I’m Brent Love, the author of Leap, a queer memoir about finding yourself, finding love, and eventually, finding your way home.

Have you ever been so different from the people around you that it terrified you?

I know that kind of fear. Before I came out, I carried fear like a heavy ghost. I carried it into my days and into my nights. I was terrified, and I wondered alone - If I come out, will I lose my family? Will I lose my friends? Will I have to leave home? Will I ever get to come back? Will I find a job? Will I find love? What will hurt? Where will I go?

And the hardest one, the one that no one talks about, was this deeper fear - If I come out, will I like who I am? Will I like the life I have now? Because there was no going back.

My name is Brent Love, and Leap is the story of my coming out. When I finally said the words out loud to my parents, my world cracked, as if suddenly the ground split between us. Then, three days later, I flew across the world for two years of Peace Corps service in Armenia.

I’ve carried around this story for so many years. I’ve known I wanted to share how those years felt, what it was like...

• To navigate my brand new queerness among Peace Corps volunteers from all over the US

• To fall in love with my first Armenian host family, learning their language and sharing food at their table

• To go to my first gay bar in the basement of an apartment building in Armenia’s capital

• To find out who I was away from all my fears but also away from all the people who’d ever loved me

I finally sat down and wrote this book for two reasons.

First, I’ve wanted to become an author since I could answer that question they ask you in elementary school - What do you want to be when you grow up? And in my six year old voice, I said, “I want to be a writer.”

But secondly, what finally pushed me to sit down and write Leap was this - I’ve lived all of my young life in the closet. I was terrified. It was queer stories that helped me survive.

Queer stories made me more brave, helped me believe I could be happy out of the closet, and that a life as my truest self could be worth living, could even be beautiful.

Leap is my chance to add to the world of queer stories that helped me survive and believe in the worth of my own queer journey.

And Leap is for you. It’s for you if you love a good story about an average person living through an extraordinary journey – a journey that crosses the planet, a journey that is filled with unexpected companions, new discoveries, and the longing for home. You’ll love it if you love:

• Memoirs about facing your greatest fears

• Queer stories

• Traveling vicariously to new places, like the cities, towns and villages of Armenia

• Stories of people who change everything about their lives to find out who they truly are

So, come sit at the table with me and my Armenian family in Teghenik. Dance with me at the gay bar in Yerevan. Road trip with me and my Armenian coworkers. Sing with me alone under a full moon.

Maybe you’ll find yourself along the way. Maybe we both will.