GAY BOY ON CAPE COD

"Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived." I found this quote some time back in the writings of a contemporary existentialist writer on spiritual realities name Adrian van Kaam. It stuck in my mind and I've thought about it and pictured the images he suggests. . .like each of us being a mystery which gradually unfolds and reveals the meaning to life. . . my life.

I remember my 4th birthday party and I can still see a scene that has stayed with me these last 17 years. The kids are all sitting on the living room floor, and next to me is Peter, I am opening his gift: a wind-up duck, something like the Afflack duck, which flapped and made that noise. I can still see him next to me. . . .thick longish brown hair, shiny dark brown eyes, very tan from summer on the Dunes. Peter was special, important to me, and I had nice feelings about him. At 4 years old I was having my first crush on / with another boy. And it was very good. When I think of that event and time I still have warm thoughts and happy feelings.

My name is Justin O'Shea and I am a gay boy, aged 21, with the same brown hair and dark brown shiny eyes as Peter. I was born and brought up in a large white house, with a wrap around porch, on the dunes, on the outer or ocean side of the Cape. Cape Cod is like an arm bent at the elbow, extending out from the mainland of Massachusetts, in northeastern USA. Our home is near the elbow, about a 20 minute drove south of Provincetown which is along the inside hand of the Cape.

I have written about a lot of this in my blog JUSTIN DUNES which I started last
July 2009. http://www.justindunes.blogspot.com if you are curious.

I am in my second year of grad school in psychology at a "prestigious Ivy League"( aren't they all?! LOL) university where I did my undergraduate studies. I plan on a PhD in psychology and hope for a service career as a psycho-therapist. While I think I would "mainstream" my service career I want to be of use to young gay people especially so as to help them weather through and allow to unfold that mystery of being gay people. I would hope I could help in some ways to make this mystery-unfolding easier for them and they people they love.

Where I come from is very important to the telling of my unfolding mystery, my story of growing up as a gay boy. My Dad is a government lawyer and Mom is a literature professor at a community college. I am the youngest of three: my brother is 12 years older and I and my sister is ten years older. A long gap before I appeared in the O'Shea family.

I wondered about the long space between me and my siblings. I asked my parents about this when I was about 10 or 11. . in one of our regular chats. . .I asked them if I was a mistake on the calendar. . .[growing up among older people all my life, I asked those kinds of questions] Their immediate reaction was "Oh No, honey, you are the baby we chose to have and came as a special gift from God when we thought we couldn't have another baby."

This was then the occasion for one of our chats about live and loving which happened when I asked the right question and gave them the opening to talk more about "the birds and the bees" and the mystery of living and loving. We always had that kind of open free relationship where I always felt free to ask questions, make comments, tell them how I felt and what was going on.

I know I was born gay nd have always been gay. . . that is the way God made me. . in His image and likeness, like all of us, gay or straight. I guess it's fair to say I have always thought that being "the way I am" is totally normal and ordinary. Oh, I didn't have then the clearer ideas and vocabulary about gay orientation I have so far today, but I soon found out I was "different" or felt I was different.

I had my second crush in the first grade. He was a curly red haired freckled-face boy named Roger. We sat next to each other. One day when the class was going to go somewhere in school the teacher had us line up, two by two, just as we had done in kindergarten. When I reached to take hold of his hand, as we did last year, Roger pulled away, with the look in his eyes which told me boys didn't hold hands. But I wanted to hold his hand and his reaction 'hurt' me and I wondered why he did that.

Bit by bit I discovered there were other things boys didn't do. I didn't talk about these but I wondered about them. I do not think though that these stifled my open and spontaneous reactions to life. . . . I just became more selective where and when and with whom. There wwere other kids who seemed "like me" and I figured this was all natural and normal. I grew up in an affectionate and demonstrative family and that has remained part of who I am, more so today.

Another factor in my growth as a gay man is the religious traditions of the O'Shea - Bouvier families: we are Catholics in the Roman tradition, which means we are Catholic in the RC line. My father's family came from Ireland once upon a time, and while still there, got mixed up with some European Gypsy bloodlines (not the Irish "Tinkers". My mother is a Bouvier ( not to be confused with the Jackie K or Princess Radziwill line) from France via French Quebec, later moving also to the Boston area.

We are regular Sunday Mass goers and have always been involved in our parish life. I would class my parents as liberal progressive Catholics who, after St Paul, "render to God our rational service". When they were running together in the 1960s and getting involved in life issues they also had serious dialog about the Church and how they see things and fit into the way of following Jesus and the Gospel. These dialogs continued in their married life with each other and with their children. So growing up I was always part of this as we definitely were not sheep being lead by the grain bucket.

So in the midst of all of this growing up I had my first guy-guy gay sexual experience. Also around that time I came out to my parents: I told them I was gay.

(To be continued in Part Two. Stay tuned. . . . )