I usually like to hear other people's coming out stories. They tend to have the ingredients of self-empowerment and pride that make a good story. However, not everyone has one, some people grew up in an environment in where they didn't need to come out as gays or lesbians... Hopefully, in the future, coming out will be a curious anecdote mentioned in sociology and history books, but for now, the society has not fully accepted same-sex love. Some coming out stories are really painful, but they all found the happy ending that standing up with courage and willingness to live truthfully to yourself and being who you already are brings.
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| Picture taken in an Art Gallery in L.A. September 2014. |
My coming out story has two parts.... first I had to accept who I was and then, I had to lose the fear of what other people would think of me for being who I was. Both parts were a struggle with my own self and both parts of the story are closely connected.
The first part of my coming out story, discovering who I was, happened between age of 16 to about 21. When I look back, everything makes sense now, I was gay but I didn't know what gay was: "The dots only connect looking backwards, not looking forward..." (Steve Jobs, 'How to live before I die')...
I was in denial of my sexuality because I thought that being gay was being a fat short-hair butchy woman. The society told me that gay was being an outlier runaway and I didn't see myself reflected in that stereotype.
I didn't know many gay people... the only lesbian that I knew was a walking stereotype. This is like the chicken and the egg.... Do lesbians create the stereotype or is the stereotype who creates them?.
Slowly, I started to understand that a lesbian perhaps was not defined by her clothes and hair style, but by her love for another woman. Then, I started to allow myself to contemplate the possibility that I was maybe experiencing feelings for some women.... However, I tended to block those thoughts in my mind.... I was not supposed to be gay, I was supposed to be normal.
Now looking back, I can see how I might have had some feelings for women in the past, but didn't really put them into context.... I blocked them and I didn't allow them to grow....
My final Aha-moment happened in my year abroad. I met a girl for whom I was starting to developed those feelings..... It was one of those strange connections that I was not able to label before, but this time it was more intense. Perhaps because I was far from home, or perhaps because I was also slightly older than before and ready to acknowledge my feelings...
One day, after a trip to the supermarket, I saw her in an intimate situation with a guy, he was whispering in her ear in the corridor of our student accommodation and I was walking by.... Suddenly, I started to feel very bad and I rushed into my room, I closed the door and collapsed on the floor by the intensity of the emotion with all of the bags from the supermarket in my hands... that was my aha-moment.
It was not just that I was jealous, that I was, it was more about the confirmation that I was gay and had romantic feelings for another woman... (by the way it tuned out that she was not interested in that guy at all....). This was a confirmation more than a revelation, I was in love and it was a girl.... I was gay!.... and now what?
The second part, telling other people, was actually harder. I was afraid of being disconnected, of being rejected and being labelled as the media stereotype of a lesbian woman...
I saw my sexuality as a weakness, as something to be a shame of and I was not ready to tell the world. When I saw Brené Brown TedTalk on 'the power of vulnerability', I identified myself with it. She defined shame as "the fear of disconnection... it is something about me, that if other people see I won't be worthy of connection." I could see how for me, being gay was something shameful, something to be afraid of... I was a shame of a part of myself and scared of being rejected....
Also, since I labelled myself as gay but I was still in the closet, I started to notice that my friendships were not growing and my connection with my family was getting weaker. This was because, as Brené explains, "In other for connection to happen, we need to allow ourselves to be seen". By not disclosing my sexuality to other people, I was not able to make real connections. By omitting myself, I was creating meaningless moments and that was hurting me and undermining my self-esteem.
That feeling of isolation is reflected in what my friend calls the 'sad eyes' of closeted people. My friend said that if you look at pictures from before he came out, he was always looking small, fearful, shy and unsecured, he had 'sad eyes'.
I needed to start slowly to come out to my friends, but it seemed that it was never the right time.... Facing death is how I finally overcame my fear of rejection and I stopped caring about what other people might think of me.
In my year abroad in Canada, I had a moment when all turned white, I was suddenly embracing a peaceful feeling and there was only one thought in my mind:
"This is it...".
I was hit by a car in a rainy day in the corner of Nicholas Street and MacKenzie King Bridge in Ottawa... Luckily, it wasn't it.... but I had a head concussion and was taken in an ambulance to the nearest Hospital.
When I was release from the emergency room, in where they kept me lying down with my full back and neck immobilised by the stretcher for hours, I was given a leaflet that it said something like: "You have had a severe head concussion, please don't fall sleep and be monitored as in the next 24h you can die.... "
I had a whole day to process that I could faint and die due to the head concussion or perhaps I might not wake up the next morning.....
I thought about my life, how I was living it and what it was missing... in this case, love, real connections and honesty were missing in my life. That day, I understood that only YOU live YOUR life, and what others might think, at the end it doesn't matter. You need to collect moments of happiness without worrying about other people's judgements...
The next morning when I woke up, I thought that I was given a second chance and so I decided to start living my life differently. The first thing to do was coming out of the closet. Luckily, I was 4,000 miles away from home, away from my friends and family, from all of the ties with the society where I grew up. I was in a country where no one knew me... and where being judge didn't matter.
One night, after I recovered from my head concussion, my dizziness and some sleepless nights after my accident, I went to a Halloween Party and I met a Spanish guy. He was dressed as a zombie M&M with an adapted costume that he bought at the dollar shop at the Rideau Shopping Center and had decorated it with some fake blood.
He was funny, I thought that he was gay and that perhaps, I could talked to him about my sexuality. Few days after, I bumped into him in the hall of the Student Residence, he was smoking a cigarette outside and I invited him up for lunch. We talked about the experience of being away, my accident and we made plans to go to a house party together later that week.
When we met up for buying beer at the liquor store that following night, I decided that carrying 24 bottles of Molson Canadian was the right time to come out. I needed to talk to someone about my feelings and since it seem to never be the right time, I just jumped into it, so I asked him:
"You are gay, right?" I attributed the condition of being gay to my companion first. Classic psychological mechanism of dissociation with the condition until the other party confirms on its part for the fear of displaying their own sexuality first and being perhaps socially rejected.
He smiled at me and nodded
"I think that I'm gay too...." I said. That was the first time that I used the word gay referring to myself out loud.
He smiled again and said:
"You think but, you don't know?"
He had a point. I had not kiss a girl in my life and, of course, I had no previous experience of any kind of intimate contact with the female gender.... It was then when I realised that I needed not just to acknowledge my label in front of other people, I needed to act on it... I needed to explore my sexuality. Being in a foreign country was going to help...
That night, I also told to a group of people that were friends with the zombie M&M that I was gay. It turned out that one of them was also gay, and another one was bisexual. They were completely OK with me being gay, and for the first time in a while I was connecting with people, I was being myself and it felt good.
The learning from my conversation with the gay zombie M&M was that I need to explore my sexuality.... and in a pool full of international open-minded students in their early twenties, there were a lot of opportunities...
House parties, sports events and lots of gatherings organized by the University..... However, the girl that I had feelings for was gone... She only stayed for a semester in Canada. I send her an email saying that I liked her after accepting her Facebook friendship request and finding out that she was also interested in women.
She answered back saying that she also liked me but that it was too late.... she has back in Europe and carrying on with her life... fair enough.... you need to take the opportunities when they come along.... and now it was too late.... I was a bit heart broken, but it was my fault, so I accepted my part and moved on....
One night a lesbian looking girl approached me in a party. She was actually a friend of the girl I liked before, but she was not my type.....She was short and very intimidating, you could smell that she was gay a mile away due to her tough way of walking around campus and her masculine body language. However, she had an intense deep purple-violet-blue eyes that could easily catch someone eye.....
She kept on approaching me in parties and one night, I was drunk and I decided that well..., she was not going to be the love of my life, but she was nice and funny and.... available..... So on a drunken night out she became my first girl experiment.
It wasn't bad, but I just didn't have feelings for her... This experience confused me more than bringing any clarity about my sexuality.... It was not the intense experience that I was waiting for.... It was more like the experiences that I had in the past with guys....
Therefore, I thought that perhaps, I was not gay after all... I wanted to not to be gay so much.... I could see now how my mind was already trying to justifying my experience: You tried with a girl and didn't really feel anything different that with guys.... therefore, I'm not gay after all.... so maybe I should go back to guys and my life will be easier.....
A week later from that first girl-experiment night, I was in a party again. I had a few cocktails and got a bit drunk..... My temporal alcoholism probably was due to the fact that I was having a bad month: the girl that I liked said that she liked me too, but she it was too late now.... I was feeling like an idiot for not acting on my feelings at the right time.... then, I tried to explore my sexuality with a girl but didn't go as expected.... so, I was very confused and anxious about my sexuality and love life in general....
I started dancing with this French boy. He was cute and tall, with lovely hair and nerdy glasses, a bit like the French version of a mix between Clark Kent and Harry Potter.....
The night ended up in my room, I needed to see if I wasn't gay after all.... But what were the odds that it turned out that the French guy was in the completely same situation. He was also gay and was trying to see if he definitely didn't like women at all.... as you can imagine the night was not very promising...
After he left my room, I decided that ending up with a gay guy was perhaps a confirmation sign that I was gay... from all of the available boys at the party, I chose the closeted gay... also, having feelings for a girl before was definitely a sign that I shouldn't ignore.... just because my experiment with a girl didn't work out, it didn't mean that I was not going to develop feelings for another girl in the future....
At the end of the day the 'feeling it or not' it is a matter of having feelings for the person, and I have to confess that I did not have feelings for my first girl experiment... I guess we all made mistakes... The moral of the story this time was that I needed to experiment with a girl that I had actual feelings for and stop messing around....
For a while, I was doing my thing without getting involved with anyone.... I started to go swimming.... and then, when I was doing my thing... without any plan I met a French girl....
We bummed into each other at house parties and at the poll quite a lot... She was very nice and had a nice conversation. We always ended up the swimming session chatting at the sauna.... or we were in a house party we would talked for a very long time.... she had the gay vibe and few of my friends confirmed it too....
I wanted to make a move.... Once I tried to shift the conversation to the gay zone, but she brought up her boyfriend... So, finally, I decided that perhaps, she was not gay and she was just friendly and that I was not going to make a move and ruin a nice friendship....
However, in my last night in Canada, she knocked on my door at about 4 am, I was still packing.... she had been wandering around my building since we said goodbye at the bar around midnight. She looked at me and hug me.... it was her way of telling me that she also had feelings for me....
At that moment.... I understood how the girl from the first semester felt when I send her the email telling her that I loved her.... it was too late... It was too late to see where this could have gone.... we were both coming back to Europe and we both had lives back home...
We said goodbye and pretended to keep in touch for a while.... Thanks to Facebook, I know that she is now married..... to a GIRL!!!! I am very happy that she finally came out of the closet and left her boyfriend....
The lesson from this event was that we always regret what it didn't happen, and one more time, once the opportunity is gone.... it is gone...!!!
My year abroad was over and coming back home was going to be another story.... I had to face the people that I grew up with and tell them that I was now gay.... Well, I was gay before, but I was now ready to BE gay. This was going to be tough, so I started slowly with my school friends... Most of them were very understanding, however, they asked me the typical questions that we all get when we come out....
I remember that one of my friends said to me:
"How can you be gay if you are way more feminine that I am?"
To what I answered:
"Sexuality is not a matter of femininity or masculinity... gender identity and the conformity with the traditional gender roles in society is different from being gay or straight".
After given few speeches similar to the one quoted above among my friends, I told a few of my university friends too... But I don't think I told all of them. Sexual orientation among early-twenties university students tend to be often a topic of conversation so, I knew that any gay gossip would spread quickly. With some people I just acted as if it was assumed that I was gay and didn't do an official statement.
Since then, I've been telling people when I meet them only if the occasion comes up, but I usually try not to make a big deal out of it... Brighton is actually a great place to live, most people is gay or gay friendly and no one judges you...
Regarding my family, I didn't tell my parents straight away. I was waiting to have a stable relationship to introduce it as something normal, but unfortunately, I didn't have too much luck in love during my first years of being gay. So, decided to put myself a deadline to come up to my parents: My 25th birthday!
Every Sunday before my deadline, when I was driving to my parents' house for lunch, I found myself going through my coming out plan in my head.... thinking that "today is the day, I'm going to finally tell them"... But whenever I opened the door and started to chat with them parents, it never seem to be the right time, it was never the right conversation nor the right moment...
One Sunday afternoon, when I was about to leave, I told my mum.
She was sitting in front of her computer and I said that I was gay as if I was telling her that I was planing to have pasta for dinner.... without making any kind of speech or changing my voice.... as it was something very normal and did not deserve a special moment....
She lifted her gaze and said:
"Does this mean that you are not going to have children?"
She was worried more about not having grandsons than my actual partner.... I replied that one thing didn't mean the other and left...
I gave her a whole week to process and the Sunday after we had a lovely conversation over tea. I ended up crying but she was very supportive. I didn't tell my dad directly, but I know that my mum did that for me.
My parents tell each other this kind of stuff, and he seems supportive. We watch movies whenever I go to visit and he lately keep insisting on watching gay theme movies. I guess that it is his way of saying that it is OK.
At the end of the day, love for children is unconditional and if they love you, they will love you no matter what.
Finally, after my year in Canada, and due to the fact the I didn't know that many gay people in my home town, I turned to the online dating world... so, here we go back to my previous post: "My first online date".
I have had some off-line dating experiences too and I have being out on the scene, usually with the zombie M&M that I met in Canada.... and sometimes with other gay men too.... it wasn't until recently that I started to have lesbians friends... so the online world has been a big part of my dating life, possibly due to my insecurities in approaching girls out of a gay context... Maybe when I run out of online dating stories I will start with my off-line ones... but for the moment, I still have a bunch of stories on my pocket yet to be told... and the ones that are happening now...
Apologize for the long post... but coming out was a long process for me...
I was in denial of my sexuality because I thought that being gay was being a fat short-hair butchy woman. The society told me that gay was being an outlier runaway and I didn't see myself reflected in that stereotype.
I didn't know many gay people... the only lesbian that I knew was a walking stereotype. This is like the chicken and the egg.... Do lesbians create the stereotype or is the stereotype who creates them?.
Slowly, I started to understand that a lesbian perhaps was not defined by her clothes and hair style, but by her love for another woman. Then, I started to allow myself to contemplate the possibility that I was maybe experiencing feelings for some women.... However, I tended to block those thoughts in my mind.... I was not supposed to be gay, I was supposed to be normal.
Now looking back, I can see how I might have had some feelings for women in the past, but didn't really put them into context.... I blocked them and I didn't allow them to grow....
My final Aha-moment happened in my year abroad. I met a girl for whom I was starting to developed those feelings..... It was one of those strange connections that I was not able to label before, but this time it was more intense. Perhaps because I was far from home, or perhaps because I was also slightly older than before and ready to acknowledge my feelings...
One day, after a trip to the supermarket, I saw her in an intimate situation with a guy, he was whispering in her ear in the corridor of our student accommodation and I was walking by.... Suddenly, I started to feel very bad and I rushed into my room, I closed the door and collapsed on the floor by the intensity of the emotion with all of the bags from the supermarket in my hands... that was my aha-moment.
It was not just that I was jealous, that I was, it was more about the confirmation that I was gay and had romantic feelings for another woman... (by the way it tuned out that she was not interested in that guy at all....). This was a confirmation more than a revelation, I was in love and it was a girl.... I was gay!.... and now what?
The second part, telling other people, was actually harder. I was afraid of being disconnected, of being rejected and being labelled as the media stereotype of a lesbian woman...
I saw my sexuality as a weakness, as something to be a shame of and I was not ready to tell the world. When I saw Brené Brown TedTalk on 'the power of vulnerability', I identified myself with it. She defined shame as "the fear of disconnection... it is something about me, that if other people see I won't be worthy of connection." I could see how for me, being gay was something shameful, something to be afraid of... I was a shame of a part of myself and scared of being rejected....
Also, since I labelled myself as gay but I was still in the closet, I started to notice that my friendships were not growing and my connection with my family was getting weaker. This was because, as Brené explains, "In other for connection to happen, we need to allow ourselves to be seen". By not disclosing my sexuality to other people, I was not able to make real connections. By omitting myself, I was creating meaningless moments and that was hurting me and undermining my self-esteem.
That feeling of isolation is reflected in what my friend calls the 'sad eyes' of closeted people. My friend said that if you look at pictures from before he came out, he was always looking small, fearful, shy and unsecured, he had 'sad eyes'.
I needed to start slowly to come out to my friends, but it seemed that it was never the right time.... Facing death is how I finally overcame my fear of rejection and I stopped caring about what other people might think of me.
In my year abroad in Canada, I had a moment when all turned white, I was suddenly embracing a peaceful feeling and there was only one thought in my mind:
"This is it...".
I was hit by a car in a rainy day in the corner of Nicholas Street and MacKenzie King Bridge in Ottawa... Luckily, it wasn't it.... but I had a head concussion and was taken in an ambulance to the nearest Hospital.
When I was release from the emergency room, in where they kept me lying down with my full back and neck immobilised by the stretcher for hours, I was given a leaflet that it said something like: "You have had a severe head concussion, please don't fall sleep and be monitored as in the next 24h you can die.... "
I had a whole day to process that I could faint and die due to the head concussion or perhaps I might not wake up the next morning.....
I thought about my life, how I was living it and what it was missing... in this case, love, real connections and honesty were missing in my life. That day, I understood that only YOU live YOUR life, and what others might think, at the end it doesn't matter. You need to collect moments of happiness without worrying about other people's judgements...
The next morning when I woke up, I thought that I was given a second chance and so I decided to start living my life differently. The first thing to do was coming out of the closet. Luckily, I was 4,000 miles away from home, away from my friends and family, from all of the ties with the society where I grew up. I was in a country where no one knew me... and where being judge didn't matter.
Picture taken from my room in Ottawa (2006-2007)
One night, after I recovered from my head concussion, my dizziness and some sleepless nights after my accident, I went to a Halloween Party and I met a Spanish guy. He was dressed as a zombie M&M with an adapted costume that he bought at the dollar shop at the Rideau Shopping Center and had decorated it with some fake blood.
He was funny, I thought that he was gay and that perhaps, I could talked to him about my sexuality. Few days after, I bumped into him in the hall of the Student Residence, he was smoking a cigarette outside and I invited him up for lunch. We talked about the experience of being away, my accident and we made plans to go to a house party together later that week.
When we met up for buying beer at the liquor store that following night, I decided that carrying 24 bottles of Molson Canadian was the right time to come out. I needed to talk to someone about my feelings and since it seem to never be the right time, I just jumped into it, so I asked him:
"You are gay, right?" I attributed the condition of being gay to my companion first. Classic psychological mechanism of dissociation with the condition until the other party confirms on its part for the fear of displaying their own sexuality first and being perhaps socially rejected.
He smiled at me and nodded
"I think that I'm gay too...." I said. That was the first time that I used the word gay referring to myself out loud.
He smiled again and said:
"You think but, you don't know?"
He had a point. I had not kiss a girl in my life and, of course, I had no previous experience of any kind of intimate contact with the female gender.... It was then when I realised that I needed not just to acknowledge my label in front of other people, I needed to act on it... I needed to explore my sexuality. Being in a foreign country was going to help...
That night, I also told to a group of people that were friends with the zombie M&M that I was gay. It turned out that one of them was also gay, and another one was bisexual. They were completely OK with me being gay, and for the first time in a while I was connecting with people, I was being myself and it felt good.
The learning from my conversation with the gay zombie M&M was that I need to explore my sexuality.... and in a pool full of international open-minded students in their early twenties, there were a lot of opportunities...
House parties, sports events and lots of gatherings organized by the University..... However, the girl that I had feelings for was gone... She only stayed for a semester in Canada. I send her an email saying that I liked her after accepting her Facebook friendship request and finding out that she was also interested in women.
She answered back saying that she also liked me but that it was too late.... she has back in Europe and carrying on with her life... fair enough.... you need to take the opportunities when they come along.... and now it was too late.... I was a bit heart broken, but it was my fault, so I accepted my part and moved on....
One night a lesbian looking girl approached me in a party. She was actually a friend of the girl I liked before, but she was not my type.....She was short and very intimidating, you could smell that she was gay a mile away due to her tough way of walking around campus and her masculine body language. However, she had an intense deep purple-violet-blue eyes that could easily catch someone eye.....
She kept on approaching me in parties and one night, I was drunk and I decided that well..., she was not going to be the love of my life, but she was nice and funny and.... available..... So on a drunken night out she became my first girl experiment.
It wasn't bad, but I just didn't have feelings for her... This experience confused me more than bringing any clarity about my sexuality.... It was not the intense experience that I was waiting for.... It was more like the experiences that I had in the past with guys....
Therefore, I thought that perhaps, I was not gay after all... I wanted to not to be gay so much.... I could see now how my mind was already trying to justifying my experience: You tried with a girl and didn't really feel anything different that with guys.... therefore, I'm not gay after all.... so maybe I should go back to guys and my life will be easier.....
A week later from that first girl-experiment night, I was in a party again. I had a few cocktails and got a bit drunk..... My temporal alcoholism probably was due to the fact that I was having a bad month: the girl that I liked said that she liked me too, but she it was too late now.... I was feeling like an idiot for not acting on my feelings at the right time.... then, I tried to explore my sexuality with a girl but didn't go as expected.... so, I was very confused and anxious about my sexuality and love life in general....
I started dancing with this French boy. He was cute and tall, with lovely hair and nerdy glasses, a bit like the French version of a mix between Clark Kent and Harry Potter.....
The night ended up in my room, I needed to see if I wasn't gay after all.... But what were the odds that it turned out that the French guy was in the completely same situation. He was also gay and was trying to see if he definitely didn't like women at all.... as you can imagine the night was not very promising...
After he left my room, I decided that ending up with a gay guy was perhaps a confirmation sign that I was gay... from all of the available boys at the party, I chose the closeted gay... also, having feelings for a girl before was definitely a sign that I shouldn't ignore.... just because my experiment with a girl didn't work out, it didn't mean that I was not going to develop feelings for another girl in the future....
At the end of the day the 'feeling it or not' it is a matter of having feelings for the person, and I have to confess that I did not have feelings for my first girl experiment... I guess we all made mistakes... The moral of the story this time was that I needed to experiment with a girl that I had actual feelings for and stop messing around....
For a while, I was doing my thing without getting involved with anyone.... I started to go swimming.... and then, when I was doing my thing... without any plan I met a French girl....
We bummed into each other at house parties and at the poll quite a lot... She was very nice and had a nice conversation. We always ended up the swimming session chatting at the sauna.... or we were in a house party we would talked for a very long time.... she had the gay vibe and few of my friends confirmed it too....
I wanted to make a move.... Once I tried to shift the conversation to the gay zone, but she brought up her boyfriend... So, finally, I decided that perhaps, she was not gay and she was just friendly and that I was not going to make a move and ruin a nice friendship....
However, in my last night in Canada, she knocked on my door at about 4 am, I was still packing.... she had been wandering around my building since we said goodbye at the bar around midnight. She looked at me and hug me.... it was her way of telling me that she also had feelings for me....
At that moment.... I understood how the girl from the first semester felt when I send her the email telling her that I loved her.... it was too late... It was too late to see where this could have gone.... we were both coming back to Europe and we both had lives back home...
We said goodbye and pretended to keep in touch for a while.... Thanks to Facebook, I know that she is now married..... to a GIRL!!!! I am very happy that she finally came out of the closet and left her boyfriend....
The lesson from this event was that we always regret what it didn't happen, and one more time, once the opportunity is gone.... it is gone...!!!
My year abroad was over and coming back home was going to be another story.... I had to face the people that I grew up with and tell them that I was now gay.... Well, I was gay before, but I was now ready to BE gay. This was going to be tough, so I started slowly with my school friends... Most of them were very understanding, however, they asked me the typical questions that we all get when we come out....
I remember that one of my friends said to me:
"How can you be gay if you are way more feminine that I am?"
To what I answered:
"Sexuality is not a matter of femininity or masculinity... gender identity and the conformity with the traditional gender roles in society is different from being gay or straight".
After given few speeches similar to the one quoted above among my friends, I told a few of my university friends too... But I don't think I told all of them. Sexual orientation among early-twenties university students tend to be often a topic of conversation so, I knew that any gay gossip would spread quickly. With some people I just acted as if it was assumed that I was gay and didn't do an official statement.
Since then, I've been telling people when I meet them only if the occasion comes up, but I usually try not to make a big deal out of it... Brighton is actually a great place to live, most people is gay or gay friendly and no one judges you...
Regarding my family, I didn't tell my parents straight away. I was waiting to have a stable relationship to introduce it as something normal, but unfortunately, I didn't have too much luck in love during my first years of being gay. So, decided to put myself a deadline to come up to my parents: My 25th birthday!
Every Sunday before my deadline, when I was driving to my parents' house for lunch, I found myself going through my coming out plan in my head.... thinking that "today is the day, I'm going to finally tell them"... But whenever I opened the door and started to chat with them parents, it never seem to be the right time, it was never the right conversation nor the right moment...
One Sunday afternoon, when I was about to leave, I told my mum.
She was sitting in front of her computer and I said that I was gay as if I was telling her that I was planing to have pasta for dinner.... without making any kind of speech or changing my voice.... as it was something very normal and did not deserve a special moment....
She lifted her gaze and said:
"Does this mean that you are not going to have children?"
She was worried more about not having grandsons than my actual partner.... I replied that one thing didn't mean the other and left...
I gave her a whole week to process and the Sunday after we had a lovely conversation over tea. I ended up crying but she was very supportive. I didn't tell my dad directly, but I know that my mum did that for me.
My parents tell each other this kind of stuff, and he seems supportive. We watch movies whenever I go to visit and he lately keep insisting on watching gay theme movies. I guess that it is his way of saying that it is OK.
At the end of the day, love for children is unconditional and if they love you, they will love you no matter what.
Finally, after my year in Canada, and due to the fact the I didn't know that many gay people in my home town, I turned to the online dating world... so, here we go back to my previous post: "My first online date".
I have had some off-line dating experiences too and I have being out on the scene, usually with the zombie M&M that I met in Canada.... and sometimes with other gay men too.... it wasn't until recently that I started to have lesbians friends... so the online world has been a big part of my dating life, possibly due to my insecurities in approaching girls out of a gay context... Maybe when I run out of online dating stories I will start with my off-line ones... but for the moment, I still have a bunch of stories on my pocket yet to be told... and the ones that are happening now...
Apologize for the long post... but coming out was a long process for me...
Nice to read your story. It took me a long time to acknowledge and come to terms with my sexuality. Years of indoctrinated shame to overcome. I'm looking forward to your next story.
ReplyDeleteThank you! Comming out is difficult and sometimes is more about overcoming your own fears than anything else.
ReplyDeleteReally true. As with all self-realisation, only accentuated with sexual identity because it's such a socially charged subject.
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