Not childhood, but adolescence, does that count too?
I was about 15, third year in high school as we call it here. One fine summer day a fellow student I knew, but had rather little contact with, asked me out of the blue if I was interested in joining him for a swim in the local swimming pool. I’ve always been a rather shy kid, didn’t have many friends and never socialized well, so I was happy with the invitation and accepted with pleasure.
So we went swimming. During our time together, I remember a continuous feeling of awkwardness, something wasn’t really right, but I couldn’t put my finger to it. We must have spent about two hours in the pool, just the two of us, no other people we knew were around. We swam, chatted, had a drink and a snack and returned home.
After that, things were as they were before. For the remainder of our college years, we were OK with each other but never spoke about it, never mentioned it anymore. He never invited me to personal or social events again.
It was only 10 years later at a college reunion I found out he was the leading figure of the gay community in our school. Apparently many of my fellow students were gay and there had been a vibrant and flourishing gay community right in front of my eyes and all of the six years I had spent in that college, I had been totally and utterly oblivious!
It was only then that I realized there was no other explanation for what had actually happened that summer day than that this was an active scouting by the school gay community to check if I’d would be ‘eligible for membership’... As I had always been rather shy and closed off, I guess they had always left open the possibility I could be a closet gay, so they had figured it was time to put me to the test. It at least explained the wide, all revealing shorts he was wearing at the time and him spending a lot of time not swimming but walking or sitting by the side by the pool showing off ‘the goods’...
Imaging something like this at the pool side:
(Oh yes, I had a lot of fun scrolling the internet looking for this picture ;-)!)
I guess I failed the test miserably…
A few years later, the guy died from AIDS. He’s the only person I’ve known in real life that has died from AIDS. I liked him, he was a kind person, but I guess I dodged the bullet called HIV there…