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“I invited him to my place for dinner,” Brian begins. The story of the couple’s meeting is, as Ferd likes to say, the oldest story in the world: “boy meets boy at the gym.” The couple vividly recall the details of their first date, one Friday in June of 1993. Coming out wasn’t a big deal then, in Holland.” “I came out when I was 22 or 23, but I had known that I was gay for a long time before that. “I was accepted to Boston University’s doctoral program in Classical Studies I instantly fell in love with the United States.”įerd’s coming out process was markedly different than Brian’s. After college in Utrecht and Amsterdam, Ferd decided to travel across the Atlantic. Ferd’s father worked in the military and, later, in human resources his mother was an elementary school teacher. It was only around the time he met his future husband, Ferd, that Brian started coming out to friends and family.įerd van Gameren was born in the Netherlands, the second of five children. Even when he told his family of his HIV status, Brian still didn’t come out as gay. Sadly, it turned out the young man had died from AIDS only two years after their Bahamas encounter.ĪIDS would take a significant role in Brian’s life, as he continued to explore his sexuality in secret for the next few years, engaging in risky behaviour that led to him becoming HIV-positive in 1990. “Throughout the years, I would occasionally try to locate him on social media but was never able to find him.” Last year, on a whim, Brian called the Norwegian Embassy, and as luck would have it, someone actually remembered him. “One night, a guy from Norway working at the embassy befriended my brother and me during a visit to a local club.” Brian shared his first kiss with the Norwegian, but quickly panicked, and retreated from the situation. “I knew I was drawn to them in a way that was unusual, but I didn’t put much thought into why I wanted to be with them so much, and the relationships were never anything other than platonic.” It was in his freshman year at college, during a trip with his family to the Bahamas, that he realized what those feelings meant. Looking back on high school, Brian recognizes that feelings he had for a few of his guy friends were actually crushes. His parents nurtured in him a sense of independence and a spirit for adventure he attended overnight camps from an early age, spent the summer between high school and college with an exchange family in Japan, and spent part of his junior year experiencing a ‘Semester-at-Sea’ – in Brian’s own words: “an incredible 100-day experiential learning journey with more than a dozen visits to countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe.” He remembers his childhood as an idyllic time, surrounded by extended family, good friends, and small-town camaraderie.
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Left to right Brian holding Ella, Levi and Ferd holding Sadieīrian Rosenberg, of Boston, Massachusetts, is a father, husband, HIV-survivor, and co-founder of Gays With Kids, a “first-of-its-kind website that helps gay dads navigate fatherhood − from creating their families to raising them.”īrian was the middle child of a close-knit family from a suburb north of Boston.