- Joined
- Sep 13, 2025
- Posts
- 13
- Media
- 15
- Likes
- 116
- Points
- 128
- Age
- 20
- Location
- South West, United States
- Verification
- View
- Sexuality
- Pansexual
- Gender
- Male
- JH1N,
Hey there, glad you’re here. On here, I go by J1HN, but others just call me Jon. I’m a twenty-year-old Jamaican American raised in the eastern United States. I grew up in the Bible Belt of the southeastern United States, raised by Christian parents. Life wasn’t easy for me. This made exploring my sexuality seem trivial. Any form of self-expression that didn’t conform to the narrative of what a young man my age “ought to be doing” was suppressed and met with harsh words and spiritual bypassing.
I eventually realized that I couldn’t convince my parents, and their expectations for me as their son were beyond my capabilities. From a young age, I had a clear sense of my identity and preferences. This is evident in the people I befriended and the interests I pursued in fashion. Naturally, I often found myself socializing with my female counterparts, adopting the language related to our shared interests.
For the most part, my sense of fashion was quite gender-neutral, leaning more towards masculinity. I knew my mother, let alone my father, wouldn’t tolerate me dressing in a feminine manner. My father would, and I didn’t even consider that as an option until years after high school. So, I would find loopholes and discover ways to feel embodied while concealing my queerness. This could have manifested in various ways, such as wearing belts with t-shirts, adopting vibrant clothing, or wanting to keep my hair uncut.
Ultimately, I never had the option to choose the weather or whether I wanted to keep my hair uncut. Instead, I had to endure my father spending $25 every two weeks on a haircut to maintain his carefully curated image of me.
The year is now 2025, and I’ve graduated high school. I’m 19 years old, and summer is here. For some reason, life has a nostalgic glisten to it, and I feel like I’ve lived many lives. It’s probably because I have. I’ve been masquerading as a “straight” guy who’s never dated. I’ve learned how to perform masculinity just enough to avoid drawing attention to my identity. Even a close friend has compared me to a leaf because she couldn’t fathom me ever dating someone.
Don’t be distraught, we’re still pretty close to this day. There were some hiccups here and there where my dad would catch me with an accessory that he deemed to be feminine, be it an anklet or a necklace. It was strict, okay? That never stopped me from sneaking those things into my attire when I was out of his sight though haha.
I vividly recall the evening when my father discovered me wearing an anklet around my left foot. He reacted with anger and frustration, labeling it as effeminate and expressing his concern that I might want to resemble a woman. His words were deeply hurtful and had a lasting impact on me, leaving me emotionally devastated for hours, if not days, after they were spoken.
This was the summer I befriended one of the sons of our new neighbours who had recently moved into the community. He and his whole family practiced Christianity, though non-denominational, they took their religion seriously. His father was even a pastor. It was his son who gave me the idea that it might be okay for me to wear one too because he proudly wore it around his foot, and I’d always glance at his toned ankles because he’d often walk around barefoot. White folks, gotta love ‘ em.
God, did I have the biggest crush on him. We’ll, call him Beck. Beck never made me feel estranged for how I talked or what I whore. It’s as if he didn’t even see anything remotely telling of my gender identity. Not that I was stunting with colored hair or hair piercings; not that those things are wrong, I’d just get killed if I ever dared. I think that’s what made Beck so attractive to me. He saw my soul before vessel in front of him and that to me was the hottest thing on Earth.
We’d often connect by playing table tennis in my parents’ garage or playing badminton in the backyard; he was very competitive, but so was I. I remember an instance where I was over his house, and he walked downstairs shirtless. I wanted to pin him to the wall and ask him to do me the same, but in reality, I just dapped him up like a homeboy nonchalantly and went on with my day lol.
We’re gonna focus on 2025 some more and unpack some of what I endured summer of that year.
As mentioned previously, I grew up in the Bible Belt in the southwest United States, and this reflected in the activities I’d participate in or the voluntary extracurricular aid I’d be included in at church. If you couldn’t tell by my beautifully captured spicy selfies, haha; I love photography. In fact, it’s one of the few hobbies I’ve taken up within the past few years.
This church I was affiliated with is pretty established. Many nice people and many other “nice” people attended this church. Nonetheless, it’s still a church, and with that many stereotypes are to be expected that I do not think I’ll expound on, but believe me when I say it was wild.
One of the voluntary extracurriculars I was requested to perform was being an assist on the media team manning the media switcher and being an on call photographer for the church’s social media pages and website.
I overperformed this position for a considerable amount of time, ranging from high school to a few months after graduation. At this point, you could be thinking, why only a few months after graduation? And if you were, I’d say that’s an astute observation.
What I didn’t mention, that some time around June, was the true beginning of my “black sheep” arc. Because it was also at this time that I began seriously deconstructing my faith and denouncing Christianity. In private. If it wasn’t already obvious, this was a heavily tabooed choice to make and looked really bad as someone with a position of “stewardship” actively serving in the church.
Some months went by, and a job opportunity presented itself to me, courtesy of my brother-in-law, who already had a foot in the door. What’s the job? Well, I’ll tell you. For context, this isn’t what I initially thought I’d be onboarding for, but I went through with things anyhow. Why? Because it was still a job, it happened to be in an area of the city I liked, and offered crazy benefits for spa amenities and services.
Oh yeah! The job I ended up securing was front desk concierge and spa attendant. This isn’t going to focus on the hot guys we’d welcome in-house often but about the mere fact of me securing the job to begin with. As we know, my parents were raised and are very strict, proud, apostolic Christians.
Upon being informed that I successfully secured a job as a luxury day spa in the city 30 minutes from our house. My mother instead of meeting me with congratulatory words of encouragement and praise, made it known she was against the idea of working in what she and my father considered a “gay” area.
This, of course, was an absolutely absurd and false preconceived notion of what they believed that area of the city to be. After an emotionally draining lecture from both of my parents about all the reasons I shouldn’t be working there, I in secret decided to make the entire encounter and made it a 4-part series on my social media. It blew up and is almost single-handedly responsible for the majority of my following.
Naturally so though, people like attention-grabbing, drama-filled story times, and I don’t blame them. I received backlash from my eldest sibling, who was in complete opposition to my decision to record the audio of my parents’ lecture towards me and post it for the world to see. She established solid points about why it was “wrong,” what could “go wrong,” and that I should take them down.
I didn’t do that. In fact, I didn’t end up permanently taking down any of the videos because I knew and understood the consequences I was inviting myself into.
I also understood that what I was doing wasn’t just a means of therapeutic stress relief but a means to creating a relatable safe space for others my age and in my community to feel seen and feel heard through my lived experiences.
Throughout the weeks that pass, my parents have no clue that they had gone viral, and that their son had unofficially come out to millions of people on the internet that he was gay and circumnavigating a stressful at-home situation between his family and church.
However, on one unsuspecting morning, my father decided to catch up on some house chores. I, of course, offered my help and made myself useful so that the burden is shared between the two of us. It wasn’t until both of us were inside and in the same room that my father received a random phone call from the pastor of our church. Someone in his circle forwarded him a video from my page where I indirectly said that I was gay.
Keep in mind everything I’ve discussed up to this point is based off of true experiences I’ve lived through and navigated on my own.
My father has no idea how to process what it was he had just heard from his senior pastor at 10 in the morning. Why the pastor had someone in his circle who had access to queer media? Idk. Maybe I do know? It truly doesn’t matter to me.
But what I do know is that the look on my father’s face looked like his deepest and darkest secrets had been verbalised and broadened on live television. He tried his best to compose himself and “calmly” demanded that I sit down and recite to him the verse in the Bible where it said being gay was okay.
He eventually found very carefully picked verses that he would then use to condemn me and lecture me for the next half hour and change and threaten to tell all of our family members.
To this day I’m not quite sure if he was bluffing or not, but I do know that after that day for the next two weeks after, he and my mom would be praying at the top of their lungs that what was said wasn’t true, hoping they could “banish the principality” from my life and undo the gay.
Of course, it didn’t work. It didn’t work when I tried, and it certainly didn’t work when they did.
I could go on and on about this chapter of my life for hours, but for the sake of my thumbs typing this and your eyes reading this, I’ll conclude with this.
There’s nothing wrong or demonic about your existence. You deserve to be loved and experience joy in its purest and most complete form, just like everyone else. Regardless of what your family thinks, what your “spiritual leaders” do, or what a book says about your existence, there’s nothing wrong with you.
I hope my little memoir reaches the people it needs to and helps someone struggling with experiences similar to mine. Remember, you are loved and worthy. I believe this post will certainly put the “SUPPORT” in LPSG haha. Thanks for welcoming me, and thank you for reading.
I eventually realized that I couldn’t convince my parents, and their expectations for me as their son were beyond my capabilities. From a young age, I had a clear sense of my identity and preferences. This is evident in the people I befriended and the interests I pursued in fashion. Naturally, I often found myself socializing with my female counterparts, adopting the language related to our shared interests.
For the most part, my sense of fashion was quite gender-neutral, leaning more towards masculinity. I knew my mother, let alone my father, wouldn’t tolerate me dressing in a feminine manner. My father would, and I didn’t even consider that as an option until years after high school. So, I would find loopholes and discover ways to feel embodied while concealing my queerness. This could have manifested in various ways, such as wearing belts with t-shirts, adopting vibrant clothing, or wanting to keep my hair uncut.
Ultimately, I never had the option to choose the weather or whether I wanted to keep my hair uncut. Instead, I had to endure my father spending $25 every two weeks on a haircut to maintain his carefully curated image of me.
The year is now 2025, and I’ve graduated high school. I’m 19 years old, and summer is here. For some reason, life has a nostalgic glisten to it, and I feel like I’ve lived many lives. It’s probably because I have. I’ve been masquerading as a “straight” guy who’s never dated. I’ve learned how to perform masculinity just enough to avoid drawing attention to my identity. Even a close friend has compared me to a leaf because she couldn’t fathom me ever dating someone.
Don’t be distraught, we’re still pretty close to this day. There were some hiccups here and there where my dad would catch me with an accessory that he deemed to be feminine, be it an anklet or a necklace. It was strict, okay? That never stopped me from sneaking those things into my attire when I was out of his sight though haha.
I vividly recall the evening when my father discovered me wearing an anklet around my left foot. He reacted with anger and frustration, labeling it as effeminate and expressing his concern that I might want to resemble a woman. His words were deeply hurtful and had a lasting impact on me, leaving me emotionally devastated for hours, if not days, after they were spoken.
This was the summer I befriended one of the sons of our new neighbours who had recently moved into the community. He and his whole family practiced Christianity, though non-denominational, they took their religion seriously. His father was even a pastor. It was his son who gave me the idea that it might be okay for me to wear one too because he proudly wore it around his foot, and I’d always glance at his toned ankles because he’d often walk around barefoot. White folks, gotta love ‘ em.
God, did I have the biggest crush on him. We’ll, call him Beck. Beck never made me feel estranged for how I talked or what I whore. It’s as if he didn’t even see anything remotely telling of my gender identity. Not that I was stunting with colored hair or hair piercings; not that those things are wrong, I’d just get killed if I ever dared. I think that’s what made Beck so attractive to me. He saw my soul before vessel in front of him and that to me was the hottest thing on Earth.
We’d often connect by playing table tennis in my parents’ garage or playing badminton in the backyard; he was very competitive, but so was I. I remember an instance where I was over his house, and he walked downstairs shirtless. I wanted to pin him to the wall and ask him to do me the same, but in reality, I just dapped him up like a homeboy nonchalantly and went on with my day lol.
We’re gonna focus on 2025 some more and unpack some of what I endured summer of that year.
As mentioned previously, I grew up in the Bible Belt in the southwest United States, and this reflected in the activities I’d participate in or the voluntary extracurricular aid I’d be included in at church. If you couldn’t tell by my beautifully captured spicy selfies, haha; I love photography. In fact, it’s one of the few hobbies I’ve taken up within the past few years.
This church I was affiliated with is pretty established. Many nice people and many other “nice” people attended this church. Nonetheless, it’s still a church, and with that many stereotypes are to be expected that I do not think I’ll expound on, but believe me when I say it was wild.
One of the voluntary extracurriculars I was requested to perform was being an assist on the media team manning the media switcher and being an on call photographer for the church’s social media pages and website.
I overperformed this position for a considerable amount of time, ranging from high school to a few months after graduation. At this point, you could be thinking, why only a few months after graduation? And if you were, I’d say that’s an astute observation.
What I didn’t mention, that some time around June, was the true beginning of my “black sheep” arc. Because it was also at this time that I began seriously deconstructing my faith and denouncing Christianity. In private. If it wasn’t already obvious, this was a heavily tabooed choice to make and looked really bad as someone with a position of “stewardship” actively serving in the church.
Some months went by, and a job opportunity presented itself to me, courtesy of my brother-in-law, who already had a foot in the door. What’s the job? Well, I’ll tell you. For context, this isn’t what I initially thought I’d be onboarding for, but I went through with things anyhow. Why? Because it was still a job, it happened to be in an area of the city I liked, and offered crazy benefits for spa amenities and services.
Oh yeah! The job I ended up securing was front desk concierge and spa attendant. This isn’t going to focus on the hot guys we’d welcome in-house often but about the mere fact of me securing the job to begin with. As we know, my parents were raised and are very strict, proud, apostolic Christians.
Upon being informed that I successfully secured a job as a luxury day spa in the city 30 minutes from our house. My mother instead of meeting me with congratulatory words of encouragement and praise, made it known she was against the idea of working in what she and my father considered a “gay” area.
This, of course, was an absolutely absurd and false preconceived notion of what they believed that area of the city to be. After an emotionally draining lecture from both of my parents about all the reasons I shouldn’t be working there, I in secret decided to make the entire encounter and made it a 4-part series on my social media. It blew up and is almost single-handedly responsible for the majority of my following.
Naturally so though, people like attention-grabbing, drama-filled story times, and I don’t blame them. I received backlash from my eldest sibling, who was in complete opposition to my decision to record the audio of my parents’ lecture towards me and post it for the world to see. She established solid points about why it was “wrong,” what could “go wrong,” and that I should take them down.
I didn’t do that. In fact, I didn’t end up permanently taking down any of the videos because I knew and understood the consequences I was inviting myself into.
I also understood that what I was doing wasn’t just a means of therapeutic stress relief but a means to creating a relatable safe space for others my age and in my community to feel seen and feel heard through my lived experiences.
Throughout the weeks that pass, my parents have no clue that they had gone viral, and that their son had unofficially come out to millions of people on the internet that he was gay and circumnavigating a stressful at-home situation between his family and church.
However, on one unsuspecting morning, my father decided to catch up on some house chores. I, of course, offered my help and made myself useful so that the burden is shared between the two of us. It wasn’t until both of us were inside and in the same room that my father received a random phone call from the pastor of our church. Someone in his circle forwarded him a video from my page where I indirectly said that I was gay.
Keep in mind everything I’ve discussed up to this point is based off of true experiences I’ve lived through and navigated on my own.
My father has no idea how to process what it was he had just heard from his senior pastor at 10 in the morning. Why the pastor had someone in his circle who had access to queer media? Idk. Maybe I do know? It truly doesn’t matter to me.
But what I do know is that the look on my father’s face looked like his deepest and darkest secrets had been verbalised and broadened on live television. He tried his best to compose himself and “calmly” demanded that I sit down and recite to him the verse in the Bible where it said being gay was okay.
He eventually found very carefully picked verses that he would then use to condemn me and lecture me for the next half hour and change and threaten to tell all of our family members.
To this day I’m not quite sure if he was bluffing or not, but I do know that after that day for the next two weeks after, he and my mom would be praying at the top of their lungs that what was said wasn’t true, hoping they could “banish the principality” from my life and undo the gay.
Of course, it didn’t work. It didn’t work when I tried, and it certainly didn’t work when they did.
I could go on and on about this chapter of my life for hours, but for the sake of my thumbs typing this and your eyes reading this, I’ll conclude with this.
There’s nothing wrong or demonic about your existence. You deserve to be loved and experience joy in its purest and most complete form, just like everyone else. Regardless of what your family thinks, what your “spiritual leaders” do, or what a book says about your existence, there’s nothing wrong with you.
I hope my little memoir reaches the people it needs to and helps someone struggling with experiences similar to mine. Remember, you are loved and worthy. I believe this post will certainly put the “SUPPORT” in LPSG haha. Thanks for welcoming me, and thank you for reading.
