*Side note: if you want the full emotional atmosphere of this story, put on the Adagio from Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 while reading.
There is a coming out story from my youth that, looking back now, I can finally laugh about. At the time, though, I was absolutely devastated. I genuinely thought my life was over.
This happened around my first year of college, which is important context. When you’re that age, and especially when you’ve only recently come out, every emotion feels life-altering. Every crush feels enormous. Every interaction feels loaded with meaning. And every possible humiliation feels survivable only in theory.
At the time, I was part of the BGLFA (the Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Student Alliance) group on campus, trying to settle into this new version of myself that was somehow both more honest and infinitely more awkward. I had only come out to people in the group and a few close friends, so I still lived with this constant fear that everyone else was going to find out before I was ready to tell them myself.
There was a guy in a few of my classes named Charlie, and I was completely smitten with him. Honestly, the reasons were not complicated. He was really cute, he was a musician, and every time I was around him my heart started racing. I’d freeze up, lock up, and suddenly forget how to act like a normal human being. It was pure puppy love.
I remember lying on my bed at night listening to Rachmaninoff and his hugely emotional, romantic symphonies while daydreaming about Charlie like I was starring in my own dramatic coming-of-age movie. In my head, there were meaningful glances, emotional conversations, and a sweeping orchestral soundtrack to our inevitable love story.
In reality, I could barely speak around him. At that point in my life, though, just daydreaming was enough.
Until one night, I called my friend John and started telling him all about Charlie and how completely smitten I was. John worked with Charlie, which immediately made him feel uniquely qualified to involve himself in the situation.
Then suddenly, John had an idea.
“I know,” he said. “We’ll call him. You stay on the line and I’ll talk to him while you listen.”
At the time, this somehow sounded reasonable to me. So I said okay.
John put me on hold and called Charlie. A minute later he clicked back over and said, “He’s not answering.”
Fine. No problem. Mild disappointment. Emotional devastation postponed.
Then John said he was going to try one more time. He clicked over to Charlie again, then came back and said, “Oh, I just got his answering machine.”
And then we kept talking.
This is the part where the story becomes either deeply funny or mildly sociopathic depending on your perspective. As we kept talking, John started making increasingly vulgar jokes about why I liked Charlie.
“You just like him for sex,” he said. Then he started throwing out vulgar things he thought I wanted to do to Charlie, trying to shock me into playing along.
He started trying to bait me into saying something terrible too. “Oh, come on,” he kept pressing. “You know you do. Just say it. Just say it.”
Meanwhile, I was panicking and insisting, “No, no, I really like him!”
Which I did.
That was the truly embarrassing part. This wasn’t some casual, raunchy joke to me; I genuinely had this huge, innocent crush on him. My brain was over here scoring imaginary romantic scenes with Rachmaninoff while John was trying to turn the whole thing into a late-night prank call.
Then suddenly, I heard it.
A beep.
Not just any beep.
An answering machine beep.
The kind of beep that instantly makes your stomach drop.
Because what I hadn’t realized was what John had actually done. He hadn’t just checked the machine and come back to me. He had used three-way calling to bridge us all together. He had intentionally kept us connected to the machine while he taunted me, meaning our entire conversation was being fed directly into the answering machine tape in Charlie’s dorm room.
The crush. The jokes. My horrified denials. All of it.
John later admitted he knew exactly what he was doing. Apparently, psychological warfare was his preferred hobby in college. Needless to say, that friendship didn’t survive the semester.
At the time, I thought my life was over.
And it wasn’t just embarrassment.
I hadn’t come out to many people in the music department yet, and I became absolutely horrified imagining Charlie playing the tape for other people. In my head, every possible worst-case scenario started unfolding. I imagined his friends listening to it, laughing, and passing the story around campus.
I couldn’t eat. I could barely think straight. For a couple of days, I lived in this state of complete panic before finally deciding I had to call Charlie myself and apologize.
Eventually, I dialed his number. He answered, and I immediately hung up, my heart beating so fast I thought I might actually pass out. I sat there on my bed for ten minutes trying to scrape together what little dignity I had left before forcing myself to call him back.
This time I managed to speak.
“Hey, this is Jerry,” I said. “I just wanted to apologize for that message. John did that.”
And to his credit, Charlie was actually really kind about it. He told me it was okay. No problem.
Then he added, as gently as possible, “But I’m not gay.”
And I remember saying something incredibly smooth and sophisticated like, “Yeah, I know.”
Which, to be fair, I did know. But that had never really stopped my brain before.
We ended the conversation politely. Afterward, underneath the lingering anger at John, there was this strange, sad relief.
Relief because Charlie had been so decent about it. He didn’t mock me or make me feel disgusting or broken. In a weird way, that mattered more to me than I realized at the time.
But there was sadness too, because my first real college crush was over before it had even started.
When you’re first figuring yourself out, a crush is never just a crush. It feels like a massive risk. Like confirmation. Like the possibility of finally being seen by someone.
I was convinced this answering machine disaster was going to follow me forever, but none of my worst-case scenarios ever happened. Charlie never spread the story around, as far as I know. Nobody mocked me. Most people probably never even knew about it while I was still replaying the tape in my head like it was the end of the world.
Looking back now, I think that’s a huge part of what growing up is: realizing that some of the moments that made you feel the most exposed and humiliated were often much bigger inside your own mind than they ever were to anyone else.
Still, at the time, I felt completely raw. Young, dumb, vulnerable, hopelessly romantic, and absolutely unequipped for covert answering machine warfare.
Which, honestly, is probably why the story finally makes me laugh today.
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