Since it’s National Coming Out Day, I thought I would share my story.  By the way, the offer of messaging me your story is still open, if you need someone to come out to.  It’s a hard thing to do, but it’s also something you want to get out there.  It’s hard to keep it in, but it’s also hard to keep in because you don’t want to hide.  So I’m here for that  :)

Anyhow, story under the cut.

I pretty much grew up thinking I was straight.  I grew up thinking I would have a boyfriend and get married, all that jazz.  All my friends had boyfriends and stuff, and I pretty much thought that would be me.  More importantly, I thought that was supposed to be me.  And I did have a boyfriend when I was 17.  

I ended up meeting my wifey on a Heero and Duo yaoi mailing list when I was 18. We started out as friends.  Meanwhile, my boyfriend and I stopped talking (he stopped talking to me because I didn’t want to sleep with him, I wasn’t ready for that).  Anyhow, we talked like every night, and I started to realize some things.

Part one: Coming Out to Myself

I remember we exchanged pictures and I really wanted her to think I was cute. That was the first sign.  The second sign was that I got crazy jealous when she told me about this girl she liked.  As soon as I realized what I was feeling I stopped talking to her.  I couldn’t be a lesbian, right?  I was supposed to have a boyfriend like the other girls.  Like the other black girls, to me more specific. I had seen white girls be lesbians and white men be gay, but black?  No, we’re all heterosexual, right?  Obviously this isn’t the case, but you see my point.

Eventually it just became too hard not to talk to her.  And really, if it’s hard for you to NOT talk to a person, that means something right?  I really loved talking to her and just, yeah, it was time to come clean.  So I sent her a long letter telling her how I felt, and how I was scared because I never liked a girl before. I also didn’t know who to turn to, because my friends were back in Chicago (I was in college at Iowa State) and even if I did call them, what would they say? They all had boyfriends and stuff.  So I told her.

12 years later we’re still together.

Part Two:  Coming out to my Parents

It would be years before I would do this, and this story has two parts.  There’s my mother, who honestly could care less.  Coming out to her was the easiest thing I’ve ever done.  She had already figured it out, because I guess I couldn’t stop talking about her.  That and she was coming to see me a lot and even took me to my mom’s house for Thanksgiving when the bus stopped going there.  She also came to visit me when I went home to Chicago, and I visited her in Minnesota.  

So yeah my mom figured it out.  Didn’t give a flying fuck.  

My dad, on the other hand.

So the way my dad figured it out wasn’t me telling him.  He found a story I had wrote for class on his computer, because I kept all of my college writings and even thought about editing some for various reasons.  Anyhow, he read one and found out about her.  We talked about it and he seemed o.k. with it.

The next day I woke up and heard him talking to my mom on the phone, and it was clear that he was NOT o.k. with it.  I was really hurt, and kinda pissed off that he wouldn’t just, you know, tell me directly that he wasn’t o.k. with it.  He made some pretty bad comments, like, “she’s with some white girl,” and what not, and that really pissed me off too because he’s dated outside his race, too.

This lead me to my next coming out thing: coming out to my friends.  But more on that later.

Anyhow, I ranted on my livejournal (wow remember that?) and a bunch of people responded because, you know, that’s what people do.  Well, he read THAT too.  And then we fought.  We fought for a long time that day.  And I cried a lot.  And it was terrible, to be honest.

But something my mom said got to him (they’re divorced but still talk to each other).  She told him to stop being an idiot, pretty much. She told him to stop because he was going to lose me if he didn’t.  And I guess he realized that because we were fighting.  So we took it down a notch.

He blamed all sorts of things on me being a lesbian.  Women’s Studies (my second major) and he thought I suddenly hated men, not to mention that my boyfriend was a jerk so he thought that I thought all men were like that.  Now, I know this gets tiring to explain, but sometimes you just… have to.  You have to explain to people that men hurting you, or you taking Women’s Studies, and things like that are not what make you interested in women.  And I know it’s irritating, but these things come up because people do use these things as an excuse.  If you’ve taken Women’s Studies you’ve met the extreme one, the one who literally does hate men with a fiery passion and shows the side of Women’s Studies that men are, frankly, afraid of.  "Women’s Studies makes you hate me,“ no, it doesn’t, it doesn’t at all but then suddenly there’s that one woman who is literally like, "DOWN WITH MEN THEY SUCK” and it just ruins everything.  You know, like how that one man says something like, “She was asking for it.”  No, not all men think like that, but that guy just ruined it for all of them.

As far as being a lesbian because some man broke your heart.  Look.  We know that that’s not the reason, either, but this is an assumption people make.  Why?  Because some women toss it out so easily.  I’ve heard women say things like, “men suck I’m just going to date a woman.”  That.  That right there.  That is why men think that we’ve been heartbroken and have nowhere else to go.  It’s such a nonchalant comment but it gets used way, way too much.  Men are responding to what women say.  And some women literally do think they can just get a membership card to lesbianism because they had a bad break up.  So yeah, sometimes, you gotta explain that that’s not the case in the coming out process.  Just explain that that’s a stupid stereotype. I asked my dad, how could I hate men, when I have such a great dad?  And that helped, a lot.

Part Three:  Coming Out to my Friends

The fun thing about being away at college is that these people don’t know who you are, so you can come in how you want.  I could say I had a partner without batting an eye.  It was hard at first, yeah, but you end up meeting people who really don’t care.  They’ll tell you that they’re gay, and that’s that.  

It’s tell the friends who have known you the longest that’s tough.

But it turns out, at least for me, that that wasn’t hard either.  If anything, they were pissed that I didn’t say anything sooner.  When I got upset about my dad’s reaction I went to my friends and told them everything.  And they were literally pissed off that I didn’t tell them sooner.  Because we’re friends, and why would they care about something like that?  So yeah, this was pretty easy too.  This was also easy with my coworkers at GameStop.  They could care less, in fact, my managers let her use my discount because “you’d be married if you could.”  

Part Four:  Coming Out to her Parents

Since I was going to move up to Minnesota, we had to tell her parents.  She already told me that she tried coming out to them before, but they refused to believe it and even sent her to therapy.  So I was pretty worried.

Nothing bad happened.  Like, we didn’t fight like me and my dad.  Instead, they decided to ignore it.  I became “the roommate” at the family parties.  And it was like this for a long time.

Here’s the thing about coming out and family.  Some of your family is going to take it hard, or ignore it, or whatever.  But, deep down, if they really love you they will come around.  Her parents are a living testament to that.  It took them a long time, but they took us by surprise when they finally accepted it.

Case in point: our house.

We decided to get a house, and we had a bunch of money saved up for a downpayment.  But the offer changed, and we had to put more money down than what we had.  So we started talking about loans and banks and stuff, and she called her mom to tell her about it.

Her mom’s response?  "How much do you need?“

They covered about $5000 of the downpayment.  On top of that, they helped us fix up the house.  Like, they were here every weekend, working on it.  And by fix up I mean "redo our kitchen, knock down walls, ect.”  So major construction.  They did that.  Not to mention that, this year, her dad actually called me her partner in front of the entire family.  And they’ve finally met my mom, and I guess our moms play “Words With Friends” everyday?  But yeah, it took some time, but now we’re all in a good place  :)

And these are my stories.  Feel free to share yours if you want.  Happy Coming Out Day!