Today’s Video Story was collected on the 50-state Story Tour. Check out the blog where you can follow us on our adventure. If you haven’t submitted a story yet to IFD, or if you want to submit another one, I’d love to read and publish it. Write one up and send it in.
My name is Cody James, I’m From Wasilla, Alaska. I kind of came out in college to my closest friend and basically it all went against me. I was assaulted and had my tires slashed, my car egged, dealt with stuff like that for four months – basically picked up all my stuff and moved in about a week’s worth span. Moved to Anchorage to kind of start over. Get things together. Could be closer to my family, a little bit, eventually as some time passed I told my mom at a restaurant in IHop of what happened – that I’m gay. I was planning on telling her for months and months cause I wanted her to really know what happened in Fairbanks. She didn’t really understand why I just took up and left and decided I wanted to move down here. “You know, I was actually was assaulted up there. I had my tires slashed. I was messed with.” And she’s asking me about my roommate, and who I was living with, and who I was dating? And I told her, “Well, I dated my roommate” and she’s like, “I knew it. I kind of knew it but I didn’t know it. ” But she started freaking out and then she remained calm because everyone started looking at her all funny and weird like. And then she was like, “We’ll talk about this later, for now, let’s just not discuss it anymore.” So then once we got home she pulled me aside into her room and just went off on me and my step dad was yelling and screaming and told me I should stay there for a while. Shouldn’t come home and visit. My brother’s just homophobic. He doesn’t like gay people whatsoever, he thinks they’re all flamboyant, “Oh my god!” He didn’t want me to be that way. He didn’t believe I could be that way. It just wasn’t even in his mindset that somebody that close to him could even be that way. The only person that’s remained – my sister’s the only positive one about it. She doesn’t care. The rest of my family, its been the same for ten months, so, I don’t think there’s no change so, got to move on. Might take years but if not, I cannot let how they think of it ruin the rest of my life.
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