Many of us are under the assumption that when someone is born they are automatically straight. Only by the process of “coming out” can we learn the true nature of someone’s sexual orientation, so discreetly tucked away in the darkest corner of their closet.
“Coming out” is something most gay people will eventually go through and as someone who has gone through it myself, I can tell you that it’s really tough.
You don’t know how someone who’s known you your whole life will react to this new information.
A friend commented on the subject and said coming out is somewhere on the same level as having a Bar Mitzvah.
I think this is a completely valid point. It’s made to be such a big deal — usually with a huge shock factor — that after it’s over we have reentered society as a person with new traits.
This makes it difficult to find the motivation to come forward and just tell people. Will you potentially lose some people in your life? Will you personally have to change to come out into the world as something seemingly different?
There are also so many ways you could go about doing it. You can tell your closest friends and have the info filter down to others, publicly announce it via social media, rebel against an overly religious family member by leaking a gay sex video of yourself or, in my case, interrupt your mom during a driving lesson together by saying “so you know I like guys right?”
Looking back, it probably wasn’t one of my brightest ideas.
Even when I told one of my good friends, I kept stopping myself before I could actually get it out because I was scared of what her reaction would be.
When I finally got the courage to get it out she laughed and shouted, “oh, April fools!” Evidently my luck would have it that I literally picked April 1 to tell a handful of people.
But you see what I mean — it’s harder than it has to be and there are a few underlying issues as to why I think this is.
Touching on what I feel is one of the most important issues of coming out is that it’s hard to come to terms with it yourself, it truly is.
From the early years of school, we read stories of the prince falling in love with the princess, and later on in sex education we learn about intercourse between a male and a female and all that fun stuff that we giggled about at the back of class.
I was completely unprepared for the feelings that I would eventually discover.
I always had the mentality I was going to be attracted to a girl and end up with one.
Thus, I had to essentially “come out” to myself first by coming to terms with the fact that I like dick. I pushed back any ability to allow myself to develop feelings for another guy until one day it just happened.
That’s when I came to terms with it myself and adopted the philosophy: fuck what anyone else says the norm is.
If we see a guy and a girl holding hands they are a couple, but if we see two guys holding hands they are a gay couple.
It’s in our subconscious because of how we were raised in today’s society, but when it comes down to it, two people side by side are just people, but one might be attracted to the same sex.
The reason why we need to come out at all is simply because we see ourselves as something separate.
Since we are the minority we need to let everyone else know if our preference is same sex oriented. Sure, the majority of us are accepting of it but that’s not enough.
People are still seen as gay or straight and to identify with two different words is to identify us as different. If we can get past that we’ll just be people with different preferences, just the same as people have different preference in colours.
In the future who knows, a girl might see one of her close guy friends making out with another dude and not think twice about it, because he’s just more attracted to guys. No prior coming out process will be necessary, just the emotional connection and the fact that we are all horny fuckers.