PAINFUL AND UNNECESSARY: My Irrational Fear of Coming Out as a SINGLE Gay Man (James)

The first time I admitted to someone I was gay was actually in the 10th grade (2001), I believe. Back then, my friend, known around NHS as “Big Gay John,” and I would IM each other almost every night. On one fateful night, I just had the urge to share the secret with someone. I shared one of my favorite gay porn sites with him, and for a while, it brought us closer... until he pressured me into coming out on a wider scale by playfully teasing me in public. I wasn’t ready to tell everyone, and I refused to come out as a single gay man. That would be pathetic and unnecessary.

The second time I came out was more formal and well thought-out. At my annual Halloween party in 2004, I came out to two of my best friends, Nelly (LF) and Alexis (SF). I pulled them aside and showed them my favorite scene from Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss: the tuxedo waltz between Sean Hayes and Brad Rowe. However, when other friends at school started asking me about it, I retreated back into my bisexual act. I wish I hadn’t just assumed that my friends would keep quiet on the subject… after all, I didn’t tell them that they couldn’t spread the news.

I didn’t come out to my family until the summer of 2007, and it was certainly NOT on my terms. Somehow this gay porn distributor had my home address but my father/brother’s name, so my father saw one of the catalogs. Of course, I’m not stupid enough to have porn sent to my home address, so I’m still in the dark about what really happened. When my dad found this mail, he immediately accused my brother and was even threatening to kick him out of the house, but I stepped up and said it was mine (even though it wasn’t), and my dad just dropped the matter entirely.

In the following days he did pull me aside for short lectures, but he was/is not well-informed enough to do that successfully. This man watches CNN everyday, and yet he believes that all gay men are promiscuous, that HIV/AIDS is a gay disease, and that faith in God would turn me around… even though he is not religious at all. It was all very hypocritical of him to preach to me, and I let him know that LOUD AND CLEAR. He’d ask questions like, “How do you know you’re gay?” And I’d respond, “Well, I’m physically attracted to men, not women. I’ve always been gay but I didn’t fully realize it until puberty.” …And then he would just go back to watching TV.

Although I’m happy that my family was finally allowed to acknowledge what they’d known all along, I do regret that my mother and my sister had to hear it from my father and not from me. Of all people, my mother has always taken a genuine interest in my life, encouraged me to follow my dreams, gotten to know my friends, supported whatever I wanted to do… of all people, she deserved to hear it straight from me.

When I talked to her about it that night, I had to fight the tears because I kept something so big from the most important person in my life. And the tears really started welling up when she told me how she loved me no matter what, and that in her heart, she always knew. My father never admitted that, but he was the main person who made me feel emasculated as a child, the main person who teased for being even remotely feminine, and yet he claimed that he “couldn’t even wrap his head around the idea.” Yeah… right!

I have lost quite a few friends from high school after coming out. However, I think they separated themselves from me because they felt lied to—not because they hate gays. Typically, I’m very comfortable coming out to people I’ve just met. I guess it’s my atonement for all the years I stayed silent. I think the biggest problem on our campus is that not enough people are open and willing to talk about being gay… which has been THE major obstacle in shooting this documentary.

Although I’m very OUT to the openly gay professors and I’m willing to talk to them about my past-and-present relationships both in and out of the classroom, I don’t discuss my homosexuality with the vast majority of the other professors… unless they ask. When topics related to queer theory pop up in class, I usually won’t give a personal example because a) I don’t want to become the “token gay” in the class, and b) I don’t want my personal life to affect my grade positively or negatively. Some professors are more conservative than others, and if I don’t know where they stand, I don’t like to risk it. But I don’t bother switching pronouns if the professor calls on me specifically, because I know everyone in the class has FaceBook, so they already know what I’m into.