I’m From New York, NY – Video Story.

by Peter

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For the transcript, Continue Reading.I’m Peter from New York City. I guess I should start with coming out to my friends in 9th grade, halfway through Winter Break and one of my friends sort of squeezed it out of me. She said to me, “You look really gay tonight.” I said, “Thanks.” And about two hours later she said, “Are you gay?” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “I thought so.” And she’d known me about 10 years.

Then in 11th grade I met my then-boyfriend, and I came out to my school. I go to a single sex school and I wasn’t sure how the guys at my school would react to that. I did it on Facebook. I made my relationship with my boyfriend official, and all my friends were like, “Oh my god, that’s amazing!” They all acted like girls actually, they were like, “Oh my god, that’s amazing, I want to meet your boyfriend so badly, can he pick you up from school? I knew you were gay even though you’ve only been here for four years, I knew you were gay but I didn’t want to say anything but it’s okay!” So that was really good. And then I told my parents and they said, “We knew that, what took you so long to tell us?” Then they bought me The Gay College Guide. That was their instant reaction. Okay, thanks guys.

Four years ago, I never thought I’d be saying this, but New York City is really small. At least in the private high school system. Everyone knows everyone. It’s just amazing how after coming out and knowing no one, then meeting a boyfriend, and then sort of that getting out, just everyone knows everyone and there’s nothing you can do about that. You can go on a date one week and then meet someone the next week and they knew your date or dated them for two years and they already knew about your date because someone texted them because everyone loves, well at our age at least, everyone loves a good gay relationship. And they’re so willing to text about it and talk about it. And so there’s almost no privacy. It even got so bad at one point that I was talking to my friend on the phone and she started to sketch out the relationships between the people that were telling her and by the time she was done there were 9 of us on this chart and she was like, “Wow, so not including you, Peter, this is like a love octagon, not a love triangle.” I said, “Yeah, it’s pretty insane.” I sort of described it to my friends at school and they started calling it a “cocktagon.” That’s an all-guys school for you.

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