Through Facebook, a 90-year-old man has declared himself gay

A Facebook post by a 90-year-old man has gone viral, and not precisely because a person of his age is making use of the social network.

Through Facebook, a 90-year-old man has declared himself gay

This is the American Kenneth Felts, who everyone is talking about after he revealed to the world that he is gay: “I’m gay, I’m out and I’m free,” reads the message.

The old man confessed how he felt about a secret he “had planned to take to the grave”. However, the confinement made him change his mind, as he started writing his memoirs and felt he could not finish them without talking about the sexual orientation he discovered at the age of 12.

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By then he was a child living through World War II and growing up in a family that strictly followed religious dictates.

“If you confessed your homosexuality, you put everything on the line-your life, your job, all your friendships; and you were automatically classified as a pervert,” Felts recounted in an interview on the Today show.

In the public eye, he lived as a heterosexual man. He met a woman in his church youth group. They married and had a daughter, but divorced in 1980. Even then he did not dare to come out of the closet because he was afraid of losing custody of his daughter.

However, in the late 1950s, he moved to Long Beach, California, to work for a retail credit company. And it was there that she met Phillip Jones, with whom she fell in love. For more than a year, they lived as a happy, if secret, gay couple.

“When I lived with Phillip in California, homosexuality itself was illegal. It was a felony, we couldn’t hold hands or anything like that. He would be arrested for exhibiting such behavior. Once he goes to court, his information spreads all over town and he loses his friends, his family,” said Felts

California’s sodomy law was repealed in 1975.

Eventually, the burden of being gay in a society where it was considered a crime became too much for Felts, and he decided to break up with Jones, whom he never saw again.

Prior to revealing his sexual preference on Facebook, Felts spoke to his daughter, 48, and via email told her that his one true love was Phillip Jones, a man.