Photo by Ryan Stanford
Hello, my name is Brody Kayman also known as @Rough_Ginger, on social media. The life I have lead has been quite unusual and if you asked me as a teenager to tell you where I thought I would be at my age, I promise you it would have never been anything like what my life is today.
I married just after I turned 21 to a woman 10 years older. I remained married for 13 years before admitting that I could no longer continue on with the marriage. This was after about a year of counseling to try and understand how I could fix what was broken within the marriage.
I have always had a strong desire for both men and women. My wife understood that before we married but I still felt dirty watching porn that wasn’t considered to be “normal”. There were times I can recall where I would be myself and something would slip out causing her to glare at me with such hate and angrily tell me “never to say it like that again”. I felt shame in my heart and a small piece of me died every time she did that. It came out sounding too “gay” for her as she would say.
I became very uneasy when I was feeling too happy or too relaxed because I was worried that I would say something in a certain way that would make her stare me down as if I was an enemy. Although she said that she understood my desires and accepted them, she showed me that those were empty words that were worth nothing more than a drop of rain in a hurricane.
I worked very hard to support my family and give them every opportunity that I never had when was growing up. I always tried to show them the love and compassion I rarely saw growing up.
I turned to food as a comfort and it became a huge focus for me as my coping mechanism. I soon reached about 220 lbs and could barely stand to see the person I saw in mirror everyday. I kept on doing what I was told was the “right” thing to do and buried myself in work. It never got any easier to look at myself in the mirror and I hated it every time.
Once I realized the unhappiness of what my life had become I worked up the courage to start my life over, it was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.
I reached a point where I could no longer stay on the east coast and sold everything that wasn’t stripped from me in the separation (which wasn’t much). I packed up my two door car and drove to California in 2 days to start my life over.
I have lived here in California for about 2.5 years and it too has been a challenge. It started out okay and then within a year I found myself homeless with not many willing to help. Individuals that said they loved and accepted me quickly had a change of heart and refused to have me around because I was “gay” and they didn’t want that around.
It’s so hard to imagine that in this day and age things like that still exist, sadly, I found out they do.