I spent my formative years, six to eleven I figure, in a very small town built on the side of a Sierra Nevada mountain. It was twenty miles West of Reno, NV, a few miles over the State line.

My sexual identity was born there, I used to climb the tallest pine trees and float with the wind at the top. We walked more than a mile every morning to Interstate 40, across two major railroad lines, just to catch our school bus to Truckee, fourteen miles a way.

And again, my grandparents played an amazing role in our life! Step dad Paul was a long haul trucker, out making the family survival money. Our grandparents lived just over the Nevada state line, in Reno.

They would come get us when they could. I have so many amazing memories of those times, barbecue beef sandwiches at the drive-in movie, driving through black town where they had no rights, having my grandmother pull me from a public swimming pool because a black kid stepped in.

I saw discrimination early in my life, and I saw it as inhuman and ugly. Now I'm the most non-discriminatory person I know.

I've had several black women in my life, my buddies who have had none, can only drool.

And some of my best male friends in life, have been black.