Coming out.

A lot of people have been posting their coming out stories and a lot of people have also been worried about coming out, so I have decided to tell you all my coming out story. It isn’t too extravagant, but it’s personal. Before I came out I dated every and any girl you saw, no lie. I dated everybody, but everybody also thought that I was gay; I was obviously in denial. In seventh grade I was at lunch and it was my best friend (at the time) and I sitting at the table waiting for our friends to come back from getting their lunch. While waiting there it was rather quiet and I blurted out (after thinking about it in the silence) “I am gay” to which she replied “Oh, I already knew that..” Which I guess gives you an idea of how apparent it actually was that I was a closeted gay. After our friends came back from the lunch line, I told them and we all talked about it. And if anybody knows anything about junior high school.. no more than one hour later did I have swarms of people surrounding me at passing time talking to me about my recent “choice” of sexual preference. For the next week or so I had contemplated telling my grandmother and aunt on my mother’s side (my mother had passed away a year prior to this) and I ended up telling them over the phone, both at different times and both of their responses were exactly the same, “Oh, we all knew, your mother and I had talked about this long before she passed away, but she always said ‘we will love him no matter what’ and I still love you just as much.” And that made me feel great, but now I had to tell my father, that was a project… I ended up talking to my dad’s girlfriend and asking her to tell him, which she did and a few days after she had talked to him for me I was sitting in my room doing homework when I heard him knock on my door, walk in and sit down on my bed and say “so, I see we have some things to talk about…” and I immediately burst into tears and cried hysterically, but after about forty five minutes of that, my father at the end of it all said “your mother and I talked about this a long time ago, we had a feeling this was going to happen, but I love you no matter who you love.” For a while, he wasn’t very accepting of it, but who’s father is accepting of their gay son when they first come out? My entire family is very, very supportive after being out for almost six years and very open about my sexual orientation as am I and I am very thankful for that.

I see gay teens and even grown adults who haven’t come out who are so afraid to come out because of what their families might do to them and that hurts me so much to know that they believe their families would disown them. I have seen families disown their gay children and it’s so sad to see and year about. I wish everyone’s families could be accepting as mine; I am truly blessed.