This is my first home page, so please be patient with it. I'm still figuring out the tables.

I'm 22. I graduated from Ohio State in June of 1998 with a degree in English, and now I'm a library assistant at a branch library here in Columbus. I check books out, I check them back in, I shelve, and on Wednesday mornings I help with toddler story time, which is the best hour of my week. Nobody has ever been as happy to see me as a three-year-old who knows I'm going to read the one about the bus.

I live in a small apartment near campus with my cat, Pancake. She's orange, and she goes completely flat when she sleeps, which is how she got her name. She has strong opinions about the radiator.

Something I want to say. This spring, in April, I told my parents and my younger brother that I'm gay. I had known for a long time, since about ninth grade if I'm honest, but I didn't say it out loud to anyone until college, and I didn't say it to my family until this year. I'm putting it here because I spent years looking for pages like this one and didn't find very many. So here's one more.

My mom took it hard at first. She cried, and then she didn't talk to me about it for about six weeks. Then on my birthday in July she sent me a card with a cat on the front. Inside she wrote that she loves me and she's trying, and she underlined trying. It's on my refrigerator.

My dad is still quiet. When I left that night he shook my hand, which he has never done before, and I think that's his way of saying he's thinking about it. We talk about the Buckeyes. I'll take it for now.

My brother Christopher is 19. He said, "Okay. Can I still borrow your car?" He can.

Books that helped me. I work in a library, so of course it was books.

Maurice by E. M. Forster. He wrote it in 1913 and 1914, but it wasn't published until 1971, after he died, because of what it was about. It has a happy ending. He insisted on that, and I'm so glad he did.

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin, and the books after it. In More Tales of the City a character named Michael writes a letter to his mother telling her. I read that chapter maybe twenty times before I talked to mine.

Is It a Choice? by Eric Marcus, which answers the questions people ask, plainly and kindly. I gave a copy to my mom. I don't know if she's read it. It isn't on the shelf where she put it, so maybe.

And two pages right here on GeoCities: Coming Out to My Parents: A Letter Collection, letters people wrote to their parents, shared with permission, and Our Son Is Gay: A Mom and Dad's Page, two parents in Milwaukee on what they got wrong and what they got right. I read every letter on the first one before I wrote my own.

If you're scared. If you're reading this and you're scared, I want to say a few things, and I mean every one of them. You are not the only one. You don't have to tell anybody until you're ready, and you get to decide when that is. If you live at home and you aren't sure it would be safe to tell, it is okay to wait. Find one person you trust, a friend or a teacher or a librarian (we're good at this), and start there. Things changed for me slowly, and then faster than I expected. My mom is still trying. I'm still here. You will be too.

Softball. Since June I've been playing in a softball game some friends get together on Sunday afternoons, at a park by the river. I'm terrible. I play right field, where the ball almost never goes, and I have caught exactly one fly ball all summer, and everybody cheered like it was the World Series. My friend Jamie, who plays first base and organizes everything, says I have "real potential." Jamie is being generous. This afternoon I got a hit anyway, a real one, over the second baseman's head. I'm still a little proud of it.

Thanks for reading my first home page. If you want to write to me, about books or cats or anything else, I'd really like that.