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A Belated Closet
Oct. 12th, 2020 12:02 pm
Yesterday was National Coming Out Day, which is generally a day of celebration. For me it's a little more fraught. I've explained why elsewhere but I thought it might be nice to revisit here.
Coming out wasn't necessarily up to me. I was in college at the time and not doing well, so I took advantage of the free therapy services there. My therapist was a decent man who really wanted to help, and I think he just got ahead of himself. After one session in which I agreed I should probably tell my mother I'm gay, I got a phone call from him saying that he told my mom everything and she was on the other line.
I think he wanted to referee the conversation to help us to come to an understanding, but it was still a lot sooner than I would have done it on my own. Over the phone, my mother was nonplussed. "I thought so," she said. "It doesn't change the way I feel."
I was so relieved, and when I went home for Thanksgiving I went to give her a big hug. But she stepped back and said, "Don't touch me. I don't know where your hands have been."
She sat me down with a telephone and made me come out to the rest of my family, one by one. My grandmother (who was awesome about it), my biological brothers, my sisters, my cousins and nephews. She said really hurtful things like "It's a good thing I wasn't closer to you. If I were and you had told me, I would have hated you."
I couldn't spend Christmas with her, so I took up a friend on his offer to spend the holiday with him, driving across the country from Albany, NY to Grand Coulee, WA. That summer when I came home, she said that when I left for college I shouldn't come back. I left within a week and crashed at the home of some other dudes I met online living in Arlington. They were extraordinarily kind to house me, but they were also dealing with their own stuff -- relationship issues, crippling OCD that one person was trying to get disability for, muscular dystrophy for another guy, the whole bit. That was its own trauma; I was molested there, but I didn't think that's what it was at the time.
I tried to kill myself that summer. I was so tired of feeling that much pain, and I just wanted to sleep forever. So I took a bunch of sleeping pills, woke up 24 hours later, kept taking more sleeping pills whenever I woke up. I'm not sure how long I slept, but someone made a sandwich for me and made me eat it after a few days. Again, kind people, just...messed up.
It's taken me a long, long time to get over my experience coming out. It went about as bad as it could possibly go. The worst part is that my mother is now dealing with dementia in her advancing age, so she swears up and down that she didn't kick me out, she didn't disown me. But I'll never forget the way she treated me after that. I'll never forgive her, either, but I'm also making my peace with the fact that I won't get closure about this. She'll never recognize what she did to me, and she'll never recognize what she did to my sister, either. Another story for another campfire.
Looking back on the experience makes me feel strangely proud, and enormously grateful. There were so many people who kept me from being homeless that year, and I'll never forget their kindness and generosity. It was one of the worst periods of my life, but I made it through and lived to tell the tale. I'm incredibly resilient. I'm a survivor. I can make it through a great deal -- not without scars, but still. I've struggled.
And now, 20 years later, I'm in a happy and stable marriage with a wonderful man. I'm part of a great community that offers such incredible, unconditional support. And, even though there's further to go, being gay in the United States is a lot more acceptable than it was even when I was a kid. I'm grateful for that, too, for the progress we've made as a society. Hopefully, folks today have to deal with my experience a lot less.
Even still, there are times where I sincerely wish I had a close, functional family. But I come from people who don't have a great deal to do with each other, and then only usually when something is needed. I would love to know what it's like to have a mother that cared about me, but my biological mother had a schizophrenic break when I was very young and never recovered; my adopted mom was a religious evangelical who had been trained to choose her congregation over her family. My adopted father was an alcoholic, moved out when I was 9 and disappeared to this day when I was 14.
I have a found family now. But in those stories where just the fact that someone is related to you means you'd do anything for them...I get that as a concept, but emotionally it's so alien to me. It feels like a part of the human experience I just...don't get to have. And most of the time, that's OK. But some days, it's hard.
Coming out wasn't necessarily up to me. I was in college at the time and not doing well, so I took advantage of the free therapy services there. My therapist was a decent man who really wanted to help, and I think he just got ahead of himself. After one session in which I agreed I should probably tell my mother I'm gay, I got a phone call from him saying that he told my mom everything and she was on the other line.
I think he wanted to referee the conversation to help us to come to an understanding, but it was still a lot sooner than I would have done it on my own. Over the phone, my mother was nonplussed. "I thought so," she said. "It doesn't change the way I feel."
I was so relieved, and when I went home for Thanksgiving I went to give her a big hug. But she stepped back and said, "Don't touch me. I don't know where your hands have been."
She sat me down with a telephone and made me come out to the rest of my family, one by one. My grandmother (who was awesome about it), my biological brothers, my sisters, my cousins and nephews. She said really hurtful things like "It's a good thing I wasn't closer to you. If I were and you had told me, I would have hated you."
I couldn't spend Christmas with her, so I took up a friend on his offer to spend the holiday with him, driving across the country from Albany, NY to Grand Coulee, WA. That summer when I came home, she said that when I left for college I shouldn't come back. I left within a week and crashed at the home of some other dudes I met online living in Arlington. They were extraordinarily kind to house me, but they were also dealing with their own stuff -- relationship issues, crippling OCD that one person was trying to get disability for, muscular dystrophy for another guy, the whole bit. That was its own trauma; I was molested there, but I didn't think that's what it was at the time.
I tried to kill myself that summer. I was so tired of feeling that much pain, and I just wanted to sleep forever. So I took a bunch of sleeping pills, woke up 24 hours later, kept taking more sleeping pills whenever I woke up. I'm not sure how long I slept, but someone made a sandwich for me and made me eat it after a few days. Again, kind people, just...messed up.
It's taken me a long, long time to get over my experience coming out. It went about as bad as it could possibly go. The worst part is that my mother is now dealing with dementia in her advancing age, so she swears up and down that she didn't kick me out, she didn't disown me. But I'll never forget the way she treated me after that. I'll never forgive her, either, but I'm also making my peace with the fact that I won't get closure about this. She'll never recognize what she did to me, and she'll never recognize what she did to my sister, either. Another story for another campfire.
Looking back on the experience makes me feel strangely proud, and enormously grateful. There were so many people who kept me from being homeless that year, and I'll never forget their kindness and generosity. It was one of the worst periods of my life, but I made it through and lived to tell the tale. I'm incredibly resilient. I'm a survivor. I can make it through a great deal -- not without scars, but still. I've struggled.
And now, 20 years later, I'm in a happy and stable marriage with a wonderful man. I'm part of a great community that offers such incredible, unconditional support. And, even though there's further to go, being gay in the United States is a lot more acceptable than it was even when I was a kid. I'm grateful for that, too, for the progress we've made as a society. Hopefully, folks today have to deal with my experience a lot less.
Even still, there are times where I sincerely wish I had a close, functional family. But I come from people who don't have a great deal to do with each other, and then only usually when something is needed. I would love to know what it's like to have a mother that cared about me, but my biological mother had a schizophrenic break when I was very young and never recovered; my adopted mom was a religious evangelical who had been trained to choose her congregation over her family. My adopted father was an alcoholic, moved out when I was 9 and disappeared to this day when I was 14.
I have a found family now. But in those stories where just the fact that someone is related to you means you'd do anything for them...I get that as a concept, but emotionally it's so alien to me. It feels like a part of the human experience I just...don't get to have. And most of the time, that's OK. But some days, it's hard.
