Throughout his school years, Jim continued to try to understand his feelings. "All of a sudden when I was in sixth, seventh grade, I'm, like, 'Uh-oh. Something's going on here,'" Jim says. "Because, you know, I'm not liking Mary and Sally."

It was at camp that Jim feared his secret might be revealed. After helping a friend take off his knapsack, the other campers starting making fun of him, even making homosexual slurs.

"So that night, when all the other kids are in bed and some of the older kids are out around the campfire … I'm laying in my pup tent with my buddy and I start hearing 'faggot' and 'homo' and [the names] get worse and worse," Jim says.

The stress took its toll, and Jim says he even had thoughts of suicide. "I thought I had something that nobody else had and then [when] you read that you have this perversion, this 'psychiatric disorder,' you're like, 'Damn it. I've got to do something about it,'" he says. "And you become more and more weak, vulnerable. I thought, 'How am I going to deal with this?' And you begin to think…"