Today’s Video Story was collected on the 50-state Story Tour. Check out the blog where you can follow us on our adventure. If you haven’t submitted a story yet to IFD, or if you want to submit another one, I’d love to read and publish it. Write one up and send it in.

I’m Jeremy Craig and I’m from Mayflower, Arkansas. I really just sort of grew up in a bubble not knowing gay people. And then when I came out in college I became a slut. And for me being gay was literally having sex with men. It meant nothing else. It really was just sort of like, I’m gay so I can have sex with as many men as possible.

And I met a lesbian and started partying at her house. And slept there too many times. And eventually she just made me start going to this club called Prism which is are GSA on campus. And it was sort of life changing because I had never been in a place with so many gay people who were just not attacking each other constantly. And it was affirming and positive and I’d never been that type of queer positive place. Where It was okay to be gay and you had another reason why you were queer.

I was immersed in this whole intellectual world that I never thought existed, and then we went to this march on the Capital in Little Rock, on this proposition called Act 1 which basically stopped anyone who was in a committed relationship with someone of the same sex or you were in a committed relationship that wasn’t marriage – then you could not adopt. You couldn’t foster kids. I really didn’t even know anything about Act 1, I was just like, okay, I’ll go to this march thing.

For me it was sort of like, I’m gay, I don’t want to get married, I don’t want to have kids, I don’t care about any of this. And then, I went and I saw people with their kids and I saw gay couples with their children. And we were on the steps and I was sitting and I was looking around, and I was sitting with my friend Nikki and we looked and I was like “God, I’m part of a family.” And it still brings me a little tear to my eye because I’m like, what? I’m part of a community, a family, and whether or not we all a different race, different creeds, were bonded by this one simple fact of all being queer. I was like, “Whoa!” It made me understand that we are a community. We’re family. And we take care of each other. And I should probably understand that I fit in to this community, somewhere, and that eventually I’m going to want a life and I should probably fight for what I believe in.