I was interested in hearing about how different people came out either to their parents, family, work or wherever. We all know that coming out is sometimes an everyday thing.


I came out at 14 or 15 years of age. I was in high school and I broke up with my boyfriend. I came home crying and my mom followed me to my room. She asked me what was wrong. I told her that I couldn't tell her. She said "What, that you like boys." She later comforted me. And that was that. That same night I went in to my fathers room and told him. He basically said "That's okay, do you have condoms?"

I was very very lucky. Not all my friends were that lucky though. I felt for them.


M

MIGUELGOMEZ said:

I think you're so wonderful to just be comfortable being you...no questions asked no worries no hidden anything

you rule hon

wow Miguelito thats a wonderful thing that your folks were so accepting of it.i felt so bad for my Uncle and aunt that they couldnt come out. i mean i knew... well hell i got Gaydar for eaons

Your parents rock

I have an aunt who still hasn't come out. My family is REALLY conservative (don't know how I fit in, in fact I never have lol) and she's gone her whole life without saying anything.

So, I suppose I don't know for positive absolutely for sure. But I'm pretty sure. You just know. That and she used to play softball on leagues and things when she was younger and her nickname was Pete.

unfortunately my coming-out story ain't too interesting, save for all the "i knew it!"-type remarks i've received so far. and that's awesome that your folks accepted it so well, miguel!

Handclapsfingasnapz said:

You're gay?
I did not know that.

Handclapsfingasnapz said:

and i was tha last to knowwwww

Fleshofmyflesh said:

yes, i'm gay--came out about 2 months ago.

TheRealFiness said:

more like you was the first to know...

Handclapsfingasnapz said:

2 months ???
NOW who's the newbie ?

Handclapsfingasnapz said:

really?.. wow.. ok.. i change my to

Natisse said:

Honey, I can say the same about you, tenfold. You are the kind of person I would hang out with.

xxooxx
(sorry my emoticons don't work on my computer at work)

M

I was 18 and dating my first ever boyfriend. At the same time I was still heavily involved in the church. I felt very guilty about it but I had to find out who I was. My best friend, she’s actually still in my core group of friends to this day, and I hung out all the time. Both in and outside of the church. It got to the point that people started whispering about, wondering if we were having sex. Well the pastor one day calls us into a private meeting and asked us point blank if we had a sexual relationship. Knowing we weren’t and that we were just best friends, we laughed at the notion. The pastor was glad to hear that we weren’t sexually active.

So the pastor dismisses my best friend and says that he wants to have a word with me. My stomach sank……… He said “I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to be completely honest with me. Can you promise me you’ll be completely honest?” I said “Yes”. He said “Are you gay”. To that I instantly burst into sobs and said things like “It’s not my fault, I can’t help it, I’m sorry”. To which he came over and held me and let me cry. After I calmed down a little he apologized for ever saying anything bad about gay people. He said that he never wanted me to feel like I wasn’t loved or part of my group and that anything he might have said about the issue wasn’t meant to hurt me.

I began counseling with the pastor and his wife. I could not have asked for better people to come out to. Most people in the church would have approached me from a completely condescending, judgmental and hateful way. They approached me with so much love. I told them how I had begun dating a guy and we discussed the issues I was facing as a gay man coming to terms with his sexuality. I applaud them because they didn’t approach this in the way that most believers would have. They actually asked questions about doctrine and how to reconcile my being with what the scriptures said. The pastors wife (Eva and Bill are their names), she asked “If he’s only ever felt this way, how can we say that it’s wrong in the eyes of god?” I could not believe that she actually asked the question. They never came to a definitive conclusion but it was nice to know that they were open to tackle the issue outside of the standard Levitcal diatribes about offering them up to sin and the punishment shall be death and all the other disgusting ways in which the Church uses the old Testament to deal with the issue.

So I had been dating this guy for a few months, and had at the same time been counseling with the pastor and his wife for several weeks, when on a Friday night after hours at the arcade, my best friend Royanna asked me who “Alex” was. My stomach sank and my heart just about leapt out of my chest.

I calmly said “Alexandra? Oh she’s a girl I’ve been seeing”. She asked me why I had never mentioned it since we were best friends. I told her that I didn’t feel like I had to tell her everything. She kept picking away. What does she look like? How old is she? Why haven’t I met her? And on an on and on…… So I decided I was going to tell her that Alex was a guy. I was so freaked out. How did she know!? I hadn’t told anybody. So over the course of the next 3 hours I proceeded one word at a time “Alex”….. “Alex is”…… “Alex is a”….. and after a couple of hours of torture (It literally took me at least 2 hours to utter these words in full) I brought myself to say it: “Alex is a guy”. To which she said “I know, I just had to hear it from your own mouth”. I said “you bitch!” She giggled madly and I sighed a huge sigh of relief that she was laughing as opposed to all the other shitty ways she could have reacted to me. So we sat and talked until the sun came up. I asked her how she knew I was seeing this guy Alex. She told me that my mom had shown her a letter I had written to him!!

The letter……I was falling in love with Alex and professed this in a letter. I quickly wrote the letter so that I could get all my thoughts out and then I re-wrote it all pretty and saved my draft. I put the draft copy in my closet, on the very top shelf, in the very back, underneath a stack of small boxes (not the first row of boxes, but the row behind it). In other words…..My mom was snooping.

At this point, I thought that my mom had only shown the letter to my best friend. Wrong! During the first counseling session I had after my mom found the letter, the pastor and his wife told me that my mom came to them demanding that they tell her why I was counseling with them. Since I was 18, the pastor’s wife said that I was an adult and that they had to respect my confidentiality. That still blows me away. That was such a rare reaction. Most believers would have ratted me out (I’ve seen it happen) and it would have turned into a full fledged exorcism (seen that too). These 2 people showed true Christianity. I will always respect them and love them for that.

When my mom demanded again, Eva said that they wouldn’t tell but that they would ask me for my permission instead. My mom said that she already knew what they were counseling me for and shoved my letter in their faces. They refused to look at it and my mom left in a huff. They asked me if I wanted them to tell her the reason we were counseling. I told them no and that I would talk to her myself.

For the next couple of weeks I tried to get my mother’s attention. Every time I tried she was “busy”. After 2 weeks of playing cat and mouse with her I told her I wanted to talk and she grabbed her newspaper and said she had to finish reading it. I said “no mom, in the backyard right now”. I called her out on finding the letter. She said “what letter?”. I then said that I knew she had showed the letter to my best friend, my sister and her boyfriend and Bill & Eva. She still denied any knowledge of what I was talking about. I said “well you leave me no other choice but to just tell you. I’m gay”.

She instantly broke into tears asking what she had done wrong. I told her she had done nothing wrong and that I have always felt the way I feel. She told me that she wasn’t going to kick me out of the house and that she still loved me. We hugged and kind of left it at that. Over the years I have tried to get my mom to open up to me in this respect and she never really has. It’s 17 years since I’ve come out and still my mom doesn’t really engage me when it comes to my life. Now don’t get me wrong, my mom and I have a fantastic relationship. She has confided in me her deepest secrets. This is one of the reasons I hate religion so much. There should not be any divide between us and the divide is caused by her failure to engage me without thinking of all the fucked up bullshit lies the church spreads about us.

Now my dad..... My parents got divorced when I was 4. My father is also Mexican and in the Mexican culture, machismo is very praised. Sometimes bordering on abuse with how much men expect to get away with shit and women being conditioned to accept it. Growing up my dad was always trying to teach me to "be a man". Here I was this little creature, a bird boy, not interested in any of the boy things and interested in all the girl things. I remember when we would visit him on the weekends and he would take me out and throw a football. I would always object and he would force me to go out and throw the ball when really what I wanted to do was stay in the house and listen to music. I remember one time crying because of him forcing me to throw the ball with him and telling him through my tears that I hated him.

My dad has since changed his tune towards me. My dad is accepting of me all the way. It’s funny cuz I’ve never actually “said” that I’m gay to my father but little by little he acknowledges it and shows me that he loves and accepts me. One time even bringing me a copy of the Advocate that he found at a swap meet with an article he thought I might be interested in My father betrayed me most of my life so I’ve always been very guarded towards him. He and my mom once had a conversation and he was thinking back on how he left us and how my sister and I had to basically fend for ourselves and my dad called me his hero for making it through life against horrific odds. That really touched me so much. To think back on the sissy boy he tried to turn "into a man" and now that he doesn't have an issue with who I am. The once reject is now the hero. I was very proud of that.

And now for a little philosophy.....before I was born my dad told my mom “Don’t expect me to be proud if we have a son”. What if his words were the cause of me being gay? Bear with me here. God is supposed to have created the universe with his spoken word. “Let there be light” and there was light. If we are made in his image does it not stand to reason that our words have power? His statement, “Don’t expect me to be proud if we have a son”. So he didn’t get one. At least not in the conventional sense, not in the ways people expect of someone who is born with a penis. Maybe it took me to be gay for him to be able to reach the point of pride. Otherwise, my accomplishments might not have shined as bright. Just a thought....

Oh my God Supa. What a life. I'm so happy that you still have both of your parents in your life. Your mom will, hopefully, get there. Your dad seems to genuinely respect you. Thank you for sharing your experience. I can never get tired of these accounts.


Remember the theory about words and water in the WHAT THE BLEEP..thread. Hmmmm makes you think....

M

Coming out for me was mostly easy. I came out my freshman year in college. First to my close college friends. That was the easy part. Some jackass found out and wrote "Fruit" on my dorm room door with shaving cream (a year later he told his girlfriend he felt he was a woman trapped in a woman's body).

Then I told my brothers. Older brother was fine with it. He just didn't believe me at first. I told my younger brother who was, at the time, 15-years-old. The whole time I'm telling him this he's lying on the bed completely transfixed by Up All Night on USA. "I said I'm gay. Don't you have anything to say about that?"

"No, it's okay. I'm open minded." Was all he said. It made me smile that my little brother was so accepting.

Yeah...accepting, but still a dumbass. The next day we were playing basketball, and he asked me if I got all hot and bothered by the gross guys in my older brothers porn stash. Actually, his literal words were, "So, in that movie that John was watching the other day, when the guy said to the girl 'suck it bitch, suck it.' did you wish he was saying that to you?" I threw the basketball at his head, he went inside crying and that was the end of that.

Both brothers were told not to tell my mom or dad. I said I'd tell mom in a week or so when I was ready to do so after smoking about a carton of cigarettes. Dad was pretty much out of the picture by that point, but we talked occasionally. ONE DAY LATER...my mom called wondering "since when can't you talk to me?" I tried to play dumb, like I didn't know what she was talking about, but my older brother told her. She was fine, just wanted to hear it from me.

Dad is a bit of a sadder story. Long story short, I'd not seen him in two years and had a grand total of about 5 phone conversations in that period of time. His life was torn apart by his drinking and the military. He called (drunk) and asked if what John - older brother - had told him was true. Yes...true, true.

"Is it also true that you told him you hoped it would make me stop talking to you?"

"Well, no. Not really, I guess."

He said he didn't think different of me but that homosexuality was "alien" to him. Of course, I took offense. We ended the conversation and he said, "I love you, but you don't have to say it back if you don't want to." I said, "Okay, goodbye then." I've regretted it ever since then - that was the last conversation I ever had with him. He died two years later. Silly me. I've learned from my mistakes and learned to tell people how I feel about them. I've since come to terms with the whole issue, but in retrospect it hurts.

I'm realizing that I've only shared that story with a few people and hadn't planned on going into the whole thing here. But there you have it.

RH2S - Thank you for sharing. At least your dad knows how you feel now. Well at least in my belief system. It's just another lesson learned in life.



M

Handclapsfingasnapz said:

Welcome aboard girl. I'll send you the toaster and the membership card soon.
Much much love to you.


M

One of my best friends came "out" to me about 5 years ago.
He said I was the only person in the world that knew and would ever know.
I said, "ok--fine. Do what you want." . I had at least a half dozen other people come out to me while I was in the military (seems like I'm so fem, they're just beckoned to me).

Anyways, fast forward 5 years.
He's married to a woman (but still very much gay). He says he wants to live a life that "society expects" and that he's scared.

I said "dude, you're wife will eventually find out. And it's going to be expensive as hell."

We don't talk that much anymore but from time to time, he still needs someone to confide in.

AsianBomb777 said:

A true friend.....


(sorry I have to go there) By confiding in AB he means sleeping with him.



M

MIGUELGOMEZ said:

but co-sign on the true friend bit...it's sad that he's remained closeted, though. hopefully there'll come the time when he'll be totally comfortable with himself and won't have to feel like he needs to be "normal" and not be scared of anything.

MIGUELGOMEZ said:

The sad thing is that I really love this person. I want what's best for him. And the path that he has chosen just seems so sad and destructive. But NOTHING--I mean NOTHING will make him see the light, he's got so much Jesus-Fear in him.

I'll always consider him my brother. But it's like watching a family member going through a bad drug abuse phase. I just hope he lives through it.

And yes---I will never reveal who he is. I keep my promises.

Handclapsfingasnapz said:

Yep, there are lots of people living like this because of either peer pressure, religion or many other factors. It's really not fair to the spouse but I try not to judge since a lot of people have different reasons.

AB, you know I'm kidding, I love ya more than my luggage.(in a non-stalker sort of way)

M
[Edited 6/16/05 15:34pm]

You guys

Without going into personal/boring details, I've only ever had to come out to one family member. My mates all had 'the conversation', of course, and many had guessed before I told them. As for my family, I haven't spoken to my father or brother for about 14 years, I hardly see my sister and the relationship with my mother - who was my idol growing up - has been affected by my fall-out with my father. Consequently we hardly talk and it's not something I'm about to bring up in a hurry. But they all know; it's just not something I have to say. Anyone who matters to me knows, so no big deal.

Anyway, I've only ever had one grandparent - my mother's mother. She was everything you could possibly want in a 'Gran' - wise, kind, loving, funny, protective. And, as the youngest of nine grandchildren (by her youngest child), we shared a special affinity. Nobody came between us.

I'd probably been 'out' for about 3 or 4 years before I told her. As even my mother & father didn't know, I wasn't sure if it was wise to say anything. We had such a fantastic relationship, it had never been an issue before and - as the saying goes - "what they don't know won't hurt them'. Plus, she was 91 at the time - would she even understand? But the more I tried to ignore it, the more I felt I was holding something back from her. I felt a fraud keeping something so integral to my being from one of the most important people in my life.

So I took the plunge..

Well, it took several attempts (!) because my Gran was VERY hard of hearing but eventually I told her "I'm gay". Tears were welling up; I was absolutely terrified that she would disown me or that I would repulse her. I sdidn't want her to change the way she thought of me, I told her.

Her response was a warm smile and she replied: "Of course I love you, I always will. And, anyway, who's to say that I'm not a lesbian after all these years??". She was kidding, but what an AMAZING thing to stay.

We hugged, I left and I felt a million dollars better. And I am so glad that I told her. She only lived for another 3 years. But that conversation made an already amazing relationship even better. I was very lucky to have her.

MIGUELGOMEZ said:

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

RipHer2Shreds said:

onenitealone said:

Thanks again for sharing all these stories. They are heartbreaking and hearwarming and so very beautiful. Keep them coming.....did we run out of homosexuals?


M

CynthiasSocks said:

Back atcha!