Something Like Pity
Prologue: Kevin’s Story
.nachzes black-rider

Dedication: For Dani.

I grew up in the city of Calgary, the heart of urban Alberta, and by the time I was fifteen, I had the world at my fingertips. But, as many things are wont to do if you don’t grab them when they first present themselves, the World slipped away.

Born to a Christian family in 1991, I was the youngest child, and the only boy, for most of my life. My mother was a housewife—a “homemaker”—while my father worked in an office in a high-rise downtown; my sister, Jenny, was five years older than me, and had no time to play with boys, so I was forced to find a best friend early in life. This problem was easily solved by my mother, who regularly left me at a babysitter’s house while she went shopping for “women’s supplies” one weekend a month. The babysitter, a young Puerto Rican woman, had a boy about my age named Steven, and as we grew older, our bond of convenience grew into a real friendship. And then, as I grew older again, it deepened once more. Or, at least, it did for me.

I first realized that I had a crush on my best friend when I was thirteen. Terrified of being gay, I tried to deny it, but after waking from my first wet dream, brought on by a memory of Steven in the shower the day before after PE class, I couldn’t continue to tell myself that it wasn’t true.

I went to my first GSA meeting in January of 2005, a week after I turned fourteen. I’d heard stories about what happened in clubs like the Gay-Straight Alliance, and had joined in a few jokes about wanting to go to the meeting in order to find out who the fags were, so I hung out at the back, chewing my bottom lip, and when the meeting finally ended, I was out of the classroom like a flash. Still, I went back the next week, and the next, and, slowly, I began to see being gay not as a sin, but instead as something natural, something that I had no control over.

With this in mind, I started to make plans to come out to my friends and family, starting with my best friend. I knew that the Christian kids at Calgarian combination Jr. high / Sr. high school were planning a party for the last weekend before school started, to celebrate the last dying rays of summer sun and the fact that we were going into the tenth grade. It was supposed to be a “tame” party, and a “teen” club, with no alcohol and no drugs. I decided to break it to Steven then.

I should have known that everything would go wrong.

My name is Kevin Anderson, and this is my story.