Staying was not an option.

If you grow up in a small town in the south, being gay isn’t an option. It’s considered a choice. And a bad one. Like, you’re going to hell. So, staying, after you come out, is not an option. Not a safe one anyway.

I grew up in the heart of the Bible Belt. Cleveland, Tennessee. Population 42,000. We were raised Church of God, and the headquarters were actually in our hometown.

Growing up, church was not a part of my life, it was my life. Prayers before every meal. Church every Sunday and Wednesday. My dad was on the Church Council. I was part of the Children’s Ministry Youth Leaders. If there was a church event, I was at it.

And my parents were strict about it.

My friends could wear shorts to church. We had to wear slacks. Very, very, traditional family. And very tight-knit—we did everything together. And I loved it. I had a very loving, caring family, and a very sheltered childhood.

Our family was well known, too. My parents both played basketball all the way through to college. My mom was very good. She was inducted into a Hall of Fame right before she passed.

For me, that made everything even harder when I was trying to figure out who I was. I felt like everybody in the whole town was watching me at all times. And I always felt like I was different and I didn’t know why.

But I knew I couldn’t be gay. That wasn’t an option. I was told by the church and the town and friends—there was just so much noise from everyone—you can’t be gay. That’s a sin. There were a couple of guys that were out in town and they had this major spotlight on them. They were the black sheep. You stay away from them.

So I tried to become a version of myself that my parents wanted and that version made me uncomfortable.

I tried dating every beautiful girl in town, trying to feel a spark, trying to understand what everyone else was feeling. But they just felt like friends. They were close. They were kind. They were meaningful. But there was never anything magnetic.

I would lay in bed at night and pray that I could just like girls, that the thoughts I was having would go away. That’s just evil thoughts. The devil playing tricks in my head. Because that’s what I was taught. I tried with every cell in my body to be who my parents wanted me to be because I didn’t want to disappoint them. My goal was never to hurt anyone.

So, I kept trying. And hoping. Thinking maybe if I found the right one, something would click. Well, it never did.

Years went by before I finally allowed myself to consider the possibility that I might be what I was told I couldn’t be—and the weight of that was suffocating. Because admitting that I was gay meant disappointing every person in my life. Or at least that’s how it felt.

So, I struggled. There was so much noise in my head.

I had social anxiety. I didn’t want to hang out with people. I was a bit depressed. All I wanted to do was go to the barn to work and ride and go back home. The horses were the one true love that I had available in my life at that time. The barn was my escape.

Then, one day, it just like finally clicked: I can’t keep living this way. I can’t keep just going through the motions. There was nothing broken about me, nothing to fix. Just the truth of who I was, buried under deep fear.

That was the start of a long journey of coming out.

I knew that the world that I was in wouldn’t accept my sexuality, so I kept it hidden, even while I began to talk to others in the LGBTQ community.

I was 16 when I started dating my first boyfriend. He was in the Quarter Horse industry, and I kept the relationship a secret for over a year.

Because I was afraid. Afraid of what my family would think, and also for my safety. I mean, there are still people that will kill you for being gay in America—the amount of hate crimes that happened in the South during those times, it was unbelievable.

So we hid it. When he came visit, we kept distance from each other. You had to be careful the way you look at each other. You couldn’t hold hands or anything like that.

I came out to a few girlfriends around that time and we came up with this goal of writing a letter to my parents. But in the end, they found out by accident. We had an emergency at the farm with a horse that got hurt. I left my phone in the kitchen and they saw text messages from my boyfriend.

It was probably one of the hardest days of my life. I felt like the air had been sucked out of my lungs. I could see the disappointment in my family. I could feel the weight of the church’s judgment without even stepping inside.

At the same time, that day was such a relief because in the same moment of heartbreak, in all the fear, there was a release. Like a thousand pounds of pressure lifted off my back. And that was the first time that I felt like I wasn’t hiding anymore.

I wasn’t accepted for who I was, but at that point it was out.

And then everything started to shift. Quickly.

We had church the next day—it was being announced that my sister was the new children’s pastor—so that’s when the pastors were made aware. I was suddenly the conversation of the whole town.

I began receiving a lot of emails and calls and letters. I’m talking, like, four-to-five-page letters from people that felt they needed to try to “save me.” I was taken up to the front of the church and they laid hands on me. They were going to rebuke the gay out of me. They tried to pray it out of me. They all wanted me to go to counseling, to talk to the pastor weekly, go see a doctor, get my hormones tested—all these things to try to search for reasons  why I am who I am. Because they thought there was a chance of changing me.

And I know everything that was done, especially by my family, was out of love. What they thought was right. But the choice to stay there was no choice at all.

To be who I was, authentically, I had disappointed my family, my friends, the church, and the town that raised me. But I finally stopped disappointing myself.

****

I believe some people are sent to you for a reason during hard times. Heather Servies, my boss, was one of those people. She showed up.

In small town Tennessee you just never knew how someone was going to react to the news. Some of the people I thought would react the most were the most supportive. And some of people I thought would react the least were the worst. Actually, some of the non-religious people in my life were harder on me than some of the religious ones.

But I had a feeling Heather would be okay with it. I was almost ashamed to even tell her, but she pretty immediately offered me a place to stay.

She was like, ‘I don’t know how this is gonna go for you with the small town mindset and religion and stuff. If you need me to rescue you, I’ll come with my German Shepherd and we’ll bring you back to my house.’

Heather and I worked for a private family in the reining horse industry. She was going through some personal stuff at the same time, so we were there for each other. I helped her with her newborn son, and rode her stallion, Twister, since she had just had the baby. She didn’t charge me a dollar for living with her or groceries and stuff.

They were like my little family when I felt like I had just lost mine.

That year at Quarter Horse Congress, Heather dedicated her freestyle reining song—”Same Love” by Macklemore—and performance to me. And she did it in such a subtle, professional way that no one could be upset about it. Not even my own family. She wore this beautiful white wedding dress. It was one of the most beautiful, life-changing experiences of my life.

Like, she brought tears to my eyes.

That’s when I started to realize that the horse world was becoming my family. They didn’t judge me. And obviously, the horses don’t care who you go home with at night.

Ryan May and Heather Servies.

I pretty quickly came to the realization that I needed to move to a bigger city, somewhere that’s more accepting, and begin my life. I went to work for Matt Martin at a hunter jumper barn in Atlanta.

At 18, going from this sheltered life in Tennessee with my family to moving away alone was a rude awakening. I was suddenly on my own. But for the first time, I felt like I could finally breathe. I had the space to figure out who I was. There’s a whole gay area in Atlanta and a very supportive, open-minded community. I could be with my boyfriend, not hiding it. Matt treated me like one of his family.

And I never looked back. I never thought about not being who I was again.

****

I met Nick Haness at the Harrisburg Horse Show. I was 19. He was competing and he came up and talked to me. We became friends.

For a few years, that’s really all it was. We would talk on the phone periodically, keep in touch on social media. He lived in California. I was in Atlanta and in Florida some in the winter. So he was quite far away. In my head, it wasn’t a real option at the moment.

And then one day, there was this spark.

He was flying into Wellington and I picked him up from the airport and introduced him to my birds. I’m a big bird lover. I’ve rescued birds since I was 10 years old. It’s something my mom and I shared. So I took him to see the birds and we went to dinner and that’s where it all started. After that day, we hung out basically every day he was in town.

Nick and I have been together for eight years. I feel extremely blessed and grateful to have the life we do with all of our animals and our farm and our business. It’s definitely something I don’t take for granted.

And we’ve seen each other through a lot of difficult times. Like when my mom was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. It was such a hard time in my life because I felt like I lost her once while coming out, and then I felt like I was losing her again. So, I made it my goal to be there for her.

My mom and I never talked about what had happened. There wasn’t a big conversation or anything. But I think in her own way, she came around. She was in a coma for a while. When she woke up, she was looking for me and told everyone in the room to just love me from now on, and not be mean anymore about anything. That was maybe a week or two before she passed.

I don’t think I’ll ever get over losing my mom. Especially the way I lost her and all the challenges we had prior to her getting sick—there were so many layers to it.

I was 22 when she died. I felt like a child. Up until that point, I had never even witnessed cancer in my life. And then it was my mom and then my grandmother and then grandfather and then one of my best friends—I lost all of them within a really short time.

And through it all, Nick was such a big support. He never hesitated. He’d encourage me to be with my mom. He’d book a flight for me. He couldn’t be there with me—it was not the right timing. It would have just caused too much of an uproar. But he supported me from the sideline.

And he flew in the night of my mom’s funeral, because it was my birthday.

Everything started to fall into place with my family after that. My dad really worked hard to understand and to accept and to be there for me. But it still took some time. Losing my mom was really hard on him. They’d been together since elementary school.

He eventually remarried and his new wife played a big part in healing our family. One day in the fall about five years ago, he called and said, ‘I don’t know why I didn’t invite you guys to Christmas. I don’t know why I didn’t invite you guys to Thanksgiving. I don’t why we needed to miss this part of our life together.’ And he immediately invited Nick and I to come to Tennessee for the holidays.

That was the phone call I had been waiting on for years. The one where we could just all come back together as a family because, you know, life’s too short.

We ended up planning a trip for my birthday that year. Nick meeting my dad for the first time was the craziest experience. Here I am, sitting in the house where everything went down, but now with my partner and my dad in the same room—and we are all just hanging out.

And my dad was excited to meet Nick! The first thing he did when we walked in the house was introduce himself and ask Nick if he knew how to shoot guns.

Nick was like, “I’m from Orange County, we don’t shoot guns.”

And my dad said, “Well, let me take you out back and I’m going to teach you how to shoot guns.”

Nick was probably extremely nervous, thinking that would be it for him. But they had a really good time. My dad was smiling ear to ear showing him what to do. It was a bonding moment.

When Nick threw a big surprise 30th birthday party for me in November, he flew my dad out. It was a huge deal. My dad doesn’t fly, like, ever. He’s only gotten on a plane a couple of times in his life. So when I walked in, and there’s hundreds of people, and all I could see was my dad—it was a very emotional moment.

****

Most people probably would be atheist after what I went through, but I’m still a believer. I still pray. I still go to church.

I’ll say, at this point, I really struggle with different denominations. I think it becomes more about the rules and specific things that we create as humans than the real purpose of going to church. For me, it’s about your personal relationship. I think every person should be welcome regardless of how you dress, skin color, sexuality. We’re all human. We all make mistakes. We all sin.

But my upbringing is also why I never chose to be angry my family or my friends. I never got ugly with anyone or retaliated. I always chose to stay positive; stay kind.

I was disappointed by their reaction when I came out, but coming from the same small town and growing up the same way as they did, I understood where they were coming from—whether it was right or wrong. Because I struggled with it so much too.

And I think that really helped me through my journey.

I just chose to move on. It’s such a small part of who I am as a person. There’s so much more to me than my sexuality, you know? And once I realized that, I was able to begin to heal within myself, and eventually, my family was able to heal too. With time and love and kindness they came around.

Ryan May with his dad, step mom and partner, Nick Haness. Photo courtesy of Ryan May

I think we owe it to the younger generations to be who we are. That’s why I’ve always felt the need to share my story. Even if you feel like your world’s ending and you can’t be who you are, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. There are a lot of resources out there and help. It’s a little bit of a scary world we live in at times as far as being in the LGBTQ community. There’s still a lot of people stuck in the past. It’s 2025 and people are still dying because of who they love. For something they can’t control.

What we can control is how we respond. Ultimately, we’re not here to judge each other. That’s not our job. We’re called to love one another.

I think it’s time that we all choose love. We always have that option.