Finding Light in the Dark } Coming Out
Ashley Lemire/The Quad News
Editor's Note: In honor of National Coming Out Day, Oct. 11, members of GLASS (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Supporters) have offered their tales of struggle and courage to The Quad News as inspiration for others. We hope that you will respect these individuals and their stories.
I told my mother on a Tuesday. Just after school, sometime in the fall.
I wasn't the only gay in school, but we were far from a populous bunch. Before my senior year, before the year I came out, Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) were these mythical sorts of things that existed in the same far-off lands as the unicorns I'd been mocked for liking. I never actually liked unicorns, of course. That was the bit that angered me. I'll never know why that idea popped into their heads, but I'll be damned if they weren't convinced.
High school was lonely, for lack of a better word. I enjoyed myself, had friends who knew my sexual orientation and was a generally healthy kid. But it was lonely because I had no one to talk to about being gay. There was a period of denial I went through when I was a freshman and a sophomore. I even had a girlfriend during those days. But looking back now, I realize that most of what I did with her was not out of love or desire, but out of a belief that it was probably what was expected of me, and I'd do well to perform it. But that ended, as they often do, and around junior year I realized that I was as gay as Christmas.
And I had no idea what to do then. It wasn't the Lifetime-Television sort of cluelessness, with soaring music and tears. It was one of the times where I looked at myself in the mirror, frowned and said, "Well damn. Now what do I do?"
I had no idea what it actually meant to be gay. Many of us were given the American Dream; the notion that one day I'd stand in front of a house with my wife, two kids and a dog.
The wife went away. I couldn't get married at the time, so the kids went away. The house went away. And in that mental image I stood alone, because the happiness I'd been told I'd have one day was no longer available to me.
If I was gay, I thought, "What do I actually DO?" Being the book-loving introvert that I am, I did what came most sensibly to me: I looked in the library and on the internet.
I'm from a small town, with a small school. The teachers and counselors were not people from whom I could learn to be gay. They were straight people, as far as I knew, so what did they know? The library had no books that mentioned homosexuality outside of encyclopedias, and I shouldn't have been surprised that none of the movies had gay people in them.
The internet was only slightly more helpful. I learned rather quickly that looking up "gay" on the internet is not the wisest of things to do on the family computer. But I amended my search, and discovered that some places had GSAs, where people like me came out of the woodwork and figured out how to actually go about being this thing we were. I wanted to start one. Not because I wanted to help people, at the time, but because I figured that if I started one of these I'd be able to find people like me.
So, now we're back to that Tuesday. I was starting a GSA, and had plenty of papers with me about policies, rules and ideas, most of which had the word "gay" over them, with a sort of shameless abandon that I found exhilarating. So, I came home one day to find my mother at her desk, going about her work. I placed my bag on the edge of her desk so I could pet my dog, and a few papers spilled out. I'm a messy person, so I paid it no attention. Things fall out of my bag constantly. As I pet my dog, my mother looked to the paper, laughed and said, "Is there anything you want to tell me?"
I laugh and say "no" and hate myself for it. Then I pet my dog some more, because doing that makes me feel better about myself, and I sigh. And I said "Well, now that you mention it..."
Not the smoothest of segues, I know. But I told my mother, right then and there. I told my mother that I had a boyfriend, and that I was gay. And she said, "Okay," and muted Oprah.
I was shocked. I remember quite clearly asking her in disbelief whether she was really okay with it.
"You're not going to kill me?"
"No."
"Crucify me?"
"No."
"Stone me?"
"No."
"Murder me?"
"Jesus Christ, if you keep asking me the damn questions I might!"
My father found out a week later, and my mother remained respectfully silent while I told him. He knows now, and he was as fine with it as he could be. Neither of them knew quite what to do, which is a forgivable thing, of course. But they believe that what they must do is love me, and they've done a fantastic job of it.
The hardest time for them, I believe, was not my coming out, but when I had my HIV scare. I was terrified. I had goals of living past 35, and with the news that I might've had HIV, everything I'd decided to live for seemed impossible. And everything my parents had hoped for me, vanished before their eyes.
If they had any reservations about me being gay, they went away at this point when they realized that it's not some compartmentalized part of my personality, but something that affects the very way I live my life. And, the way the world affects me.
The test came back negative, but my immediate family has never been more supportive and ready to tackle the world itself to make sure I was alright. I know my story is not the most common of sorts, one with a happy ending and a receptive family. But it does well to remind ourselves that there are lights in the dark.
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