Pants Vs. National Coming Out Day

It’s national coming out day.

I had the luxury of having a relatively easy coming out. I was born far enough past the initial movement of hatred that the brave and trailblazing woman and men before me paved the way so I didn’t feel much of anything in the way of hatred.

Sure – along the way there have been instances where my sexuality has caused things to be harder, to be less than fair. But in the overall scheme of things – I’ve had it pretty easy.

So with it being national coming out day, AND thanksgiving, I will pass along my coming out story/stories and give thanks to those brave people who came out before me, because without them and their sacrifices I wouldn’t be able to live an open and honest lifestyle today.

There were three instances where I think “coming out” applies. First to myself, then to my mother, and ultimately to my father.

These all happened within the space of about 8 years.

Coming out to myself is a risky story to tell. Because it feels so distant from me and so comical that I almost don’t want to tell it. I spent a large part of my childhood being forcefully attracted to females. In the sense that I craved female attention vs male. Whenever I was looking for affirmation or praise, I looked for it from the female sources in my life and rarely sought out any from the males. You’d think that would have been a sign – but I was raised in a very Christian household, church every Sunday, prayers before dinner. I didn’t even know what a lesbian was until I was 11, stealing porno mags from my friends parents and looking over the glossy pages wondering what the fuck was going on with them.

Sexuality is so strange when you’re a child. It makes no sense. You know for certain that it’s something you’re not supposed to be engaging in, the thought or the sight or anything in between. It was dirty and bad and wrong – and because of that notion – it never occurred to me that what I was feeling was anything other than wrong.

At 12 I had a boyfriend named Tom. A forced relationship that was nothing more than hand holding and the occasional make out session. It never felt right. It always felt like cheating. In my confused adolescence I believed that that is just how it was supposed to feel. Even though I was still chasing those fleeting feelings of butterflies and infatuation, praise and acceptance from my female friends over even my boyfriend.

I have to say, a part of my coming out involved movies. Two specifically. I saw Twister in the theatre every single night that it played. I saw it so many times that by the end of the week, the guys remembered me and let me in for free. I remember watching Helen Hunt in her dirty white tank top, smiling and laughing and being dramatic and almost dying and I felt it. The flutters. I was addicted to those flutters.

It’s like your heart drops. It feels exactly like your heart drops. It sends a pulse from your heart outwards, to the tips of your fingers, the ends of your ears. You sink and twitch and feel like you’re spinning. That’s attraction – that’s attraction to me, anyways.

But at 12, how do you understand or compute that into your head? When there should be no possibility that you could be feeling this attraction to someone, much less a woman. It just made. No. sense.

Then batman returns comes along, with its terrible acting and Nicole Kidman in her cascading black ball gown and I felt it again. The camera cascades down on her, she moves her head to the right and looks up over her lashes. My heart sinks. This is love, I think, this is what love and attraction are.

Sure. I knew then. But knowing and admitting – two different things.

It wasn’t until later that evening, in the privacy of my own room that I took that memory and that feeling and came to terms with the fact that there was something terribly WRONG with me.

And that’s how I felt at 12. Hidden and wrong and burning in hell for all eternity, because I happened to find gingers especially attractive.

Fast forward 3 years, and I wake up from my first sexual encounter with a boy that, by definition and standards – was not sex. But some form of awkward fumbling threesome with two of my best friends, one female and one male. It was only then, in the stark naked hungover and still stoned morning that I said the words out loud for the very first time.

I’m gay.

Things didn’t really change that much. My life didn’t spiral out of control, I didn’t start putting rainbows on everything and walking around blasting the indigo girls with my fist held proudly in the air. No. nothing really changed except that instead of pretending that one day I was going to fall in love with and marry a man, I simply accepted, and got excited that one day I was going to fall in love with and marry a woman.

And I think that’s how it should be. Simple acceptance.

I wasn’t a different person. I was still me. Same blood, same awkward stance, same problematic addiction to figuring shit out. Nothing changed.

But then I guess somehow, everything changed.

I still fought with a lot of fear in my life. Fear of my parents, who had just split up, fear of my friends never speaking to me again. Keep in mind, I grew up in a very small town of about 4 thousand people.  Gay people didn’t exist, because if they did – this town would eat them alive.

It wasn’t until a year later, when I moved to the big city, that I even made an attempt to tell my mother that she wouldn’t be seeing me with a boyfriend anytime soon. I think I told her first that I was bisexual, thinking that somehow this would cushion the blow because she could still hold onto the hope that I might just be doing some silly teenage thing. My thoughts were confirmed when she had my brother try to talk to me, telling me to stop playing the game I was playing because mum didn’t think it was funny anymore. I remember laughing. Not because I was playing a game and laughing at the outcome, but laughing because I wasn’t playing a game, and the reality was, they were not going to ever understand that.

My sexuality has very rarely been the topic of discussion with my mum, or my step dad. It simply moved from being something that I suppose she was vaguely concerned about, into being something that just went unsaid. There were no talks of hell or damnation, though fleeting mentions of ‘straight camps’ and having to reconcile my feelings with god were sometimes thrown around. I’ve never felt accepted by the religious confines of my parent’s beliefs. But I’ve never felt alienated either. So I take what I can get.

Fast forward to 18. I was living with my first girlfriend and coming into a more balanced understanding of myself and who I loved. Strangely enough, the thought of telling my father about my sexuality scared me more than anyone else in my life. I don’t know why. Even looking back at it now, I don’t know why. He never gave the impression that he would have acted any differently towards me, or that he would judge me or find fault in my life. I can’t rationalize the fear, but. It was still there.

We went for lunch one day when he was in town, and he asked me clearly if I was dating anyone. I said I was, a boy named Carl. Nice guy. Things were good. He worked a lot, it wouldn’t be likely that my dad would meet him. I felt the lie spilling out of me before I could even control it. I had a girlfriend, named Carly. A lie that’s close to the truth, does that count?

I don’t know why I lied. Fear I guess. But it was a topic that we didn’t dwell on and just moved on to the next set of news to share.

The next day my dad invited me out to the bar to have a few drinks, see some music. Seemed like a good time. I brought Carly along. She knew the situation, that my dad didn’t know. She seemed ok with it. She agreed to come along and to avoid any mention of our life together and to avoid any sort of PDA. Everything seemed fine and good until my dad got up to use the bathroom. We took that single moment alone together to smile, to kiss, to reconnect even though my fear was forcing us into a closet we shouldn’t be in. and at that moment my dad made his way back to the table. Caught red handed. Red lipped? I don’t know. I couldn’t think much about it, I had no time to react. To think. To rationalize. All I could do was look at my father, deer in the headlights look on my face and say “dad… there is something I need to tell you..”

And true to my father’s form, he simply raised his drink to me and said “Duh”.

We would talk about the moment later in life, years and years later, and my dad will tell me that I wore a suit to my graduation, that he knew for a long time. And I guess always found a sort of comfort in knowing that nothing changed for him either.