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" Where we come from is important to who we are….Do we sense that we fit? Do we feel welcome? Do we experience ourselves as valued members of the community? How are we perceived by our neighbors and peers? These are among the most fundamental questions we have to answer.
Most men begin with the promise that we are, in fact, welcome. The boy child is, in almost all our known contexts, the heir. He has a right to assume that he will acquire whatever is possible in his world. If his background includes being the member of a disenfranchised group because of race, religion, ethnic background, or class status, he still has the expectation of achieving the most that background will give him.
The gay man, since he is primarily a man, begins with those assumptions. It isn’t until he comes of age and understands his sexual identity and the way it separates him from his birth community that a gay man achieves a perception of being a member of this particular minority….
One of the first questions that a gay man has to answer revolves around the basic issue: Where do I belong? Having grown up as a privileged member of his community, he will now have to ask himself if he can stay there. For years, gay men thought they only had two choices: They could either sublimate their erotic identities and remain in their hometown, or they could move to large centers of population and lose themselves in anonymity. There was no way for a gay man to have a hometown and still be honest with himself. He had to hide his social and sexual proclivities, or else he had to give up communal life in pursuit of them. "
― John Preston , Hometowns
