When Bach was only two or three years old, his mother found him “announcing” the game to the knob that opened one of the casement windows in the house. He spent hours playing video games and narrating the action, with his sister as a test viewer. “Alyssa, do you see what’s going on with the way I’m calling the game?” (According to his mother, Lynn, her usual response is, “Yeah, whatever.”).
He began to accept that he was gay during his sophomore year of high school, but with acceptance came anxiety. A multisport athlete, Bach was often in the locker room with a chorus of homophobic slurs and gay jokes. He didn’t take them personally, but he felt uncomfortable, as did his idea of coming out.
“I knew it wasn’t directed at me,” Bach said.
By the beginning of his sophomore year at Michigan State University, Bach was ready to tell his parents he was gay, to his father’s surprise, but to what his mother had previously thought. backed up. “I probably said ‘I’m fine!’ 100 times,” Lynn Back said. The following summer, Eric Back wrote an essay on Outsport and he revealed himself to the world.
If any of his relatives, friends, or acquaintances from home did not approve, they never told him. Most of the time he was supported and entrusted with reading the silent tea leaves of others. But still he was sure of his place in his world.
“No one is in your life forever,” he said. “Doing that was like a culling process of who really cared about me, who treated me and saw me the same way.”
Bach will graduate from college in 2021, first joining an independent baseball club in North Carolina before leaving for the Lenoir Line. Last year he came to Fredericksburg. He did each job to the best of his ability, but his sexuality was never talked about.
