Darrell

Hometown:
Ozark, MO
Positive Since:
July 3, 2005
Relationship:
Single
Age: 35

I was born the youngest of five boys in Branson, Missouri in 1976. When I was eight months old my father decided it was time to follow his dream of living off the land. He and my mother packed up their five children (the oldest being five years old) and moved to a tiny village called Red Devil, 300 miles north of Anchorage, in the Alaskan "bush".

The first five years of my life were spent living like the Swiss Family Robinson, but set in the pristine wilderness of Alaska, without running water, electricity, telephones, or many people to speak of, for that matter. One of my earliest memories is my father being away (on a hunting trip, I believe) and my mother at the window of our log cabin with a shotgun, all of us kids huddled around her as a black bear prowled in our front yard.

The strongest elements in those formative years were family, religion, and nature, themes that to this day my parents still hold as the most important things in life. Although there was no church in the tiny settlement in which we lived, we received shipments of sermons on cassette from my grandfather and another preacher who shared the same religion as my parents. Twice every Sunday and once on Wednesday night, we would gather around with our bibles and solemnly listen to the words warbling out of the tape deck.

My parents belong to a small Calvinist religion called Independent Missionary Baptists, an extremely fundamentalist group who believe in Predestination and a 100% literal interpretation of the bible. Growing up there was no question that God was a stern and judgmental figure who would not hesitate to strike down and condemn to hell any and everyone who did not follow his commandments.

These teachings fed directly into reactions that accompanied news of the “gay plague” when it hit the media several years later. At that time my family was living in a slightly larger town in Alaska called Bethel, and even though the reports were from a far away land called California, I felt a sense of panic much closer to home. I had never heard of homosexuality before, but I gathered (particularly from my father’s reaction) that it was a dark and threatening force that should be wiped out immediately before it caught hold.

It was several more years before, at the age of twelve, fuelled by our religion’s stance that God had created a plague to wipe out homosexuals, I deduced that AIDS was created when two men had sexual relations. This understanding filled me with terror, because by then I had realized that indeed I was one of these deviant creatures, and had even participated in these acts (at five years of age) when an older male cousin had initiated me into the world of sex.