Coming out is a continual process. We are constantly meeting new people, and they all automatically assume straightness (is that a word?)
I came out to a co-worker a couple of years ago.... a dyed in the wool republican who was very much against gay marriage.
She was a really nice person, but had no clue that I was gay. I had just started working alongside her a month or so previously.
One day the conversation turned to gay marriage, and she began expounding her (blah blah blah) views.
I couldn't take it. I told her my story.
Once upon a time I lived in a small town in AZ, I met my partner when I was eighteen, and we were together until she died of a heart attack 21 years later.
We were poor. We didn't start out that way, but illness (hers) had taken its toll. So, despite the fact that we had built a life together, managed to hold on to our home and land together, and had numerous assets together, neither one of us had a will because we simply couldn't afford it by the time we needed it.
To make a long story short, the home and land were in her name and I lost everything to her family, who never cared for her in the least in her last years of mental and physical illnesses. I had no safety net, no savings, not even a good running car. All my energy had been funneled into caring for her during her debilitating descent into manic depression and her numerous physical problems, some of them a result of the manic depression.
Well, I not only told this woman I was gay, I told her what had happened to me because of this country's stance on gay marriage and/or civil unions, and a miracle happened right before my eyes. She got it. She had been through the same thing almost, with an ex husband who took everything from her. So she was able to understand that if that could happen to her, with the protections that marriage affords, how absolutely impossible it could be for someone who is not afforded those protections.
Despite her devout religious beliefs, she was able to separate them from the issue, and began talking to other conservatives about the need for protections and why gay marriage is important.
This miracle could never have happened had I not come out at the most propitious time possible. Coming out enables people who don't get it to become people who understand us on a human level. It turns a subject they know nothing about into a subject they know about personally. Coming out tears down the walls that Falwell, Robertson and the republican party have erected.
Truth is like that.