The Beginning of The Beginning

Growing up was a whirlwind of strangeness for me. Feeling what I perceived to be love, I assumed that my parents loved me. Perhaps in their own warped way they did. However, it seemed that the older I got, the more estranged from them I felt. My brother never seemed to have this difficulty. He probably did though, but to a lesser extent.
Being raised in a fundamentalist Christian home, unschooled until the age of eight, and homeschooled my whole life, I felt exceptionally isolated from children my own age. My parents had been involved in a group called The Way International, now deemed by many as a cult, and I had been raised under a majority of its precepts. Besides many of its non-traditional views on Christianity, which led to an unstable religious upbringing for me and my brother, it also has a harsh, unforgiving view on homosexuality. This I had to learn the hard way.
I had already heard my parents brag to me about their time as Way missionaries in New Orleans, "re-training" people who were gay to become straight "again". Teaching gay men how to walk like "real men" and talk like "real men".
I didn't know what to make of any of this at the time. In fact, I had so little exposure to anything LGBTQ that I really didnt know anything about it at all. Just what my parents told me. That gay was bad, and we loved the sinner and hated the sin. These words were spoken to me on a rather frequent basis.
My only sex education came from my mother. It was brief, somewhat down to business, and was all within the context of man and woman, husband and wife, after marriage. That's how babies are born kids! I actually thought people had sex standing up. It was pretty confusing for me. My brother didn't want to hear a word of it; he got immensely grossed out and wouldn't believe what she was talking about, and went into a state of denial about the situation of how he came into the world.

The whirlwind had not even really begun yet, but it would soon. And I would begin to doubt everything I had ever known.