If they could see me now: the new season of High School Reunion features Daniel, who's out, proud, and up in the face of his Texas classmates

For his high school reunion, he makes his entrance in a cowboy hat, tank top, barely-there underwear, and so-sheer-why-bother-wearing-anything pants. Call it the Revenge of the Gay Nerd ensemble. And it's all being televised, as the WB's hit show High School Reunion kicks off its second season with formerly oppressed gay teen Daniel (no last names, please, this is reality TV) strutting 10 years' worth of weight training onto the screen, rendering his adolescent tormentors from Round Rock, Tex., speechless. "I wanted to disarm them a little," he says, in a considerable understatement. "I always had a bit of an edge in high school, and I wanted to preserve that and just mix it up a little. Why not?"

That sense of mischief, combined with a need to retroactively stand up to high school bullying and a plain old desire to be on TV--"Anyone that says they didn't do a reality show for selfish reasons, just to participate in a TV program, would be lying," he says--informed Daniel's decision to reunite with his classmates from Round Rock, a place where he lived out a life many gay high school students are all too well acquainted with.

Of coming out at age 15 in a suburban school of over 3,000 students, Daniel remembers, "[The consequences] ranged from interrogations, as though I was a specimen they'd never seen before, to people trying to run me over in their big-ass trucks, the kind with the four tires across the back."

One of those truck drivers, classmate T.J., a young man emblematic of all things traditionally heterosexual, Texan, and cowboy hat-wearing (and who was not made available by the WB to be interviewed for this article), was intentionally thrown into the same living space with Daniel for what was to be the duration of the show.

In the very first episode, however, T.J. is shown clearing out as soon as his roommate arrives on the scene wearing those peekaboo pants. Great TV but not a staged reaction: The two mixed like tornadoes and trailer parks. Yet according to Daniel, their relationship "evolved dramatically," reaching a sort of detente.

"My first reaction [to T.J.'s openly antigay attitude] was gut revulsion," explains Daniel. "I wanted to punch him in the face. I was that disgusted by him. But over the course of our interaction, he showed me by his words and actions that I was [demonstrating] the same kind of closed-minded behavior that I was reviling him for doing to me. He opened up in a way that I never expected. I was very humbled by that. I can't tell you that I'd care to be friends with him, but I think we came to an understanding."

As for his fellow cast members, many of whom he never socialized with in high school, Daniel--currently single and working in academic information systems administration at a Boston teaching hospital--counts a few as new friends.

"I expected there to be a lot of confrontation involving me," he says. "Those expectations were not met in the way I thought they would be. It surprised and humbled me. It gave me a reality check and made me remember to give them a chance, that they were probably a lot more sophisticated than I gave them credit for being."

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