This isn't just a coming out story.

It's a coming through story. Through silence. Through shame. Through every unspoken rule and whispered slur.

In The Truth, Cannon W. Stiffler bares it all-grief, grit, glitter, and grace. Told through a series of raw, poetic, and fiercely honest essays, this memoir captures the heartbreak and hope of growing up gay in a rural, conservative Appalachian town where the cost of being different often feels impossibly high.

Cannon writes for the kids who are still hiding under their own bedsheets, the ones who flinch when someone says faggot in the hallway, the ones who check every room before they dare to breathe a little bigger. He writes for the ones who have survived by folding themselves smaller and smaller until they almost disappeared.

This is not the version of queerness the world tries to package in rainbows once a year. It's the truth-the brutal, beautiful truth. The loneliness of the closet. The ache of digital love and ghosted promises. The invisible scars carved by shame. The complicated battles over body, beauty, and belonging. The myths and realities of pride. And, most of all, the small, fierce, daily acts of choosing to live when it would have been easier to disappear.

The Truth is a letter, a battle cry, and a love story to anyone who's ever asked, Am I allowed to exist like this? It's for the ones still asking. It's for the ones still unfolding. It's for the ones who survived when no one was looking.

The answer is yes.

The truth is: you always were.

And it's still unfolding.