Here goes nothing: Homestead High School, I would like to announce that I’m gay.

But before you start laughing hysterically, spreading the news to everyone and swapping embarrassing “I-always-knew-it” stories with your friends, please read on.

I’ve known about my sexuality since about the fourth grade. That’s a six-year period of keeping a huge secret to myself. So why the long wait? As much as I don’t relish opening my secret to a harsh, often bigoted world, fear of prejudice was never my main reason for staying in the closet. First, I had to make peace with the harshest, most stubborn bigot of all – myself. Until this year, until this very moment, I wasn’t ready.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the very beginning, when I first started suspecting the truth. Suspecting is the word, because until about seventh grade I convinced myself that my feelings were just a stage or a figment of my imagination. In seventh and eighth grade, I struggled more realistically with the possibilities: that I could be gay, bisexual, going through a stage. By freshman year, I was fairly sure that any whisper of heterosexuality inside me was just wishful thinking. But even as I got closer to accepting it, I was far from ready to come out.

So why am I ready now? The fact is, I’m not. But I don’t have the luxury of waiting until I am. I’ve reached the point of no return in my high school career – the point where I can either tell the truth or start lying blatantly. I’ve known this was coming for a long time, and in a way I’ve been anticipating it. I may not be ready to fully accept my sexuality, but I’m ready – have to be ready – to let those around me start trying.

It took six years for me to come to terms with my sexuality. Why? The fact is, I’m just not the right person to be gay. Yes, living in California and being involved in theater, I’m generally a liberal. But deep inside me there’s a conservative streak that truly believes marriage should be between a man and a woman. I want to have a real wedding, with a bride dressed all in white. I want to have children who are genetically descended from me, who will have my eyes and their mother’s chin. I want to be able to go on a honeymoon anywhere, not to some gay resort where same-sex couples frolic on the beach and slather each other with sunscreen. I want to be the one to hold the door open for her, to propose to her on one knee. But there is no “her”, and there never will be.

My problem, really, is that I’m obsessed with clichés. When I was little I loved to write stories, but looking back at them they’re just collections of cheesy conventions that I picked up in other places. Today, the stories have gotten better; the taste for conventions has not. Stories are the yardstick by which I measure my life and the lives of all those around me. I always wanted to be like this or that storybook hero; being a sheltered, wimpy kid, I lived vicariously through my imagination. But being gay effectively banishes me from those fairy worlds between the pages. How many stories do you know where the main character is gay? “Brokeback Mountain” doesn’t count. Yeah, I didn’t think so. How about where the comic sidekick, the hero’s parents, anyone important at all is gay? Yeah, I didn’t think so. No matter how politically correct the world becomes, My Two Mommies will never be on the shelf of classics next to Snow White and The Lord of the Rings.

In fact, the only reference to gays in pop culture is as the irritating best friend in second-rate romantic comedies. This is the one type of gay that appears in the world of stories: a fashion-toting, limp-wristed, comical queen. To be brutally honest, I think in some ways the gay community has brought this persistent stereotype on itself. I mean, there are enough limp-wristed queens in the real world. I don’t know why. Do they feel more comfortable with their sexuality if they live their lives with a stereotype as a blueprint, or do they all really love fashion and shopping and saying the word “fabulous”? I mean no disrespect for those people, and I’m obviously in no position to be prejudiced against them. But sometimes I wish that the media would show gays who are more – much as it pains me to say it – normal.

To flesh out this example, let me tell you a story about my good friend – let’s call him Bob. Bob goes to Homestead and is extremely gay. Now, while I support and respect Bob in the utmost, his antics have set a precedent, an expectation that every gay is similarly silly. I know another gay male, “Joe”, who doesn’t have a limp wrist in sight and has an androgynous mix of interests. I know that Bob is 100 percent sincere, but there must be more homosexuals like Joe out there. I refuse to believe that Joe and I will someday be called by our inner hormones and discover that we both love manicures. We’re just people, and our sexuality doesn’t affect our personality any more than our race or religion. As representatives of an oft-wronged minority, we have a duty to let our peers know that.

That doesn’t mean that I haven’t gone over and over every gay stereotype in my mind, convincing myself that I fulfill them to the letter. I mean, I’m not exactly the manliest type. I hate sports, I’m in theater and I speak French. But for everything stereotypically gay about me, there’s a logical explanation. So what if I don’t like sports? I’m just an outdoor athlete; I feel as comfortable in REI as another guy would feel in the gym. And then there’s theater, which is easy to explain. That runs in the Lilly family. My dad was in theater and he’s obviously straight. As for French, that was just a random chance. I didn’t sign up for it so that I could discuss haute-couture or cuisine or l’amour (heterosexuale, or otherwise). I might as well have taken Spanish. In fact, in middle school I wanted to learn Latin. Latin is an extremely manly language – or at least it was in the 18th century. So why did I just happen to end up with French? Why are all the fates conspiring to make me seem like a total fruit? I can’t tell Hollister from a handkerchief. How can I convince the world that I’m just a regular guy who happens to be attracted to the same gender?

Unhappily, that question has no easy answer. In fact, the answer might well be that I can’t. Even if I can forge new clichés for my life, if I can find a way to accept myself the way I am and be something other than the gay best friend, I’ll still never really be a regular guy. I just need people to know that I don’t intend to be a conventional homosexual either. I intend to show the world something more complex than a sashaying drama queen, even if I don’t know quite what it is yet.

It’s a long, hard road ahead of me, but I’m ready. I’m finally ready, ready to face whatever the world throws at me. I’m ready to see which of my friends are true and which are pretenders.

So don’t judge me by what I’m not – but go ahead and judge me by what I am. I dare every homophobe at Homestead High School to hit me with their best shot. I’m man enough. And not every straight guy could say the same.