I am going to let you in on another secret, there are certain places around town where men who love men can get together for momentary trysts.

Oh, you already heard about that one? Well, did you know that the majority of the gentleman that frequent such places, if not all, are married to women? Yes! Shocking, huh?

They’re the closet homosexuals who were pressured by church, family or society into a life that was “normal.” Because in reality, it’s all how you appear to the public that matters, what’s inside doesn’t mean jack squat.

There is a statistic that says one in 10 men are gay. While that is likely, I think the number is actually more like two, quite possibly three.

The reason I think that is the case, despite thinking all people are gay, sexuality, whether anyone wants to agree or not, is not a simple gay/straight scenario. There is a wide range in between.

Dr. Alfred Kinsey developed a scale from zero to six, where zero represents exclusively heterosexual and six being the latter. The numbers in between correspond to the attraction a person feels for the sexes.

It is the in-between that I think the majority of society lies. The reason I say that is because life is in no way just black and white and anyone who pretends to believe that is kidding themselves. There are so many shades of gray.

People try to fool themselves because that is what their faith dictates. Someone, somewhere, decided that there is only one way to live and wrote it down in their corresponding book, dictating that their ideas are the “right way.”

There are so many faiths and so many books they can’t all be wrong and they can’t all be right.

I grew up in a deeply religious home and from pre-school to eighth grade I was enrolled in a Christian school. I was taught that there is only one way to live, and that way definitely went against how I felt inside.

For most of my adolescent years, I grappled with my sexuality and during that time I developed this hatred for homosexuals that was so vitriolic I’m surprised that I never participated in a gay bashing.

I guess that’s because I, thankfully, try to avoid any and all kinds of confrontation. I prefer to use my words.

What I realized after I had just accepted that I am who I am, and there was nothing wrong with me, was that I thought that if I hated gay people enough I could kill that part of myself.

Basically, I was just attempting to trick myself into believing a lie, and only recently did I discover that my hatred for gay people, at that time, stemmed from my jealousy that they could live their life uninhibited by some unsaid rule or a single passage.

That’s why whenever I see someone so impassioned by taking away gay rights or making laws against the LGBT community, my red flag goes up.

I remember my own self-hatred and can only equate it to that, because to hate someone or something that doesn’t affect you is really strange. Unless, of course, they have something they want to hide.