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“I celebrate myself, and sing myself.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892), American poet and author of Leaves of Grass.

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I cannot sing. I do not make that declaration out of modesty. It’s true. I cannot sing, try as I may.

But in a recent dream, I was poised on stage for my singing debut on “America’s Got Talent.” The stage lights were warm, and as the judges called my name, I started humming Coldplay’s “Yellow”:

Look at the stars
Look how they shine for you

Instantly, I knew that Coldplay should be standing where I stood, not me. I stopped humming and told the judges so.

They stared at me under the lights. Then, one by one, they agreed.

I woke before anyone had sung a note. But in my waking, I recalled more lyrical words. They weren’t from Coldplay. They were from something I read long, long ago and far, far away:

I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument, while the song I came to sing remains unsung.

Somehow, as a high-schooler, I had discovered Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali, and from that point forward those lines from Song 13 were burned into my brain. It does not matter that I garbled the lines and omitted a word or two.

What matters is that the lines stayed with me and surfaced when I needed something to say—something that might stand in for what I did not then fully understand and, therefore, could not say fully—when I was writing a placement essay for college Honors English.

I’ve often wondered what I actually wrote between those bluebook covers sitting there in Old Main. I wish I could remember as vividly as I can still recall the minty smell of the green, oiled sawdust the janitor swept faithfully across the hardwood classroom floors, darkened and smoothed by the generations of footsteps before me.

I can see myself writing about dreams deferred in a coal-mining region where Christmas shopping never happened until Christmas Eve, when the miners were paid. Where hand-me-down clothes were talked up as “good as any” because better and best lived in catalogs. Where parents did without so that their children would have enough to make do. Where hope hung mid-air between paychecks. And where, on Sundays, it was lifted—however briefly—by the gospel notes of “In the Sweet By and By.”

I can see myself writing about the value of an education, as a way out of a region where talents—generation after generation—had been trapped beneath the surface of pride and poverty, unable to escape. And as a way up, for me—a first-generation college student—to live the good life I saw my teachers living, the life I saw others living who had gone away and not looked back.

I can see myself writing about my vocation—what I was meant to do with my life—with all the earnestness and idealism of a young man who believed in the power of words and ideas. I had dreamt of becoming an English professor since I was in the third grade, and there I was at the start of that journey—a freshman majoring in education at Alderson-Broaddus College.

I can see myself writing about finding my voice, about learning to trust my ideas and discovering whether I had anything worth saying that others might want to hear. I knew it would involve years of reading and study, exploring ideas, and imagining myself one day standing before a classroom, inviting students to do the same. But somewhere between having ideas and giving voice to them lay a distance I had not yet learned how to travel. I wanted to believe that my voice mattered, that my ideas mattered, and that somewhere along the way I would find the confidence to make them heard.

I can see myself writing about my social unease, about being the youngest of six children and growing up accustomed to my own company. I had spent countless hours playing alone, in a world where woods and gardens welcomed me without question. Nature had been my playground, my companion, my refuge. I had loved that solitude, never thinking of it as something from which I needed to escape. But college was another world altogether, one in which I would have to find my footing among strangers, make friends, and discover how to belong without the familiar safety net of home.

But I know what I didn’t write about.

I didn’t write about being gay.

I didn’t write about being the gay son of a father who mined coal and a mother who preached, growing up in a household where economic hardship and spiritual conviction were powerful forces shaping our lives. I didn’t write about the complicated business of being a young man like me in 1965, in the South, sitting in a college classroom at an institution with Baptist roots. I didn’t write about the uncertainty of finding my place in a world that had not made a place for me at its table.

I knew better than to write about any of that. Some things were best left unsaid, especially when saying them might close doors that had only just begun to open.

But silence did not mean that I was without questions. Far from it. I had questions enough to fill a dozen bluebooks, questions that seemed every bit as important to my education as anything I might learn from Chaucer or Shakespeare or Dickinson or Frost or Albee. How was I to live? How was I to love? How was I to become the person I was meant to be in a world that seemed determined to tell me who I could not be?

And beneath those questions lay something almost spiritual in its urgency. It was not unlike the medieval plea that I came to love from Piers Plowman: “Tell me, O Lady, whom men call holy, how may I save my soul?”

But I never feared for my soul. Not then. Not ever.

God is, and I am.

That settled it for me.

What remained unsettled was everything else. How to reconcile the life I knew was mine with the life the world expected me to live. How to find love without surrendering myself. How to claim a place at the table without pretending to be someone I was not. How to make my way in a world where the rules had been written by others and for others, long before I arrived.

Those were questions no college placement essay could answer. But they were questions I carried into every classroom, every friendship, every new experience. They were as much a part of my education as the books I read, the lectures I attended, and the examinations I passed.

I wish I could remember what I wrote in that bluebook. Perhaps I wrote something earnest and ambitious about the power of education. Perhaps I borrowed Tagore’s words to lend a little eloquence to thoughts I could not yet express with confidence. Perhaps I wrote about the future I imagined for myself, never once acknowledging the future I could scarcely imagine.

Whatever I wrote, it was only part of the story.

The rest would unfold over the years, not between bluebook covers but in the life I chose to live authentically, without asking permission, without allowing others to define who I was or what I might become.

I never felt compelled to make an announcement about being gay. I simply lived my life and let others make of me what they would. But a bluebook is a different matter. I had been asked to put my best self on those pages, and I put down only the self that was safe to show.

Perhaps I’ll never know what I wrote in Old Main. But I know what I would write today, with another bluebook open before me.

I would quote Tagore once again. But this time, I would answer him.

I would write that I spent a good many days stringing and unstringing my instrument. We all do. We come into this world without knowing who we are or where we belong, and we tune and retune for years before we trust ourselves with a single note.

I would write that the coal miner’s son became the English professor he had dreamed of becoming since the third grade. That he loved and is loved. That he took his place at the table without pretending to be anyone else.

And I would write the sentence I knew better than to write in 1965.

I am gay.

Three words. They would not have filled a line of that bluebook, let alone the pages. It took a lifetime to fill in the rest.

I still cannot sing. Ask anyone who has ever stood beside me. But that has never stopped me from trying to make a joyful noise. The song I came to sing has not gone unsung. I have been singing it all along, in classrooms, in essays, in a life lived without apology.

It took me all these years to write this essay. Not to discover who I am. I knew that before I ever opened that bluebook.

I am. And you are, too.