Chapter One: The House Among the Trees

I was born in the early seventies, somewhere in the Middle East. Where exactly doesn’t matter. What matters is the place: a quiet suburb full of trees, with only a few houses scattered between them, the kind of place where the loudest thing in the afternoon was the wind moving through the branches.

Ours was a loving house. My father would have done anything to keep his family happy and safe. My mother raised us with care and tenderness, and the house was always full of warmth and positivity. I had two older sisters. I was the youngest, and the only boy, and in a family like ours, in a time like that, that made me special. I knew I was loved. I never had to wonder about it.

My life was ordinary in the best way. If you had asked me then, I would have told you I was a happy child. And I was.

Until I was ten.

There was a man from our area who was very close to my family. Everyone trusted him. He was a great liar, and he lived a double life. To the outside world he was known as someone who treated women badly; he dated and slept with many of them at the same time, and people shook their heads at him. Nobody imagined there was anything more.

Secretly, he was raping me.

At first I was afraid of him. I wanted to tell someone. But who listens to a ten-year-old child in the early seventies, in a place like ours? I believed that if I spoke, nobody would believe me, and that I could even be killed for it. So I said nothing.

It went on for at least three years. Twice a week, sometimes more, and almost always on Sundays, when everyone else was in church. He bought me things I liked. Nice things. Gifts with an unspoken price: as long as I kept my mouth shut, they kept coming.

My family never suspected a thing. Why would they? They trusted him completely.

One day stands apart from all the others. It was the most horrible of them.

He poured something onto a handkerchief and pressed it over my face. I couldn’t breathe. Somehow I broke free and ran. I was so dizzy that I fell at least five times on the way. I made it to a friend’s house and stayed there until the world stopped spinning and I felt like myself again.

A few days later he apologized. He said it had been a bad idea. He had only wanted me to smell a new fragrance, and it seemed I hadn’t liked it.

I was so naive. I believed him.

He put me through hell for years. And then, at some point, something in me turned.

One day I stopped him. I turned the tables, and I did to him what he had been doing to me since the day he stole my innocence. For the first time, the power in that room was mine.

I think that was when I began to feel something changing inside me. I had always assumed I was straight, and now I was becoming something I didn’t understand and had no name for. We had no sex education. Nobody talked about these things, least of all about a man with a man. There was no one to explain anything to me, and no one I could ask.

In the next part of my life, I started taking control back. I stopped seeing him. When he invited me in, I said no. And I kept saying no.

Around fourteen, I met a girl and fell in love. We were deeply in love, and we stayed together for a few years. In all that time I had no unusual urges. I didn’t think about him, or about any man.

Then we broke up.

After her, I discovered that many of my friends were gay. Of course, none of us knew what “gay” even meant back then, or what was supposed to be right and what was wrong. We fooled around every now and then, and my feelings grew more and more mixed, but I never acted on them openly. I was too afraid.

Slowly I came to understand that what I was doing was considered wrong. So I did the only thing that seemed possible. I lived a double life: girls in the open, and the rest behind closed doors, only with friends who trusted each other completely and carried the same secret.

From one bruised heart to another,
Unbroken