I was in tenth grade and dating the hottest girl in my Catholic school, when I received a chain email from [email protected]. The end of it read:
FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO 69 PEOPLE by tomorrow MORNING…or you will suffer the CoNsEQuEnCeS. If you fail to do so, you will be cursed with..HOMOSEXUALITY!!!!!1!
I marked it as Spam and went back to trading softcore instant messages with Oahn, my girlfriend. We’d done a lot of Biblically-approved stuff already: holding hands at school lunch, making out behind the rectory after Sunday mass, shopping in tandem at the Sarasota Mall, and—of course—trading our steamy IM’s. I messaged Oanh she’d be in my prayers that night and signed off. I didn’t give the chain letter a second thought.
The next morning, I woke up remembering the time I’d told Oahn that she makes me harder than the last Temptation of Christ…when I noticed something was off. I wasn’t erect at all. I couldn’t turn myself on thinking about Oanh’s auburn locks from my vantage point behind her in Geometry II. All I could think about was our Math teacher Mr. Timko’s manly back as he drew the golden ratio on the board. How proportional his shoulder-to-waist ratio was. How I’d want nothing more than to one day touch other butts as taut as Timko’s…
I froze and looked down at my hardening penis, tenting like the vertical beam of a crucifix at the thought of a…man? What in the Heck was going on!
Let me be clear, I’d never had problems with gay people! I’d even heard Jesus was probably gay. Or so I’d read on the dark web. But, I could not believe that I’d been turned gay overnight because of a failure to forward email! What kind of queer internet proxy was going on?! And how had it gotten past my heterosexual firewall?
Every day, the gayness increased. When the lunch lady asked if I wanted veggies or meat, I snapped my fingers once to the right, once to the left, and clicked my tongue loud enough to silence the whole gymnasium, before hissing, “Meat!”
I began breaking dress code at Sunday mass—cropping my tops, bedazzling my New Balances, and sporting a jock strap at all times underneath my pressed Khakis. I looked—and felt—amazing. I started listing my A/S/L in AOL chat rooms as “17, Male, and Liv-ing!”
I broke up with Oahn at Junior Prom the second the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” dropped—I had no choice. I broke off slow-dancing six-inches apart from her to Vogue the sign of the cross while all my classmates cheered me on and awarded me “Dancer Of The Year.”
I guess the moral is—being turned gay has been the greatest tech hex to ever befall me! But, also a warning—unless you want such a sudden and FABULOUS shock to your system, forward those chain letters! I learned the gay way that their curses really do come true.
