I’ve had to fight my entire life to get people to accept my straightness and it’s tenuous at best. Regardless of what I tell them or what they see, they just bury their head in the sand and insist that I am not straight.

Starting in middle school, my friends would call me gay and insist I loved taking a fat one, after all my self awareness was not the best and I would say thing like “I like balls” and had a tendency to wear short shorts until I became cognizant of the implications.

Throughout high school and college, boys were constantly hitting on me and trying to get me to come to drag shows with them. I even had a gay roommate at one point and he wasn’t totally convinced.

My siblings even went so far as to get me Christmas presents covered in rainbows and other flamboyant paraphernalia.

I had several long term girlfriends but that as never enough. My friends would insist that it was a cover up, and in fact once asked what would be the girl I married how much I was paying her to pretend to be my girlfriend.

We eventually got married and had a child, to which my friends insisted “That proves nothing”. 12 years later we’ve decided to separate and the first question my sister-in-law asked was “Is it because he’s gay?”

Just last night my 4 year old told my soon to be ex-wife “Daddy really likes boys.” I just can’t convince anybody.