Gay Shame Revisited: How Traveling to East Africa Sent Me Back Into the Closet

Here is my first piece for Nerve.com. Subject: the biggest surprise on my recent trip to Tanzania.

I was anticipating the unexpected. I was fully prepared for some twists in the roads and bumps in the nights ahead (preferably unrelated to nocturnal lions!). You have to be psyched for anything when you're spending 10 days truck-trekking from Dar es Salaam on Tanzania's Indian Ocean coast up north through Lushoto and Arusha to the Serengeti and Ngorongoro region, then further onward and upward to Nairobi, Kenya's capital city. It's a long, rocky road, though not one less traveled, and in case you momentarily lose your open mind or misplace it wherever you stuffed your malaria pills, any good tour company will keep reminding you until you're expecting the unexpected in your sleep. (Click here to read the rest of the story.)