Colton's acceptance of his gay identity

Colton's acceptance of his gay identity is a hard-won shift from seeing his sexuality as a sin that must be erased to recognizing it as part of the person he can choose to embrace. The change does not undo the violence of his religious upbringing or the lasting fear left by conversion camp; instead, it begins when he can say what he is, survives in the support of people who make room for him, and deepens as he stops apologizing for having been born himself.

Identity and Early Conflict

As an adolescent, Colton first experiences attraction through his attention to Ronnie Baker, a track runner he had once mocked alongside his friends. By freshman year, Colton notices Ronnie’s tall, fit body and can no longer reduce him to the boy with glasses and braces. His desire and identification arrive together: he wants to be like Ronnie, and he wants Ronnie. That convergence unsettles the distinctions Colton has relied on to imagine himself as an acceptable boy.

The realization comes in private, at night, and is followed by shame rather than relief. Colton cries after imagining Ronnie in the gym showers, then prays for God to take his feelings away. His fear of being gay joins an existing dread of marriage and family life: he worries about becoming like his father, whose way of looking at Colton’s mother represents a fate he does not want. In Colton’s religious understanding, same-sex desire is not merely an unwanted feeling but a threat to his soul and future. He cannot reconcile what he wants with the life he has been taught he must lead, and concludes that he cannot be gay.

His attempt to hide his sexuality takes a concrete form on his sixteenth birthday. Colton steals a copy of Men’s Health from a convenience-store trash can and conceals it inside a torn Sports Illustrated cover. The disguise reflects the terms under which he can acknowledge desire: he can risk punishment for lust, but fears the more devastating judgment that would follow if his attraction to men were discovered. His father finds out, and Colton is sent away.

Conversion Camp and Naming Himself

The camp is presented to Colton as a place for people like him, a chance at salvation for those condemned as queer and supposedly unable to resist temptation. Its Christian framing intensifies rather than resolves his shame. Father Benson is Catholic, while Colton comes from a Mormon family, but the boys at the camp share the fear that they are headed for Outer Darkness. The institutional setting turns private self-rejection into a program of attempted correction.

Colton eventually runs away. He later explains that the camp was trying to make him not gay, that the experience hurt more and more, and that he feared Father Benson might kill him. After living on the streets, he is arrested for vagrancy and sent to Ted House. The escape is a decisive act of self-preservation, but it does not immediately give him confidence or a sense of safety. He continues to have night terrors and remains wary of help, having learned that people who claim to act for God may bring agony and torment. Even after reaching a more supportive environment, he fears that Ted House will be no different.

The first clear movement toward naming his identity comes during a conversation with Amit. Amit describes himself as bisexual, explains that love is not about a partner’s gender for him, and speaks about being closeted and fearing rejection from his family. His openness gives Colton a way to hear queer identity spoken without contempt. Colton tells Amit that he is Mormon, then immediately doubts whether that still describes him: he thinks his family may no longer want him, admits he does not know what he is, and says that things became ugly after his parents discovered he was different. His account is halting, but he chooses to continue when Amit asks whether he wants to tell what happened.

Later, when he is being questioned about his denied financial aid, Colton gives Marcel a more direct account. His parents did not lose custody through the child-welfare system; they sent him to a conversion camp after finding out he was gay. Marcel understands what such camps are and does not demand further details. Colton then says he ran because he was not getting better, was increasingly hurt and afraid, and did not want to die. The disclosure connects his sexuality, his family’s decision, his flight, and his time on the streets without making his identity itself the cause of the abuse.

Belonging, Support, and Everyday Self-Acceptance

Acceptance grows in settings where Colton is allowed to be more than the person others tried to correct. At Ted House, James tells him that prayer may help if Colton finds it helpful, but that God would not turn away a child for being born as he was. James’s words do not require Colton to recover his former faith or to treat prayer as an obligation. They make room for his uncertainty while challenging the condemnation he has internalized.

The support around him is practical as well as emotional. Colton worries about dogs that have been on the street and are half-starved; Sage tells him that Will has already fed them chicken and rice and will donate to foster families so the animals will not go hungry, neglected, or unloved. The exchange sits alongside Colton’s recognition that his past is not a secret he must keep hidden from the people close to him. He can be fragile when he needs to be, and he can continue becoming a person on his own terms. He has lost both his faith and his family, but in the circle that accepts him he begins to find himself.

Ruby’s bar offers a different, limited kind of breathing space. Colton goes there to feel like someone other than the good Mormon boy he was supposed to be. Ruby knows why he comes and lets him sit in that imagined version of a life in which he is not ruled by terror of sin, although she will not let him drink. The bar does not erase his shame: he still thinks in terms of having crossed a line by being touched by men, and he still wishes for the courage to live openly. But it gives him somewhere to test the boundaries of the identity he has been taught to fear. He chooses a Shirley Temple rather than alcohol, explicitly not wanting to become like his father by using drink to forget; what he wants is to stop being afraid.

Material Pressures and Ongoing Vulnerability

Colton’s acceptance develops under conditions that make self-determination difficult. His foster placement is temporary, and turning eighteen while graduating from high school means he must leave Ted House. Sage promises that he will not be abandoned with only a backpack, and the staff’s family-like care offers genuine support, but Colton still struggles to believe he belongs. He has spent less time in foster care than many young people he knows, yet the approaching age-out deadline makes the limits of that belonging unmistakable. James explains that the caseworker needs to see progress before Colton leaves, and that resources remain available but must be worked for. Colton’s ADHD, difficulty focusing, irritability, and confusion further complicate the expectation that he prove he can manage independently.

Education brings another institutional barrier. Colton’s veterinary-school financial aid is denied because his parents have not legally lost custody, so the aid system treats their income as relevant even though he has been in foster care. The denial arrives while he is already managing the practical strain of low wages. A leak then becomes a flood: he saves his laptop, phone, file folder, and backpack, but little else, relying on the spare dry clothes he has kept from his time on the streets. The sequence links his vulnerability not just to his past but to present systems and circumstances that limit what he can afford and where he can live.

A community-college route offers lower tuition, but not an easy solution. The quoted price is $3,200 for full-time study, with a $250 deposit and three monthly payments of just under $1,000. Those amounts are far beyond what Colton can readily access. His difficulties are therefore not evidence that he lacks ambition or has failed to accept himself; economic scarcity and administrative rules narrow the choices available to him even as he tries to plan a future.

Relationships and Continuing Change

The relationship with Marcel brings Colton’s old fears into an intimate present. When Marcel worries that telling his family about the relationship will be another thing he has to manage, Colton interprets the hesitation through his own insecurity. He describes himself as hyper and nervous, about twelve years younger, and a café worker. Marcel answers by affirming those very qualities, including Colton’s love of stray dogs and his habit of folding his socks. The exchange does not turn acceptance into a completed transformation: Colton is still unsure enough to cry and embarrassed by how often he has cried that day. But Marcel’s response locates desire and affection in Colton as he actually is, rather than in a version of him made acceptable by hiding his sexuality or changing his personality.

Colton’s trajectory is consequently neither a simple return to religion nor a sudden release from shame. At the bar, he longs for confidence he has been promised will come someday; at Ted House, he fears that the care there will prove temporary; with Amit and Marcel, he begins to speak more freely. The movement is uneven, shaped by the difference between being told that he is wrong and being treated as someone whose presence is wanted. His decisive change is captured in his recognition that he did not choose how he was born, but he can embrace himself. By the time Marcel reassures him that he is wanted exactly as he is, acceptance has become less an abstract answer to the question of identity than a daily practice of speaking, surviving, and allowing himself to be known.