it. I’ve never been certain whether it’s queer-coded or if I’m interpreting it through a more modern lens, but others I’ve shown it to have also said it struck them as unusual.

Coming up with a possible identity for the man with a family resemblance was what set the wheels in motion. Even before coming out myself I took notice of the odd “bachelor uncle” in the family tree and speculated on the reasons they might not have married. But on my Mom’s paternal side, I couldn’t think of any likely candidates. Not only were there no bachelor uncles, I thought the man in the photo was probably older than my grandfather.

That sent me back another generation. On my grandfather’s father’s side there were no bachelor uncles and at first I thought that was the same for his mother’s family but my great grandmother had one brother who was a blank slate. I assumed he died young because there were no details about his life other than a birth year. Dying young in the 1800s was common enough I had never looked deeper.

Armed with the genealogical and newspaper records of the modern internet, I discovered an interesting story. The third of eight children to survive to adulthood, my great, great uncle Evander Bennett Jackson was born in 1853 in south Alabama.

Unlike the rest of his family who remained in south Alabama, he appears to have moved westward in his younger years. He shows up in Texas in the 1880 census, but by 1900 he is living in “Indian Territory,” in what is now the state of Oklahoma. That same year, “E.B. Jackson” begins to make appearances in the newspapers of Coal County. Most of the mentions are unremarkable: notes about him coming to town with farm produce or sharing news from a nearby farm community. It gives the impression that he may have been an eccentric, a friend of the writer, or possibly both.

He also appears to have been active in politics running for local office in his community between 1910 and 1916 as a member of the Socialist Party! There were multiple mentions of offices he had his eye on but I’ll share this one because it’s also where the nickname “Bachelor Jack” makes an appearance.

From The Centrahoma Record – May 20, 1916

It doesn’t appear he won any of the offices he ran for, but it’s striking that an ancestor, queer or not, was aligned with the Socialist Party in early 20th-century Oklahoma. The party then was a home for farmers and laborers pushing back against corporate and political power, but it also tended to attract people who were on the margins in other ways. For someone like “Batchelor Jack,” who didn’t follow the prescribed path of marriage and family, it may have offered a sense of purpose or belonging he didn’t find elsewhere. It adds to the impression that he walked a different path than the rest of his family.

E.B. Jackson appears to have died around 1920. The last newspaper mentions I find of him are related to his estate, appearing from April through December of that year. The first is his brother petitioning the court to name an A.M. Stuart as the estate’s administrator. It’s clear that if a brother in Alabama knew where he was, knew that he had died, and took steps to settle his affairs, Evander wasn’t entirely estranged from his family of origin.

Was Bachelor Jack a queer ancestor? From the records I have, it isn’t possible to say for certain. But I’ve read that queer history often requires reading between the lines and noticing the clues that wouldn’t have been recorded outright. My great, great uncle moved west without any close family, which echoes many known queer narratives, both past and present. There are stories about queer people in the 1800s who reinvented themselves in new places. Even his involvement in socialist politics, while far from definitive, suggests someone who may have felt out of step with the mainstream. And not just being a bachelor but being defined by it as a nickname suggests he was marked out as a bit different.

But there’s no way to know for certain if Bachelor Jack was a gay uncle. No records remain that tell the story of who he may have loved or whether anyone was with him when he died. I can’t even say for certain that he’s the man in the photo my grandfather saved. The photo itself just became the vehicle for digging into the history of a forgotten relative.

Regardless I hope this little essay honors the memory of these people. Part of the push for me to write this down was that it’s Pride Month and a podcast I recently listened to started the little wheels turning.

On this episode of the Q-MindBody podcast the host Darren Main and guest Peter Goddard discussed the concept of Queer Ancestors which I found intriguing. It made me realize I had noticed family members who didn’t quite fit, but never paused to be more curious about their stories. That conversation, combined with this small sliver of family history, made me realize I should write down what I do know. It’s a way to remember someone whose life might otherwise be lost to time.

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Part of that time I was too consumed with dealing with my Mom’s dementia. And after finally having to accept that she needed more care than I could provide, I was all over the map. There were days I was so depressed that I didn’t want to wake up and other days that I was ready to finally move forward in life. But mostly I was frozen in my tracks. I couldn’t see a way forward in midlife. It simply felt too late. Honestly I have always been indecisive and this was probably just more of that same energy.

In early 2023, I shared a colorful rainy artwork that was then still pretty new. I love to do rainy scenes but usually they’ve been of specific locations and although people appeared they were rarely the focal point. In this case, it depicted simply a couple under an umbrella together against an abstract backdrop.

I posted it on multiple platforms I used at the time, but it was posted on my Mastodon account where another user responded that they wished for a similarly colorful scene but depicting a gay couple. And I responded back that I would see what I could do…

I don’t know how to explain it except that I never had the excuse before. A relative stranger online had given me the “permission” to create artwork that I never felt free to do before. I hadn’t even thought about it before. If I placed a couple in a scene it was reflexively a man and a woman because that’s what was expected.

A little over a month passed and I finished what was then the only artwork I had done that depicted two gay men as a couple.

And what I’ll never forget about sharing it for the first time was that I felt like I had to explain why I had undertaken this particular scene, that I had been asked to. I hadn’t come out to a soul yet and part of me wanted to own it entirely and say that it was something that was personally meaningful to me. It was a well received piece and I was surprised how much attention it received. Part of that was unquestionably the platform it was shared on (Mastodon) being more populated with queer people and queer-friendly people. So it should have been a thoroughly lovely experience. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling of disappointment that accompanied it.

Somehow it felt crushing and this was the thing that finally shook me out of my inaction. A few weeks later I finally came out to a friend. Around the same time I started identifying as queer on Mastodon. And as 2023 passed by more and more people in my sphere came to know the “real me.” Or at least as real as is possible. I’ve written and shared a lot of the experience since then. I feel like I’m still in a state of learning who I am or who I was meant to be despite my calendar age.

When I shared my next piece of gay art weeks later, despite the fact I created it to fit a specific request, the best part about it was not needing to use that request as a crutch.

No disclaimers needed this time! Just coming out felt freeing in a way that is still hard to describe but probably understood by a lot of LGBTQ+ people all over. I had become so adept at cloaking my feelings that it was difficult for me to even claim them as my own. Sharing a piece of my artwork and being free to say that it meant something personal to me was an experience I don’t think I’ll ever forget. Or if I do it will be down to the ravages of age.

And it’s a theme that has shown up in my work since then again and again. I guess since coming out I’ve gotten a bit addicted to expressing that part of me through my work. If you’re curious to see more you’ll find it on the Pixels Platform.

Clearly I lean towards the romantic side in my work but I’ve always been the one getting teary eyed watching romcoms and the like. Was it surprising to hear that art played a possibly unexpected role in my coming out story? I’d love to hear if other artists in any form had a similar experience where visual artwork, writing, or music, etc. played a part in your story?

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Managing Perceptions or What Will People Think?

What brought this particular subject to my mind was a discussion I recently had with a friend about how in the old days on Twitter (before I came out and before its downward spiral) I had three separate accounts. One was for my art business. A second one was my “personal” account but when I say personal, I mean a place where I talked about politics or what movie I just watched, etc. And then I had the account no one in my life knew about. It was where I followed spicy creators. Unlike the other two, no part of my real name was attached to it at all and I carefully did not follow any of the same accounts I followed elsewhere. It was the social media equivalent of a burner phone.

This habit illustrated how I compartmentalized my life overall. That burner account was part and parcel of a piece of my life that internally, never mind externally, remained a disconnected fragment of who I was. There were easily digestible aspects of my life That I owned to varying degrees but then there were parts I didn’t allow others close enough to even glimpse.

This fragmentation is a theme I’ve seen mentioned in multiple books I’ve read about a too common gay experience. The insidious thing is I really don’t have specific memories of events that convinced me there was a need to be secretive. I do have vague memories of my mother saying things like “what will others think” but I don’t remember the context at all. Maybe I’ve walled off some unpleasant memories or maybe I simply observed in the world at large how harshly anyone even a little different was treated.

I do remember when I told classmates circa 6th grade that I was agnostic I received much more interrogation and push-back than expected. Now I wonder how I opened up about that but was so hesitant to let the other shoe drop. Interestingly even then I was actually being selective about what I revealed. I always considered myself an atheist but thought agnostic was more palatable. However I got there, I formed an early habit of keeping my cards close to my chest. Worrying what others think seemed rooted in all aspects of my life.

Circles Of Trust

How comfortable did a given person make me feel? Did I feel comfortable sharing religious views with them? Was a person someone I didn’t mind knowing who I voted for? Would I tell them about my family? This attempt to manage what others thought was especially evident on Facebook where I didn’t have to ponder these questions each time I “spoke” – I had my Facebook connections pre-sorted into their own little silos via friend’s lists. I strategically used friend lists to maintain circles of trust that would control how others saw me. The nearer to the center the more one saw but there was always that core aspect of my identity that was off limits for all.

Coming Out & Letting Go of What Others Think

In 2022 when I moved from Twitter to Mastodon, I had yet to come out and I partly followed old patterns by having separate “personal” and business accounts. As time went on and I came out, I gradually unclenched. I started feeling a visceral reaction to having separate accounts, using my personal Mastodon account less and less as I no longer felt the old need to control what others think. And when I later opened accounts on Threads and Bluesky, it was just one each. I’m sure there are a lot of marketing people who would cry at the idea of sharing political views, music I like and my art business all from the same place.

However I had spent so much of my life with a tight grip on shaping what others think that I went 180 degrees in the other direction. And it was literally freeing not to pick and choose. Although I’m going to also admit it felt a little weird on Mastodon where there were people who followed my artist account who probably didn’t expect to see anything else. That’s probably a me thing though, an aspect of my people pleasing and a need to manage what people see that is still wound a bit tightly.

So I had entered a phase where one account to rule them all was my new mantra. And on Bluesky in particular that really meant them all. I shared my art, I chatted, and I followed the adult content creators all under one name-bearing account. And it was very liberating. No secrets. No 30 layers of circles. And on one level it felt wonderful, but on another it was jarring.

This time it wasn’t a matter of shame, it was a matter of distraction. I found that consistently having spicy content in the same feed as everyone else was a recipe for not really interacting with anything else. And I resisted the obvious solution for months. Bluesky has a lot of different custom feeds including one called “After Dark” that’s for just the NSFW content but I never found its opposite, a safe for work feed that was similar to the following feed but without NSFW content. Well I found a few but none seemed to actually work. And I kept ignoring the glaringly obvious choice.

Solutions & Compromise

I didn’t want to return to having separate accounts because to me the very act felt like an admission to some form of shame. After a couple of months of failing to find another solution, I finally found what worked for me was reinventing the wheel. So yes, now I do have a second Bluesky account. And my compromise was linking to my main profile from there. Not hiding any aspect of who I am but also accepting that my monkey brain does need some separation between some of the content I consume.

And after accepting the obvious solution to my problem was the best one, I have considered going farther. There are days that I feel like I’m getting consumed by politics and I’m tempted to open yet another account and blocking every political word under the sun and just following friends so I have somewhere more akin to an online Walden in the woods…

Maybe as social platforms mature and decentralize there will be better ways to curate our feeds. Because that’s really what I’m looking for now. Instead of a shame-based need to control what others think, I want to curate what I see based on the moment. In an old school analog way, I instead wish for a way to pick what “section” of the newspaper I want to read right now. It’s definitely a better “problem” to have than the old need to manage how others saw me.

Concluding Thoughts

By no means am I saying that in less than three years I’ve completely shed my worry about what others think about me. I won’t even guess to what degree that’s possible. It’s more a story of chipping away at old habits. It’s the act learning to actively recognize the behavior in myself. In a way it’s learning to harness the same energy that was previously self-censoring to instead recognize when I’m engaging in that behavior. Learned behavior can be unlearned.

By no means am I suggesting that in less than three years I’ve completely shed my worry about what others think about me. I can’t predict the extent to which that’s even possible. Instead, this is a story of gradual transformation. It’s a tale of chipping away at deeply ingrained habits, one day at a time. It’s about learning to take a breath and actively recognize when those old patterns of self-censorship surface. Slowly, I’m learning to redirect that same anxious energy from silencing myself to understanding myself. The beauty lies not in perfection, but in the patient work of unlearning. Learned behaviors aren’t dismantled overnight, but they can be transformed, softened, and ultimately reshaped with time.

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The way I had buried those feelings is difficult to describe. It wasn’t that I was unaware of who Matthew Shepard was or what happened to him. Rather, I didn’t consciously recall how his murder terrified me, how vulnerable it made me feel. At the time, I hadn’t yet confronted my own sexuality. I’m sure deep down, I knew I was gay, but as I mentioned before, I was so disconnected from my own feelings that I brushed it under the rug. Looking back, I often think that if there was ever a period in my life before now when I was likely to have found myself, it was during that brief window when I lived in an environment surrounded by queer people. I’ll never know for sure, but I do know that Matthew’s murder cast a long shadow over my life.

At the time, I felt a connection because I was freshly out of college and he was a college student. We were both born in December, albeit five years apart. On the surface, these similarities are paper thin, but years ago, I felt a kinship that I can’t really explain. While I’ve heard people say Matthew Shepard’s murder gave them the determination to come out, for me, it had the opposite effect. In my eyes, it felt like a flashing warning sign that being openly gay, as he had been, was inherently dangerous.

Last year, during a therapy session, I discussed these long buried memories with my therapist. I explained to him how I had suppressed these emotions for so long that they were all but forgotten. But the process of coming out and writing about my past had unearthed them. When he asked me to tell him Matthew’s story as if he were unfamiliar with it, I found myself sobbing far more than I had anticipated. Any notion of detachment, of treating it like an historical event, evaporated. Although friends had already read my essay, this was the first time I verbally shared that memory with another person, and I found myself crying once more. Months later when the 25th anniversary came around, for the first time I didn’t shed a tear. I felt sad and angry about his life being cut short, but I wasn’t moved to actual tears. Naively perhaps, I thought a demon from my past had been exorcised.

This year, as October arrived, I found myself feeling blue. In part this may be due to recently learning about an old friend’s death. But it also reminded me that I’m “always blue this time of the year.” For the first time, I questioned why. I love fall – the cooler temperatures and, although scarce here, the autumn foliage. So why the melancholy? Then, scrolling through Instagram, I saw someone share a photo of Matthew Shepard, reminding everyone of the anniversary of the night he was beaten so severely that he eventually succumbed to his injuries. In that moment, a realization crept in: perhaps I’m blue because my body instinctively knows the season, even if I don’t consciously think of it.

Yesterday, on the 26th anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death, I started several times to post on social media about how his death affected me across the years. But each time, I hesitated. It feels strange to broadcast such emotional impact over a stranger’s death no matter how public it was. It was not how I was raised – my mom used to speak frequently about people who wanted to be “the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”

Sharing these feelings feels on some level like an attempt to claim a part of the attention that Matthew’s memory rightfully deserves. I don’t want to do that. Yet, I feel compelled to acknowledge that the memory of what was done to him has haunted me across the years. I accept the likelihood that there will be more tears on future anniversaries. Perhaps accepting this ongoing impact is a step in the right direction?

Concluding Thoughts

In the process of writing this, I’m beginning to better understand that my connection with Matthew Shepard’s story isn’t about claiming part of his narrative. It’s about recognizing how his fate impacted my personal journey through life.

My tears aren’t just for Matthew Shepard; they’re for a younger me in 1998 who was scared and felt very alone. Those tears are for the shared trauma that many of us in the LGBTQ+ community have felt across the years, before and since. So many lives lost or scarred by similar stories. By acknowledging the impact of those lives, we honor not only Matthew Shepard but countless others like him. We also celebrate the resilience of a community that, in the face of such tragedy, still strives to live open and authentic lives.

Yesterday, I read about a conversation between someone closer to my age and a younger queer person. Apparently the younger individual didn’t know who Matthew Shepard was. This interaction reminded me how rarely our history is really taught. And it reminded me of the importance of sharing our stories and the stories of those who can no longer speak for themselves. It’s through these narratives that we ensure younger generations understand the path we’ve traveled to get where we are in the world today.

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