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it was not easy getting close to his father, he and his mother had a strong bond and loving relationship; and because of their age difference, his brother watched out for him and took care of him when his father couldn’t.
Jeff got decent grades in grammar school and had a number of good friends to play with in the afternoons. He liked to spend his time creating and building things. “I wasn’t into sports, or fast cars or such.” In fact, life for Jeff couldn’t be better, until…
His brother left for college and his parents starting arguing all the time. Finally, when he was eleven, they divorced, and he and his mother moved away to start over again. Jeff characterizes the next six years as “a really dark period of my life.”
It was also time for puberty, and Jeff found himself attracted to boys, not girls. It made it even worse to be in a new city with new people and none of the old friends he had come to count on. He felt like an outcast. “I didn’t have very many people I could hang out with.”
It soon became tough with his mother as well. “It was not a pretty time in our lives. My mother was recently divorced, and I was discovering my own sexuality. We fought like cats and dogs.”
By the time Jeff was fourteen, he had a job as a busboy in a local restaurant in the evenings, and started visiting the gay bars when he got off work. As his grades began to slip at school, the teachers and advisors were very sympathetic; after all, they rationalized, he had to work at night to help his mother make ends meet. The truth was that Jeff would go to school at eight in the morning, go to work at six in the evening, go to the

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