My name’s Jerome Bwire and I’m from Reno, Nevada. I ended up going to school and the University of San Diego. Up until that point I had kind of gotten pretty good at ignoring my sexuality and kind of not facing those issues. I actually was in a relationship with a girl that I had met my sophomore year. We met at a concert through a mutual friend. I had kind of just gravitated towards her for a while and just wanted to get to know her on a friend basis and I can legitimately say that after getting to know her, I fell in love with her. But the issue was in our intimacy. There was one night that we went to a show together and we were downtown and came home. In my head I’m thinking of how I’m going to get out of having sex tonight and so my solution was just get really drunk. And as we went to bed I just said, “I have whiskey dick, sorry. Can’t do it tonight.” And that just became like a recurring theme. It was just getting to a point where all of these lies that I was telling to her and myself were just getting to be too much. And there were definitely nights where after she was asleep I would be crying myself, just like seeing someone I care about so much that I’m constantly hurting. Our senior year I was just–at that point I was using school as an excuse and work so I was like, “Oh, I can’t hang out with you, and blah blah blah” and it was just getting to the point, like, “I’m not in a place to be in a relationship” and I ended it. There was one day I got a text from her and she sent me a link to a song which is by this band called Warpaint. The song is called “Majesty.” It’s towards the chorus and she’s singing saying, “When I held your hand, you still went the other way, and you wanted me to stay with your arms stretching away.” And then it continues on, “Could it be that I’m your mirror, showing you the things you never wanted to face, yet you let me slip away.” That kind of was very loaded for me in the sense that she just read me that I was clearly dealing with some inner demons that I wasn’t sharing with anyone or facing myself, and through that I wasn’t really able to form relationships. Since then, I graduated from school, I got a job in New York, met a great man, we fell in love. On Valentine’s Day, the way that I kind of came out to everyone from my past was, I posted a picture of my boyfriend and I and received just such positive feedback and support. But the one that really resonated with me the most was from my ex-girlfriend and she was actually one the first people to reach out to me. And I didn’t know what to expect. I saw a text pop up and I read it and she was just saying like how proud she is of me and how happy she is for me and it’s great to see me happy. Looking back I can definitely see breaking up with my ex-girlfriend and receiving those lyrics from her as kind of a catalyst for me of realizing the way I had lived my life before that, was just not sustainable. The most rewarding thing is, because I’m honest with myself, I’m at a point in my life now that I’m living in New York City that I can form relationships with people that I had struggled with so hard up until that point. And it’s genuine happiness and it’s allowing me to be who I am and share that with other people.