I’m Coming Out

Yesterday was National Coming Out Day, so I thought I’d share one my coming out stories. I have multiple. I’m gonna recount the family one first.

I was dating a guy I’d met through the Lamar University Theater Department. Jacob was the dreamy quiet guy in the corner who everyone agreed was pretty damn great. One day were were alone in the green room between classes, and he leaned towards me and suggested we hangout sometime. Being that we’d fallen for each other without either of us being out, we became BFF’s long before we were lovers. Like we were both still living with our parents at the time, so had multiple sleepovers without anything physical happening. My family loved him, and after enough time passed, I started to suspect that they knew we were boyfriends, and they were just staying quiet about it. That was until the day of our big date.

Jacob and I had scheduled the gayest date I’d ever been on: we were going to dress fancy, drive an hour to a nice restaurant, and then see a performance of the Houston Ballet. As we were getting ready at my parents’ house, my mom was visibly on edge and cornered me in my room while Jacob was sitting out on the living room couch. She asked if Jacob and I were “just friends or more than friends?” I panicked and immediately responded that we were just friends. She said, “okay… because I saw this email—”.

Pause.

I have to give this email a proper backstory. In all my darkest fears of how my parents would find out I was gay, this email was worse. I’d that dreamed me and my beloved would be roommates for decades who secretly were lovers and one day when we unveiled the truth to the people who loved us, they’d have witnessed our love so clearly for so long that they’d understand and accept us, and they would see us as close to heteronormative as possible. Instead, my mom read an email. My boy friend Jacob was more experienced with guys than I was. In fact, I knew he’d had a long standing crush on this guy Tyler who lived in Austin. I’d heard the tale of their stolen kiss between the pontoons of a boat during a gay lake day, and I was worried that Jacob my eventually leave me for this Tyler. Flash forward to one day we decided to drive to Houston to see some movie (it MIGHT have been Brokeback Mountain…) with Tyler. Afterwards the three of us go back to his place and have a great time (I’m pretty sure Tyler even convinced me to smoke weed for the first time that night: something I’d nearly broken up with Jacob for even considering in the recent past). Tyler is so cool and cute and funny and charming and smart and well… I quickly developed a crush on him too. It got late, so we crash on the floor at the foot of his bed. The next morning, I initiated something sexual between the three of us. Shorty afterwards, I wrote Tyler an email discussing everything. The email detailed how it was all my doing, there was talk of dick sizes, how Tyler and I finished at the same time, and how I’d hoped it would happen again. When my mother said she’d read an email, THAT is the email she’s referring to.

I’m SO thrown by this unexpected turn I didn’t know what to do. I planned on presenting my homosexuality to my mom through how I’d come to accept it: through love. Instead she was getting the raw, uncut porn threesome version of my sexuality, and I just knew there was no way of convincing her it was anything other than lusty, debaucherous, and sinful. She claimed the email was somehow attached to an email I’d sent her boss, but I’m pretty sure she was snooping on my computer (which is very mother’s right, so I don’t fault her for it). She said she’d shown it to my dad (Oh GOD!), but he said he thought it was just all just a joke (thanks for trying to help me cover it up, dad) I latched onto that, but she came back with “But I’ve heard things at night.” (So, then I had to picture my poor mother’s heart breaking as she heard me having quiet gay sex through the walls.) There was no way I could lie my way out of this. She asked if I’d tried to be with women. No! If an uncle had touched me. NO! The only words that could come to my lips were that there was “nothing wrong with me.” It was about the time that my dad came in that I heard the front door swing shut (Jacob had understandably bolted). I needed help. My father wasn’t religious. He watched the discovery channel. Certainly he could help me! I remember pleading, “Tell her, dad. Tell her why it happens.” As he hugged me and my tears started pouring out, he responded, “They don’t know why it happens.” I don’t remember much outside of that, but eventually, my mom said she didn’t want to ruin my night, so soon after I finished getting ready, met up with Jacob, and we went to the ballet.

It was a rough few years after that. It seemed like my mom was constantly on the edge of tears. I think somewhere in that messy coming out, I’d tried to soften the blow by saying I was bisexual, and THAT turned out to be a colossal error because it lead to my mom asking me to keep it a secret from my sister and grandmother, and she kept telling me that she was praying that I’d eventually fall for my church friend Katy. Outside of that, nobody talked about any of it, so I started to resent her after a while. After her father died and her older brother publicly came out to the family (I’d already knew about him thanks to his myspace profile page) and after my sister requested access to the pictures I’d taken on a VERY gay backpacking trip through Europe, I was able to muster the courage to tell the rest of the family despite my mother’s wishes. It started to get better after that.

I know times are different now, but what made it all so hard was the shame and fear we all carried with us. If I’d had the courage to be fully honest and proud of who I was, I think my mom would have been less worried. I was lucky that my family was able to look through what society was telling them about homosexuals, and still see me for me, but I was so full of self-hatred and shame that I couldn’t even see that love. I think on some level, it’s less about others accepting you and more about you accepting yourself and letting others see that. Because of that, my friends were paramount to my survival and evolution. They let me test out different versions of myself until I settled on what felt right.

If I could give one piece of advice to any person still hiding some part of themselves in a closet, it would be to GO to a place where you feel safe and find someone (and I mean ANYONE) and let them see your secret. Whether they accept you or not, you’ll find a power and a peace in that admission that will lead you to a greater level of self-love and happiness.

Happy National Coming Out Day