I was raped by a neighbor as a kid and have never told anyone…

Throwaway for obvious reasons. I (28M) was raped by my neighbor who was a few years older than me at the time.

Context. I was probably 11 at the time. My across the street neighbors consisted of a single mother, and her two kids who I’ll call J and E. E was a few years younger than me, maybe 8 or 9 at the time and J was a few years older than me, probably 13 or 14 at the time. I got along with J very well and we hung out most days not long after they moved in for about a year or two. We shared a lot of the same tastes. Gaming, anime, Pokemon, etc. Typical nerdy kid stuff. We would hang out and play games most days after school. I almost thought of him as the older brother I never had. I even stayed the night at their house quite a few times.

Now at the time, being a kid, I never noticed but J had many… alternative… tendencies. Looking back on it, its so clear to me. The manner of speaking, the always having a female avatar in games, the music tastes, etc. I’m not going to list off everything cause it’ll probably make me sound like a homophobe, which I’m not people can live their life however they want it doesn’t matter to me, just understand when I say he was a flamer, he was a flamer. I just didn’t realize it at the time cause I had no idea what that even meant, he was just my friend.

Now, the event happened one night when I stayed over at their house. I slept in J’s room as usual, (again I never saw an issue with it at the time, thought it was normal friend stuff), but I distinctly remember being awoken later that night, sleeping on my stomach, with someone pulling my pants down from behind. I’m not going to go into explicit detail, but I will say I specifically remember a tongue, and insertion. I was terrified, I had no idea what was going on but I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to make what was happening worse. I didn’t know what to do. So I just kept quiet and fell back to sleep once it was over. I woke up the next morning confused and anxious. I clearly remembered what happened the night before and it absolutely was not a dream. I pretty quickly went home and tried to get my thoughts together. I knew it had to have been J. There’s nobody else it could’ve been and the weird way he was acting that morning really cinched it for me. I just didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to make a scene. How does a kid tell their mom, “Hey I think my friend raped me last night”. So I just kept quiet. Basically just shrugged it off as just a weird thing that happened. Never told anyone. Never confronted J about it. Never told anyone in his family or mine. I still hung out with J sometimes after that. I never had another sleepover, but we would still play games every now and then, but it was definitely different. His family moved probably not even 6 months later and I may have talked to him once after that.

I have never told a soul about what happened. Not my parents, not my friends, not my girlfriend, nobody. I don’t think it has dramatically affected my life. It doesn’t make me hateful or afraid of gay people. I think about it every now and then, like a passing thought. Clearly I think about it enough to make this post, but I just felt I had to tell somebody. I feel like it’s too late at this point to seek any kind of retribution. I’ve even tried to find J on various social media sights but it seems like he’s fallen off the face of the earth. I doubt it would even be worth it. I just felt like I needed to get it off my chest somehow and after listening to lots of videos based off posts in this subreddit, it compelled me to post about my secret and see what the internet thinks about it