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Here it is, entry number three of my memoirs. And now, after reliving this, I think it's time to head to the bar. Enjoy.
Coming Out
There comes a time in nearly every gay man’s life where he decides that he has had enough lying, deceiving, and hiding. It doesn’t matter anymore how scary life after truth can be, because by some point – living life as a lie is even worse.
For some of us, that age can come very late in life. I’ve known some men and women who didn’t come out until their late fifties and even their late sixties. Some of them were married and divorced, some of them remained married, and some of them never had a significant relationship in their whole life. Those are the men I see sitting alone in a smoke-filled cabaret lounge, nursing their Tanqueray and tonic, hunched over on their stool, eyeing every cute trim body that wanders past them and glaring at every happy couple in the room. Those are the men that I’m afraid of, because sometimes I see a little of myself in them. But I think if we’re honest, we all do.
But for others, the age we finally tell the truth can be quite young, and more and more of us are coming out earlier and earlier in life. I was fourteen, a freshman in high school, when I decided to come out and tell people that I am gay.
I had finally had enough of the lying; not that I actually lied about being gay often. I think most people just assumed that I was, or didn’t really think about it at all. A perfect example is Shawna’s reaction, not to mention her Grandfather’s prediction four years earlier. A couple years ago, Shawna told me about when she told her family that I had come out of the closet. Her younger cousin asked “What was he doing in the closet?” To which Shawna’s great-grandfather responded “He was playing with his toys.”
As I said, most people had already figured it out. That’s not to say that they took all took it well. Sure, my small circle of friends didn’t bat an eyelash, and they never treated me any different after I told them than they had before. If anything, it was a topic for humorous conversations that usually revolved around how (not) straight I had acted before I came out. But they weren’t the norm.
Between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, I perhaps got one month of sleep. Most nights I lied awake thinking about the torture I’d endured that day in school, and dreading the next day’s. There were quite a few nights that I cried myself to sleep circa every Lifetime Movie because I hated my life so much. More than once did I wish I could fall asleep and never wake up. Or wake up to find out it had all been a nightmare, a horrible, sickeningly real nightmare. But I never did wake up.
It wasn’t long after I had told my friends that I’m gay that I felt I had to tell my family, or at the very least my mother. For the better part of a month, I tried time and time again to get the words to come out of my mouth during our afternoon catch-ups. A few times I almost succeeded, but my lips just wouldn’t form the words. I finally decided that I might not ever be able to talk about it with her, but I still had to get it off my chest. So, being the everlasting romantic that I am, I decided to write a letter.
The first sentence of the letter, as I recall, was “Mom, I love you.” The second sentence was, “But this is something I have to tell you.” From there I rambled on for nearly three pages about how I would never live up to the expectations that I felt were imposed upon me, and that even though I knew it would disappoint her, I needed her to know: I’m gay. Three pages of introduction, once sentence stating the point of the letter, and another three pages of apologies and pleas of acceptance and understanding, and the letter was finished. I took that letter and sealed it in an envelope, writing in tiny, elegant cursive, “Mom,” on the front of it. Then I put the envelope under a stack of books and papers in the back of the bottom drawer in my desk. I didn’t feel much better, but it did take my mind of telling her, and I forgot about the letter after a few weeks.
A couple months passed, and I started getting letters from my brother, who was in prison again, in who knows what county. The gist of the letters was that he wished we could be close and that he was sorry for how treated me when we were younger. At this point in my life, I wanted nothing to do with him, or his letters. So I came up with this brilliant plan to get him to stop sending them, stop talking to me, and leave me alone. I figured that the one thing a prison inmate would hate most in the world was having a queer brother. So I wrote him back. The exact line I used, and I remember sneering so smugly as I wrote it out, was “…if you want to be close, there’s something you should know – I’m gay.” I even closed the letter with “Your gay brother, Bradley.” I sealed the letter and gave it to my mother to mail the next day.
But like all my brilliant plans, it backfired on me. The next afternoon when I came home from school, I found my mom lying in bed, the ever-present haze of smoke in the air and a cigarette dangling from her fingers. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. Then I noticed that next to her on the bed were two letters: the one that I had written to my brother the day before, and the one that I had written to her months before.
“We need to talk,” she muttered, noticing me standing in the doorway with my best Bambi eyes turned up at her.
And so we talked. She told me that she loved me still, and always will. She would never approve of it or understand it, but as long as I was happy – that’s what mattered. The last thing she said to me in that conversation was “You can’t have boys in the house now, you know that.” I only nodded, and I vowed that day that I would never introduce her to my boyfriends, or even my gay friends, male or female.
I didn’t speak to her for a few days, refused to look her in the eye, and found every excuse possible to be out of the house. But eventually we got back into a routine, and things got almost back to normal. A couple weeks later, I was in my basement bedroom doing my homework and my father knocked on the door. He didn’t say anything; he just came in and hugged me, and told me he loved me. That’s the only time he’s ever said that. So now my parents knew, I was officially out of the closet. And even though I knew they didn’t approve of it, I was still happy to be honest with them. I don’t think that they were ever ashamed of me or of having a gay son; it just became something we never talked about. They didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell. We’ve mainly kept that family policy through all these years.
That’s why I was so surprised at Thanksgiving dinner only a month later. We were in the middle of our dinner at my grandmother’s house. The adults were at their table, we kids were at ours, and the room was full of the noise of a family eating and talking and laughing. I was pretending to enjoy my aunt’s frozen green bean casserole, trying to keep the small talk between myself and my cousins to a minimum, when I hear over the din my mother’s voice, asking my grandmother, “Eileen, can you pass the rolls? Oh, and Brad’s gay.”
Dinner came a crashing halt, and every head in the room turned to stare at me with eyes and jaws wide open. The only sound in the room was the spinning plate someone had dropped on the floor, and maybe my heart beating fast enough and hard enough to rival any tribal drum. For at least a minute, I was the center of attention, and I knew what it felt like to be a carnival freak show. Instead of the rambling stutter that I could feel building up inside me, I just smiled, shrugged, and ate another fork full of cranberry sauce.
And that’s how I came out.
Coming Out
There comes a time in nearly every gay man’s life where he decides that he has had enough lying, deceiving, and hiding. It doesn’t matter anymore how scary life after truth can be, because by some point – living life as a lie is even worse.
For some of us, that age can come very late in life. I’ve known some men and women who didn’t come out until their late fifties and even their late sixties. Some of them were married and divorced, some of them remained married, and some of them never had a significant relationship in their whole life. Those are the men I see sitting alone in a smoke-filled cabaret lounge, nursing their Tanqueray and tonic, hunched over on their stool, eyeing every cute trim body that wanders past them and glaring at every happy couple in the room. Those are the men that I’m afraid of, because sometimes I see a little of myself in them. But I think if we’re honest, we all do.
But for others, the age we finally tell the truth can be quite young, and more and more of us are coming out earlier and earlier in life. I was fourteen, a freshman in high school, when I decided to come out and tell people that I am gay.
I had finally had enough of the lying; not that I actually lied about being gay often. I think most people just assumed that I was, or didn’t really think about it at all. A perfect example is Shawna’s reaction, not to mention her Grandfather’s prediction four years earlier. A couple years ago, Shawna told me about when she told her family that I had come out of the closet. Her younger cousin asked “What was he doing in the closet?” To which Shawna’s great-grandfather responded “He was playing with his toys.”
As I said, most people had already figured it out. That’s not to say that they took all took it well. Sure, my small circle of friends didn’t bat an eyelash, and they never treated me any different after I told them than they had before. If anything, it was a topic for humorous conversations that usually revolved around how (not) straight I had acted before I came out. But they weren’t the norm.
Between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, I perhaps got one month of sleep. Most nights I lied awake thinking about the torture I’d endured that day in school, and dreading the next day’s. There were quite a few nights that I cried myself to sleep circa every Lifetime Movie because I hated my life so much. More than once did I wish I could fall asleep and never wake up. Or wake up to find out it had all been a nightmare, a horrible, sickeningly real nightmare. But I never did wake up.
It wasn’t long after I had told my friends that I’m gay that I felt I had to tell my family, or at the very least my mother. For the better part of a month, I tried time and time again to get the words to come out of my mouth during our afternoon catch-ups. A few times I almost succeeded, but my lips just wouldn’t form the words. I finally decided that I might not ever be able to talk about it with her, but I still had to get it off my chest. So, being the everlasting romantic that I am, I decided to write a letter.
The first sentence of the letter, as I recall, was “Mom, I love you.” The second sentence was, “But this is something I have to tell you.” From there I rambled on for nearly three pages about how I would never live up to the expectations that I felt were imposed upon me, and that even though I knew it would disappoint her, I needed her to know: I’m gay. Three pages of introduction, once sentence stating the point of the letter, and another three pages of apologies and pleas of acceptance and understanding, and the letter was finished. I took that letter and sealed it in an envelope, writing in tiny, elegant cursive, “Mom,” on the front of it. Then I put the envelope under a stack of books and papers in the back of the bottom drawer in my desk. I didn’t feel much better, but it did take my mind of telling her, and I forgot about the letter after a few weeks.
A couple months passed, and I started getting letters from my brother, who was in prison again, in who knows what county. The gist of the letters was that he wished we could be close and that he was sorry for how treated me when we were younger. At this point in my life, I wanted nothing to do with him, or his letters. So I came up with this brilliant plan to get him to stop sending them, stop talking to me, and leave me alone. I figured that the one thing a prison inmate would hate most in the world was having a queer brother. So I wrote him back. The exact line I used, and I remember sneering so smugly as I wrote it out, was “…if you want to be close, there’s something you should know – I’m gay.” I even closed the letter with “Your gay brother, Bradley.” I sealed the letter and gave it to my mother to mail the next day.
But like all my brilliant plans, it backfired on me. The next afternoon when I came home from school, I found my mom lying in bed, the ever-present haze of smoke in the air and a cigarette dangling from her fingers. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. Then I noticed that next to her on the bed were two letters: the one that I had written to my brother the day before, and the one that I had written to her months before.
“We need to talk,” she muttered, noticing me standing in the doorway with my best Bambi eyes turned up at her.
And so we talked. She told me that she loved me still, and always will. She would never approve of it or understand it, but as long as I was happy – that’s what mattered. The last thing she said to me in that conversation was “You can’t have boys in the house now, you know that.” I only nodded, and I vowed that day that I would never introduce her to my boyfriends, or even my gay friends, male or female.
I didn’t speak to her for a few days, refused to look her in the eye, and found every excuse possible to be out of the house. But eventually we got back into a routine, and things got almost back to normal. A couple weeks later, I was in my basement bedroom doing my homework and my father knocked on the door. He didn’t say anything; he just came in and hugged me, and told me he loved me. That’s the only time he’s ever said that. So now my parents knew, I was officially out of the closet. And even though I knew they didn’t approve of it, I was still happy to be honest with them. I don’t think that they were ever ashamed of me or of having a gay son; it just became something we never talked about. They didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell. We’ve mainly kept that family policy through all these years.
That’s why I was so surprised at Thanksgiving dinner only a month later. We were in the middle of our dinner at my grandmother’s house. The adults were at their table, we kids were at ours, and the room was full of the noise of a family eating and talking and laughing. I was pretending to enjoy my aunt’s frozen green bean casserole, trying to keep the small talk between myself and my cousins to a minimum, when I hear over the din my mother’s voice, asking my grandmother, “Eileen, can you pass the rolls? Oh, and Brad’s gay.”
Dinner came a crashing halt, and every head in the room turned to stare at me with eyes and jaws wide open. The only sound in the room was the spinning plate someone had dropped on the floor, and maybe my heart beating fast enough and hard enough to rival any tribal drum. For at least a minute, I was the center of attention, and I knew what it felt like to be a carnival freak show. Instead of the rambling stutter that I could feel building up inside me, I just smiled, shrugged, and ate another fork full of cranberry sauce.
And that’s how I came out.