In 1990, on my 13th birthday, I remember finally becoming a teenager. It was halfway through my 8th grade year. Science was my favorite subject. Mrs. Wegloski, my teacher, had the best classroom in the building, complete with a magical room filled with test tubes, alcohol burners, chemicals, and other odds and ends. Laboratory equipment fascinated me. I was fairly certain my life’s work would involve wearing a lab coat. I’d wear a tie every day and don a lab coat on at work.
Later that year I started high school, and I shined in Biology class. My teacher, Mrs. Bryce, constantly signed me out of study hall to help her in the Bio lab. At one point during the year, we DNA fingerprinted ourselves using electrophoresis equipment from UIC. I was in heaven, spending a few hours each week wearing my lab coat, tinkering around in the lab.
The next year I realized, or maybe a better term would be acknowledged, that I was gay. It wasn’t an easy decision to finalize in my mind, but I did it, and 1992 will forever be burned in my mind as the year I started to come out. It was also the year I gave up the dream of wearing a white lab coat.
Strange? Well, in all honesty, I didn’t think gay men could be scientists. I’d never seen a gay scientist, I’d never heard of a gay scientist, and I’d certainly never met one. The only gay men I’d met at that point were bartenders, waiters, actors, hairdressers, costumers, makeup artists, drag queens, and dancers. Honestly, I’m not sure why I convinced myself it wasn’t possible, but I gave it up.
In 1994 I made the mistake of starting college. The course work was seriously beneath me, as my high school prepared us incredibly well. Somehow I conjured up the image of myself as a pharmacist (there it was, the white lab coat) and tried very hard to pretend it was something I wanted to do with my life. I even worked in a pharmacy for a spell as a pharm tech and wore my lab coat with pride. It was fun, but I soon realized I didn’t want to work in that field my whole life. I wanted a life that was, well, gayer. But having never met any gay pharmacists, I didn’t really know how that would work.
I say “made the mistake of starting college” because I should have taken time off before college and just worked. I think all kids fresh out of high school should experience some life BEFORE they get snared into student loans, adult-like life, college parties, non-mandatory attendance classes, and another five to twelve years of school.
Instead I tried to make it all work. I tried to live a ‘gayer’ life, be a good student, work, and live at home. I tried very hard to find myself somewhere in-between all that, and it wasn’t working. When a very good paying job landed on my doorstep with Walgreen’s corporate, I ditched school and snatched up the job.
I’ve said it before, but I don’t regret leaving college. If I have any regrets, it was starting college right after high school. Maybe my life would be different if I’d taken time off before going to school. I don’t think I’d have ended up wearing that white lab coat after all, but who knows. Heck, today I could buy a closet full of white lab coats. I just don’t want to anymore.
When I dropped out of college to go work with Walgreen’s I knew computers were my future. Oddly enough, at the time I didn’t know any gay men who worked with computers for a living. I knew plenty who used them (I was into online dating back in ‘96, but left that scene in ‘99). I just hadn’t met anyone who made a living working with them.
How interesting. I didn’t think I could be a gay scientist because I’d never met one, but I knew for certain I could be a gay IT guy, sight unseen. Why the difference? Things that make ya go hmm…
This morning while putting on my jeans, an old tee, and a comfortable sweater, I was suddenly shocked at how different my life is from that 13 year old’s vision. I wasn’t putting on a shirt and tie and slipping on a white lab coat when I arrived at work.
In case you were wondering, the reason I bring all this up is because last night I had a dream about my future. It was patchy and didn’t make sense, so I won’t go into detail, but it made me think about what my life might look like 20 years from now. As a million scenarios were flipping through my mind this morning, I’d just pulled on my sweater, poked my head out of the top, and looked in the mirror.
If the 13 year old me didn’t even come close to predicting what I saw in the mirror this morning, how is the 31 year old me supposed to have any clue what the 50 year old me will be like?
The answer is simple and it hit me like a ton of bricks.
I can’t predict the future. But I can become whatever I want over the course of the next 20 years. So the task at hand isn’t imagining what I’ll become. It’s deciding what to become.
This will take some thought.
there are plenty of gay scientists… you just haven’t met them yet. But they’re often gay nerds too, so… pick and choose :)