Guillaume – Story

My name is Guillaume, I’m thirty-three years old and gay. I grew up in an ordinary family with both parents, two sisters and pets.

From a very young age, my attraction to boys – not girls – challenged me. I remember saying to myself, in my little child’s head, while I was walking in the city center of the village in which I grew up, looking at a couple hand in hand in front of me: I prefer to look at the buttocks of this man rather than those of his girlfriend…

One day, when I was a teenager, my father was talking about my sister’s boyfriend and saying to her during the discussion: “I was wondering if you were a lesbian. I would have felt like I had failed if that had been the case. “

Of course, what I learned from this sentence is: Loving the same sex = you’re wrong. From that day on I refrained from talking about anything that could be related to sexuality, especially mine, with my parents.

In high school, I went to live with my older sister in the Paris area. Not to run away from my parents, just to take continue my school there and to avoid having to get up too early to go to the only school offering the course I had chosen. At fifteen, I was now living without my parents, and I was living student life before the hour. I consumed alcohol, sex and soft drugs, in a world where my friends were five to ten years older than me, they were already adults and almost responsible.

I had a boyfriend who was at university, who opened me up to the world, both sexual and social, with whom I gained confidence in me.

Kissing this man in a bar? So exciting! Buying me branded boxers at Galeries Lafayettes? Completely normal. Hugging on the gay pride float? It is fun! Listening to him talk about my last ejaculation to one of his friends? A little embarrassing but rather flattering. And then my studies stopped, I was just twenty years old. First job, for a public works company. Rustic, macho people, quite primitive, the opposite of what I had experienced during my few years of freedom. Very quickly the company sent me to work for a year across the country. I room-mated with a colleague, quite straight, but got hit-on by a married dump truck driver with several children. He was in his fifties, paunchy and not at all to my liking, but surprising as it may seem, when I would never bring up the subject of my homosexuality with anyone in this universe, he had it surely guessed.

A little while later, I hit it off with a trucker (a woman who drove a truck), and like a cliché, she turned out to be in a relationship with a woman. The company I worked for was going to send me home, and before I left, this couple of friends asked me for the favor of helping them become moms.

Going back to my region was very difficult: I had to move back in with my parents, in my pre-teen room left as I had left five years earlier. No more life and it lasted a few years. How do you get a man home? I closed myself up little by little, in my little secret.

And then I found a house to buy and overnight it was all up and running again. I now had a deep desire to form a couple with a nice boy to accompany me in life.

One Sunday, I went to eat at McDonald’s with my dad, and I invited the man I found to be the best of all. My father didn’t say anything, but I think he understood. Since then we have all eaten as a family on Sundays for lunch.

There are several moralities in my story: Never imagine that parents cannot understand, but that if parents present themselves as a problem, just walk away from them.

Never tell your children that their sexuality could be wrong.

May the social interactions with older gays benefit you.

Coming out is not a must. Those around you don’t need to hear you say what you’re doing in bed, they just need to understand that you are in love.

Take care of yourself and preserve yourself.