 Are you ready for all of your Facebook friends to watch this? I am scared to death. Okay. We are rolling. Guys, welcome back to my channel. Today's video is super special because it is our Pride Month special. I have my mom Valerie here and she is going to talk about how she figured out she was gay and give you guys advice, tips, tricks, all of that. Before we get started, I wanted to remind you all to hit the red subscribe button. Also, click the little bell to turn on your post notifications and follow me on Instagram because it would mean the world. And give this video a thumbs up if you enjoy it. And also comment down below any stories you might have, just your experiences and stuff because we would love to know. And I guess without further ado, I will just let Valerie take it away. Also, I'm just going to interrupt her real quick. We have our Pride attire on. This is not really official Pride attire, but it's the best I could do. Plus we have Mickey back there. Mine is more Pride than Alex's is mine is official Pride because as you can see, I have all these little Nickies that are in rainbows. I was very pleased. I guess I would say pleased that Alex asked me to be her very special guest star today to talk about how I figured out I was gay. There is no way that I would do this for anybody other than Alex. And while there have probably been hundreds of people that have heard my story, I never thought I'd be taping it and filming it. So all of you out there could hear about it. But I do think that there are some good points that I can make that might help you or somebody that you know, be able to get over some of the emotional hurdles that one has whenever someone realizes that they might be gay. Well, just to give you a little perspective, I am 64 years old. I can't believe that there must be some mistake. But I am 64 years old. I'm going to be 65 in February. I was born in 1957, which I know sounds like ancient history to most of you out there. But the reason I'm telling you this is that the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, even into the 1990s were so much different than how it is today. When we talk about people that are in the LGBTQ plus community. And I think that that is an important piece of perspective. But when I hear people talk about figuring out that they're gay today, young people, people that are in high school, people that are in college, it seems like they go through many of the same things that I went through. So to give you a little bit of my story, back when I was in grade school, elementary school in the 1960s, I knew that I was different. And the way I knew that I was different is I didn't like girl things. I liked boy things. I had a great collection of GI Joes and I love trucks and cars and things that boys would like. Now, my mother really liked Barbies. So I ended up with a big collection of Barbie and Ken and Midge and Allen and Skipper and all those dream houses and all of that. But for me, I love GI Joe and I was always excited whenever I was able to get a new GI Joe. In fact, as I still have my GI Joes from the 1960s, but I noticed that the girls that were around me didn't really like GI Joes and they like to do things that I had no interest in doing. Well, for one thing, they like to skip rope. Not only was I terribly uncoordinated, but I had no desire to skip rope. They like to do things like, you know, play house and just things that I just had no desire to do. What I wanted to do was I wanted to play army with the boys in the neighborhood, which I did. I loved playing army with the boys in the neighborhood. I didn't really think too much about it other than the fact that my interests were much, much different than other people's. At that time, people just said, Oh, Valerie's a tomboy. But I didn't have the athleticism in order to really be a tomboy. So I wasn't like climbing trees and things like that. So your typical tomboy didn't really fit my interests. So I wasn't sure what I was. I wasn't sure what was going on with me. I went into what we'd call then junior high, which was seventh and eighth grade and what you would call today middle school. And I then after that I went into high school. And one thing that I noticed is I didn't really have an interest in boys. And I didn't have an interest in girls either, but I definitely didn't have an interest in boys. I did though because of peer pressure. I did have boyfriends. I fact is went steady a couple of times. One time I went steady with a boy from a neighboring town and I think I went steady for about a year with him. Again, I really didn't have any interest in, you know, wearing the things that my female peers wore and doing the activities they did. It didn't really interest me at all. If it wasn't for my mother who emphasized things like makeup to me, I probably wouldn't wear makeup. But when it came to my clothes, ever since I was allowed to pick out my own clothes, I noticed that the clothes that I wore were different too. I hated things that were frilly and feminine and, you know, things like that. I always wore very tailored clothes. That's what I always picked out for myself. In fact, is recently I was cleaning out a closet in the home where I grew up. And I found some clothes that I had been allowed to pick out when I was in grade school and they were quite a contrast from the clothes that my mother picked out. Those were the things that were just like very different than what other people were doing and other people liked. But again, I went steady. I had a boyfriend. I think I had multiple boyfriends. And like I said before... Stop bragging. What? Stop bragging. I did it. I did. I went steady like my whole sophomore year in high school. It was very strange because they were very confused. I'm sure. They were because we would go out. We would have fun. We would, like I said, we would go to dances and we would go out to eat. But when we would come home and they would want to do things that were beyond kissing, I wouldn't. Right. I had no interest in that. So it was especially was confusing for the one boy that I was talking about. He was a year older than I was. He couldn't figure out and I guess I couldn't figure out either why after we would have a date, we would go back to actually would go back to my grandmother's house and my grandmother had a rule that we had a half hour that we could talk and whatever in the living room before he had to get out. And so during that half hour, we would talk and he would want to what we call then neck. I don't know. They say that now, necking. Well, anyway, it means kissing, you know, but you know, he would occasionally want to do more and I would like put the brakes on it. And after we were going steady for like all those months, all I would do was kiss him. So both of us were very confused with this. I had no desire. I didn't even have a desire to really kiss him, but don't tell him that if you see him. I will tell you that in 1974, that was only five years after the Stonewall riots. And that is the very first step of what was known then as gay liberation and that Stonewall was a bar and the police would come in regularly and raid it and arrest people simply for being gay and being in the bar. One evening they got sick of it. And so there was a big riot and lasted for days. In fact, is the Stonewall bar is a tourist attraction now because of what it meant to the gay community. So this was only five years after that. And so being gay was not something that people accepted. And certainly I never thought I was gay. I mean, that would be horrible. I mean, that would be terrible to be gay. And so all I knew is that I didn't really like guys, but I never really thought I was attracted to girls and never been crossed my mind. But then I left my small town in southeastern Ohio and I went to the big city into Columbus where I went to the Ohio State University. I will tell you that I was probably there for maybe two months before I found myself attracted to a woman. I don't know what I thought. I was like, this can't possibly be that I feel this attraction to this woman. She was actually in one of my classes and she also was in just by happen chance. She was in the same dorm that I was in. And so I would use any excuse to strike up a conversation with her. And I was like, oh my God, this is exactly like what people do when they like a guy. So I was starting to get really, really worried about myself. Let's just say we ended up doing what was then considered to be highly inappropriate things after several months of flirtation. I guess you would call it. She and I become very good friends. We won't go into it. We'll keep it PG, but you get the idea during the summer between my freshman and sophomore year. I didn't know what to think because again, you have to put it into perspective at that time. Being gay was like this huge, awful, disgraceful, sinful, terrible, no, no, that no one ever, ever, ever wanted to be gay. So my sophomore year at Ohio State, I moved into the sorority house. I had joined a sorority my freshman year because I think that subconsciously I was doing a lot of stuff to not be gay. What's less gay than joining a sorority? So while I had absolutely no desire to really be in a sorority, my mother was encouraging me to be in a sorority. And I thought, well, if I'm in a sorority, I'll meet guys and this thing that happened to me during my freshman year was just a fluke. And by that time, it had cooled between this woman and me. And I thought, you know, that was just a fluke and I'm just going to forget about it. So it won't drive me nuts. But in the sorority, there was a woman who became very, very close to me. Let's just say we ended up going a bit farther than I had gone in the dorm with my other friend. If you've ever seen a musical that is called Fun Home, it's about a woman's recounting of her coming out story. And she also, when she first went to college, discovered she was gay. There was a scene that was in her dorm room with this other woman and every time I hear the music to that or I see that, it reminds me of exactly what happened with me when I was a freshman. Just like it was with her, it was like, oh my God, what do I think about this? When I was a sophomore, I got into a really serious relationship with one of my sorority sisters. And that is when I think the full impact of who I was really started to affect me. I was with this woman for the duration of college and we had got an apartment together and she and I were very, very close. And it was a wonderful relationship, but I was tormented with guilt. So even though the relationship was one that I will always cherish as my first real relationship that I had with another human being in that type of context, I was tormented by guilt because I still was in some level of disbelief that I was gay. As things progressed, she and I had a parting of the ways and I continued to date people. And actually, I was dating guys and I was dating women, not at the same time now, not quite at the same time. I did leave a few hours in between, but my point is that I would have no real serious relationships except for one with a woman. And I did have a serious, sort of a serious relationship with a guy, but I was so totally confused. I was, again, just like joining the sorority, I was doing my best to make myself straight. I was working really, really, really, really hard at making myself straight. The 1980s for me was still a time that I was seeing both men and women still doing what I could to make myself straight. And keep in mind, too, that I had been reared in an environment where the little mention that being gay had, because you hardly ever talked about it, was sin, sin, sin, sin, sin. So I had a spiritual as well as a social as well as an emotional and psychological issues with being gay. And so I wanted desperately to be straight. But I learned something during the 1980s that you can't pray the gay away and you cannot will yourself to be straight. You are, I believe, in my opinion, you are born either gay or straight. And there's, to me, there's no doubt about it. I mean, look at Alex here. She's as straight as they come. She was born this way. I was born gay. She has been reared in an environment with two gay women that has not affected her at all. So I don't believe it's environmental. I believe it's birth and I'm not even addressing any of the other things beyond in the LGBTQ plus spectrum. I'm just keeping it to gay and straight because really that's all I'm qualified to talk about. Two things happened in the 1980s which were significant in my life. The first thing was I met Sherry and I met Sherry in 1985. And Sherry and I became very, very close friends. And we, you know, piled around together and things were becoming more and more open. And we had a very good circle of friends that we both belong to. And so it was good. It was very good. But being around Sherry helped me understand more about myself. That was a, and continues to be, 34 years later. I want to say it's a relationship that's based on love. How in the world could something that is that good of a relationship, that is that loving and that raised this wonderful child? How could a relationship like that be in any way evil or bad? Then something else happened. And that is that in 1989 when Sherry and I had been together for two years, we decided that we were going to look for a spiritual community. And since we had both been raised Christian now, Sherry to a much lesser degree was involved in religious things. But I had been very, very, very involved in church. I was very churchy growing up. We had heard that there were some out there that were Christian based churches that were welcoming to gay people. And sure enough, we found unity and unity had a very large church in Columbus. And that church was very important in our lives for many, many, many years. And the church that we went to in Columbus was very welcoming to us. There were other gay couples that were there. There were other gay people that were there. All the straight people that were there welcomed them. There was absolutely no criticism of being gay. There was no condemnation of being gay. The unity churches are welcoming places. And it was through my attending church at Unity, reading the various Unity publications, talking to the ministers that I was finally able to reconcile spiritually that being gay was not this horrible thing that I had believed that it was. So those were two very significant things. Having that wonderful relationship starting in 1987 and finding unity in 1989. When people ask me, would I rather be straight? No, I mean, no, I wouldn't rather be straight because if I were straight, I wouldn't be with Sherry. We wouldn't be here with sitting here with Alex. I know. There's no would I rather be straight. Now, if you would have asked me the 1970s, I would have had a different answer because it was so much easier to be straight than gay. My hope is is that all gay people come to that conclusion that they can accept themselves, that they can love themselves, that they know that there is love out there for them. I'm always so sad whenever I hear about young people or older people who have felt forced to live a lie, who have felt forced to be in the closet because of the society that we're in or they should say the society that they are in because of religious reasons, because of family. I mean, it is so sad when people have to live their entire life being something that they're not. I would say that we are in such a better, better place. I mean, if you had asked me in the 1970s or the 1980s or the 1990s, if Sherry and I could ever be married, legally married, and not just significant others, I would have told you you were crazy. On December 1st, it will be five years that we've been married. So, what an amazing thing. Those of you that are out there that have a friend who's gay or who thinks they might be gay, you know, talk with them. Be a friend. Love them. And I don't necessarily mean gay love. I mean, just love them. Love them. Love them as a friend. Show them acceptance. Give them an opportunity to talk with you. And even though you're surrounded by all of the acceptance in the media and people that you see that are couples and married and, you know, all these wonderful diverse families now that does not necessarily mean people don't still have an inner struggle based upon how they were raised. From the standpoint of religion, from the standpoint of their family's expectations, there may be many, many reasons that they may still have that inner struggle. If it is a friend of yours who is struggling about being gay, be their friend. Give them an opportunity to talk. I had no one to really talk with when I was going through this in the 70s. If you believe that you are gay or lesbian, then I believe that you need to find some trusted friends that you can talk with. Again, they don't have to be gay. They can be straight, but find trusted allies to speak with because there are many people out there who love you and who want to help you. And so I hope that my story has not only given you a little bit of a history lesson about the way it used to be, but I also hope that it has helped you see that there is a way out. And there is a way out of that closet. You just have to be able to find the right combination for you or for your friend. Your friend has to find that right combination to be able to be proud, have pride, be out, be comfortable with themselves, be accepting of themselves, and be able to find that special person that they can spend their lives with. Alex, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk on your YouTube channel. You're welcome. This has been a lot of fun. Again, I never thought I would be talking about how I figured out I was gay, but here I am. Are you ready for all of your Facebook friends to watch this? I am scared to death. Okay. Anyway, I think that is going to be it for this video. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Leave any comments, questions down below, and maybe Valerie won't answer them. I don't know. Give this video a thumbs up. Don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you guys in my next video. Thank you. Bye bye.