Coming Out is Over Rated
The closet is somewhere I will eventually be expected to leave – it’s a little like being stranded on a desert island because you are just too lazy, or too afraid of calling the hover-craft taxi to come get you. Some regard it as the porch to the gay world, whereas for others it has never really existed at all. Everyone has their own ‘coming out’ experiences, which they may wish to share, or not to share. However, I’m not any less of a person because I chose not to divulge my ‘personal details’… yet.
There are people with secrets in every aspect of my life. I have friends who are Christians and yet secretly go to pubs and bars. I have other friends who have dark secrets in the bottom of their pockets. I know many people who get up to much more clandestine activities than me. And yet I’m the one who has to ‘come out of the closet?’
Lets face it – gay or not, many people have things they want to hide. People spend years in denial or desperately trying to cover up their deepest secrets. It is acceptable to have secrets, you aren’t even expected to tell anyone, and it’s considered quite romantic to take them to the grave.
But if you’re gay, come on, out with it.
Is coming out a way of wearing a badge to forewarn everyone I’m not exactly the same? I have lots of other unique (and possibly more interesting) features to my life – perhaps it’s time I produced them from the closet and reorganised them for the shock and bemusement of my peers and family.
Coming out is something that I ponder a lot. Not because I am in denial, I know I’m gay. Unlike others I am firm in my belief that I don’t want to face the problems coming out may bring while I am young. I’m young, gay and about to start truly living. Why would I wish to stain that with arguments from those who I know wouldn’t even really understand when I told them?
Perhaps it’s not ‘big’ of me to stay in the closet. I do however, refuse to be patronised with the ‘older and wiser’ lines. As if time is a determining factor. While I may realise I’m gay, I don’t have a long grey beard and half moon glasses and am therefore not wise enough to make this momentous step.
I guess I reckon coming out is over rated.
Posted by straighttalker05 @ 2:38 PM::
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3 Comments:
Sometimes coming out is overrated.
Sometimes it's liberating.
Sometimes it's necessary.
Sometimes it's dangerous.
Sometimes it just happens.
Sometimes it is inspiring.
Sometimes it is humdrum.
(Sometimes, once out, people go back in the closet again.*shrug*)
One thing for sure though: you never "come out" just the once and that's it - you do it again and again and again... and eventually it gets boring. Very, very boring. But it is still important.
I first came out when I was 17 - and every time I come out again (each new working environment, each new colleague) I do it for the same reasons: I want to be known for who and what I am. I want to be seen as equal and ordinary -or even superior and extraordinary. I am not ashamed of being lesbian. I am not embarrassed by being lesbian. There is no secret and I'll be damned if I pretend that there is one, just because my life doesn't fit in with someone else's world view...
Maybe you have your reasons for staying closeted. I know that I was scared of how people would react to me: I would be shunned, beaten up - my friends would think I was hitting on them, my family would cast me out. None of that happened, although all of it could have, I suppose.
It took me a while to be confident in my queerness: regardless of whatever anyone else thought, whatever doctrine they'd swallowed, to know I am a good person, a moral person, a person who makes a useful contribution to the world. Being lesbian doesn't change that: that's why I am out.
(Well, that and getting caught snogging a girl while skiving a History A-level class, then having to explain myself to my head of year in front of a class of my peers... After that, it seemed daft to deny it - and very few things have seemed as scary since.)
Thanks for the reply gripes.
If you have read back, you may have noticed I kind of outted myself about 2 months ago by kissing 2 girls at a party...
No one asks - I don't say.
I guess I could be comfortable enough to come out in certain circles - indeed in some I am out. But I need those circles to be pretty detached from every other circle.
I know my parents would react pretty badly - and I like my bed too much to find myself on a park bench.
Well, you do have to be out to the people you are gaying with, I suppose, otherwise, where's the fun?! (-and all my friends knew I was gay long before I did. Bastards: they could have said!)
Incidentally, my partner still isn't out to her mother: we've been living together for over six years - apparently I'm the lodger...
(Seeing as we'll be getting a civil partnership next year, I'm not quite sure how that delusion will still work...) I'm just bolshie, I think...
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