Mad Men

Randy Harrison and Gale Harold in 'Queer as Folk' | Courtesy: Showtime

Sometimes I forget that I was fortunate enough to have been able to come to terms with my sexuality at such an early age. I was 12. The year was 1997. And for every year of my existence before then I knew that I wasn’t ever going to be like all the other boys I grew up with, though I could never quite figure out why. Then all of a sudden it hit me—thanks to a Blockbuster Video membership and a few hundred viewings of Leonardo DiCaprio in “Romeo and Juliet”—that there even was such a thing as being gay, that I might be it, and that that was why my eyes always lingered just a little too long at Mark Wahlberg’s Calvin Klein ads as a kid.

The only problem with this kind of discovery when you’re a middle school kid in Harlem, however, is that there isn’t really a bevvy of positive gay influences to count on despite the fact that you’re growing up smack dab in the middle of Manhattan. New York may be a hotbed of gay culture but you wouldn’t know that if you ever ventured north of 110th st. Hell, you wouldn’t really know it from going north of 14th Street in the early 9o’s. And so, when it came to learning about my newborn sexuality, I turned to the one friend who helped me through everything from learning the correct way to tie my shoes to how to properly cope with my parent’s divorce: Television.