His Story by Donny Kaye

     My story is an historical accounting of my life experience in this realm. It starts at birth, and even before. It is the accumulation of events and experiences documenting this life.

     All of the stories of my "history" exist within me. All are memorable, each for their very own reasons. Many of the stories stir delight and goodness in my recollection of the experience. In my history is the remembrance of riding my bike the first time without the assistance of training wheels or someone running beside me steadying the teetering cycle. I re-collect the stories of making of new friends who have grown old with me in time, remaining as witnesses to a life that has unfolded in time. There are those friends whose appearance was brief in the experience called my life.

     Some of my history is more painful to recall or even want to remember. Those times when for whatever reason I was at dis-ease with myself. I have recollections of feeling different and consequently, not enough. What is intriguing to realize is that the events of my history are all interpreted by me. My interpretation colors the experience in a good, bad or neutral way.

     There have been those experiences when I have not acted from a higher place within. My uncertainty has resulted in actions that only untruth can cover. The time I damaged another's property intentionally; a reflection of unexpressed anger or emotions I couldn't understand much less directly express. A test I cheated on because I didn't hold confidence in my very own capacity. Actions I took out of fear that I wasn't good enough in my own right. Moments of sadness and a sense of disconnection. My history is riddled with actions where I acted from a sense of lack rather than abundance and confidence.

All of who I am is an expression of the learning in my life that have become my history. What are the stories that get told? Of more significance than the history that gets told are the stories that don't get told. What is realized is that only I get to choose the revelations of my history. No different from authors, publishers and political parties that are about a certain truth only achievable by withholding the truth, the whole truth that is.

     And so it is in this life; my history comes together with yours. Each believing in the history, at least to the extent that we choose to reveal. A new friend appears, the attraction found in the stories we tell--either ourselves or the other. The truth expressed and withheld.

     And so it is; my history comes together with “His Story”. And only history will tell the impact of the two, stories intertwined into one.

About the Author

Donny Kaye is a native born Denverite. He has lived his life posing as a hetero-sexual male, while always knowing that his sexual orientation was that of a gay male. In recent years he has confronted the pressures of society that forced him into deep denial regarding his sexuality and an experience of living somewhat of a disintegrated life. “I never forgot for a minute that I was what my childhood friends mocked, what I thought my parents would reject and what my loving God supposedly condemned to limitless suffering.”

Story Time at The Center has been essential to assisting him with not only telling the stories of his childhood, adolescence and adulthood but also to merely recall the stories of his past that were covered with lies and repressed in to the deepest corners of his memory. Within the past two years he has “come out” not only to himself but to his wife of four decades, his three children, their partners and countless extended family and friends. Donny is divorced and yet remains closely connected with his family. He lives in the Capitol Hill Community of Denver, in integrity with himself and in a way that has resulted in an experience of more fully realizing integration within his life experiences. He participates in many functions of the GLBTQ community.