gratitude and much respect to all the folks sharing their coming out stories. i was inspired by rserven and by vacantlook and shared part of this story as a comment to vacantlook's diary.
here is my coming out story.
i was born in 1971 in a place that cannot be found on any current map of the world. that is because on april 17, 1980, the country where i was born gained independence and my birthplace was reclaimed and renamed. salisbury, rhodesia became harare zimbabwe. the first words spoken in the newly independent zimbabe were, 'ladies and gentleman, bob marley and the wailers.'
this is a long diary. if you take the time to read it, i thank you in advance.
i was raised in a fairly strict seventh-day adventist household. we did not eat meat, did not consume anything with caffeine, were not allowed to listen to rock music. my sisters were not allowed to wear jewelry or make-up and we were all discouraged from dancing. black pepper and other hot foods were also discouraged because they might excite our bodily systems. we went to church every saturday, my parents donated 10% of their weekly income, and from sunset on friday to sunset on saturday, we kept the sabbath holy.
seventh-adventism was extremely important to my parents. my mom credits it with saving her from a life of bad influences. i was born in africa because they were there as missionary doctors for the SDA church. when we finally relocated to the place i would spend the bulk of my childhood -- michigan -- it was because there was an adventist school system there that went from pre-kindergarten through to graduate and post-graduate studies. all for the further glory of god.
seventh-day adventism is a fundamentalist, apocalyptic religion. one that, like sarah palin's evangelical faith, teaches a frightening dogma about the end of times. we were taught that in the end times, the government would come to take our bibles and to prevent us from worshiping on the true sabbath, saturday. we were taught that we would be hounded and persecuted for being the true remnant church. we were taught that at the end of time, jesus would return, first visible as a cloud about the size of a human fist, descending from the area of the sky containing the belt of orion. the holy would be caught up to meet him and all of the 144,000 saved souls would be taken to our eternal reward.
to grow up gay in such an environment was simple. from the first moment i realized i was attracted to boys, not girls, i knew that i was going to hell. simple. we were taught that you could not earn your way into heaven by good works. we were taught that homosexuality was the reason sodom and gomorrah were destroyed by god's righteous fires. we were taught to fear god and fear him i did. if he knew that i was gay (and his omniscience guaranteed that he did), then i was most certainly condemned to burn in a lake of fire.
i remember being told that at the end times, one of the ways that we would know whether we were god's sheep (those going to heaven) or whether we were lucifer's goats (those going to hell), was to take a mouthful of water. if you were going up, the water would remain water. if you were going down, the mouthful of water would turn to blood. i remember whenever i went to the drinking fountain i would think, 'well i guess the end times aren't here yet.' because i knew i was going to hell. because i was attracted to daniel and not to cindy.
i lived a fairly self-destructive life through my late twenties. i stole from my parents, i shoplifted from stores. i broke into houses and read my friends' diaries. i learned that the best defense is a great offense and i became extremely good at deriding and denigrating other people with an acid tongue. i was a compulsive liar and a cheat. i thought that my power and strength was measured by how easily i could dismantle the person standing next to me.
of course, all of this was a defense mechanism. if people knew the real me, they would stop loving me. and so i had to make sure that they never saw the real me. if god couldn't find his way to love me, what hope could i have that an imperfect human might manage the arduous task? this understanding does not excuse my behavior, of course. i have hurt many people in my life. i have betrayed many trusts. it is something that i still think about.
that was my solution. i would hide and avoid my sexuality. i would pretend. i would compartmentalize and control. i would fool people into loving me because i knew that the real me would be too disappointing to love. the first step was to escape the eyes of the people who had been my classmates since 4th grade. i would start fresh. it was all very great gatsby. brandishing a u.s. news and world college ratings issue, i somehow convinced my parents to let me go to oberlin college in oberlin, oh. my first halting steps towards coming out would happen there.
like many gay people, i first came out as a bisexual. luckily for me, oberlin was a place that actively celebrated difference. being bisexual, i discovered, was a step up from heterosexuality within the inverse social hierarchy of oberlin. i was actually accused of pretending to be bisexual because it would make me seem cooler. when i first came out to my friend paul as a bisexual, he said, 'wow. i'm really jealous. your life is going to be so much more interesting than mine.'
it was the first time that my sexuality was anything other than a source of shame, fear, doubt and self-hatred. i wouldn't exactly say that i felt free, because i didn't. i still felt like a fraud. if these new friends could see the lying, cheating, duplicitous person sitting beside them, i would lose their love as easily as my admitting my sexuality would strip me of my parents' love. my strategy for living remained the same. control peoples' perceptions of me. become what people wanted me to become so that i might sneak tiny portions of their love before the inevitable revelation of my un-lovability.
this was my way of handling the world. i used to call it my 'hard face.' let no one in. need no one. secretly despise the people who i had managed to con into loving me. keep the real me -- the scared, uncertain and insecure me -- buried under layers of prickliness. no one could hurt me that way. i would step out of the closet out when it benefitted me, and i would step right back in whenever i was afraid it wouldn't. it was a sure path to psychosis.
my decision to come out to my parents was the result of a failed relationship. i loved him, but was too scared to reveal my fears and insecurities and doubts to him. i made a rule that if he was visiting me at my place, he wasn't allowed to answer the phone, in case it was my parents. i didn't want to have to explain another male voice answering my telephone. i didn't want to risk having my parents suspect that i was anything other than the same straight yet highly sensitive son that they had always known. i wanted to keep him in the compartment i had constructed for him; quarantined from the compartment i had made for my parents.
of course, the relationship disintegrated. i cheated on him and lied about it. after the breakup, i realized that no matter how much i claimed to love someone, it could not be true if i was also ashamed of them. it sounds like a simple obversation, but it was a huge turning point for me. i was starting to understand that unless i could love without shame, i would end up living without love.
i began asking my sisters (who i had come out to in college) for their opinions on my coming out to my parents. both of them said that it was a bad idea. my parents had stopped talking to one of my sisters for two years, when they found out that she was living with her boyfriend out of wedlock. a boyfriend that she had been in a relationship with for seven years and to whom she is still married. 'if they couldn't handle that,' they said, 'they certainly won't be able to handle their youngest child and only son turning out gay.'
during one of these conversations with my sister, her husband said, 'i don't see why he has to be the one to do it. why don't you two sisters do it for him? that way, he won't have to hear your parents say things that they'll probably regret and they won't have to hear him say anything that he might regret. plus, you'll be able to be good role models for them. if you show that you love and accept him, then maybe they will too.'
i vacillated for a good long while, destroying several more relationships and driving myself deeper into the hole. it was becoming a catch-22; another cycle of self-destruction. by trying to stop people from seeing the real me in order to fool them into loving me, i was also making sure that when it worked -- when they did love me -- it would make me feel like a fraud and a fake, even more unworthy of their love.
finally, i asked my sisters if they would talk to our parents, if they would out me to mom and dad. i expected them to say no and i expected to use this refusal as another way of blamelessly postponing my life. luckily for me, my sisters were not as cowardly as i was. they accepted. they said they would do it the only time that we were all going to be together in the same town. christmas eve, 2001.
i begged them to reconsider. 'this might be my last christmas as part of the family,' i pleaded. 'let me have this last one.' that my extremely religious parents who once informed me that bisexual men are the most evil men on the planet because they are the ones that spread AIDS to the straight population, that voted for reagan happily, that had bush/cheney bumper stickers on their cars, that were members of the NRA, that will in all likelihood vote for mccain/palin in just a few weeks; that these parents would love me and accept me as i am was beyond hope. i wasn't expecting to come out intact. i was doing this to try and find my way out of the pit of shame and self-hate that i had dug myself into. if i lost my parents in the proces, it would be the same thing as a badger chewing off his leg to free himself from a hunter's trap.
before i got on the train to go from chicago to michigan, my sisters called. 'we're headed over to mom and dad's house now,' they said. 'and don't worry. we won't leave until mom and dad are fine with it.' brave words from two incredibly loving sisters. when i boarded the train i knew that my world would be completely changed by the time i arrived in michigan.
my brothers-in-law picked me up at the train station five hours later. still no word from my sisters. we all went back to my sister's house to wait for the outcome. i was nervous. i paced. my brothers-in-law tried to calm me down. i tried to pretend i was okay with whatever. i felt like i was a young boy again, head bent towards the water fountain, waiting to see if i would end up with a mouthful of warm, acid blood.
eventually my sisters came home. their first words were, 'we are so proud of mom and dad.' they told the rest of the story. how mom and dad resisted at first, asking about girls i had been involved with in high school. how mom and dad had asked my sisters to leave the room so they could talk about it between the two of them and how my sisters refused so that they could be there to guide my parents' thinking. how eventually my father said that it was all genetics anyway, and that i probably didn't have a choice in the matter. they told me that christmas was still on and that we all were supposed to show up at mom and dad's house the next morning at ten.
i barely slept that night. i didn't know how to think or what to feel. i couldn't tell you how or what happened, but somehow i ended up knocking on my parents' front door on christmas morning, miraculously and finally out of the closet. without having actually said the words, 'mom, dad, i'm gay.'
my mom greeted me at the door and with sad eyes, she gave me a big hug. i immediately started crying. she brushed my tears from my eyes and said, 'don't cry, son. there's no reason to cry here. there's nothing to be sad about here.' and then she said, 'why didn't you tell us yourself, son? didn't you trust your dad and me?'
helplessly, i said, 'it's hard to believe in unconditional love when you've seen so many people lose their families over this.' and my mom started to cry then and she reached up to grab my shoulders almost as if she were angry with me. and she shook me and looked me fiercely in the eye and she said, 'well do you at least know better now?'
and then i was hugging my father. and he said, 'son, your mother and i love you very much and are very proud of you. that remains unchanged and undiminished.'
and then we were all crying and in my memory snow was falling even though i don't know if that's true. because it was the perfect christmas. and everybody knows you can't have a perfect christmas without a shimmering curtain of pure white snow reaching down to the dark ground and covering it.
i am one of the lucky ones. i found a way through the hatred and shame and back into the light. i am 37 years old now and have found the love of my life. i have revealed myself as completely as i can and he has welcomed me and loved me and cherished me. and if this love is wrong and if the old testament and all of the people who have tried to hold us down are right; if after i die, i burn in a lake of fire for having loved this man, i say that i am fine with that.
because i have been given the gift of unconditional love -- from my friends, from my family and from my partner, tim -- and that has been heaven enough for this and all of my other lifetimes.