I came out to my L.D.S. Boy Scout troop when I was 12 years old. This wasn’t intentional. As we sat in a circle in an empty church rec room, my friends described these cool, powerful, new feelings that they were having towards girls.
So I shared my feelings and what was happening with me. You see, I totally understood what they were talking about because I was having the same feelings too.
I have never in the decades since that moment forgotten how they looked at me, their senior patrol leader. Their looks of confusion and disgust let me know instantly that I had done something terribly wrong.
I spent the next few weeks at the small public library in my town trying to figure what I was. You see I knew what a “faggot” was. It was these strange, evil men who had done something so wrong that God had sent AIDS to exterminate them.
It’s near impossible now to think of a time of such ignorance in this age of information but it happened, I was there, and it sucked.
I found that word in a book, sitting alone on the floor of an empty aisle of the Fontana Public library and that word was “homosexual.” It still feels strange to type it out, to remember all the lies and the prayers and the things I did to try and change myself. Of all the drugs and the booze and the self-destruction that followed because I couldn’t.
But I’m sitting here right now, writing this, filled with hope because I know that there is a baby being born, somewhere in my country, right now who will always know that they have a right to follow their heart. To know that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
At this point in my life I have somehow become known for the horror films that I create and upload to the internet. When people meet me they assume that I have some deep knowledge of the darkness, or love of horror’s tragic delight. But what I have is not that, it is a true understanding of fear and the things people do when they are cornered, misunderstood, and afraid.
Tony E. Valenzuela
June 26th, 2015
