I came out on my 17th birthday, but I’ve been coming out ever since. Everyday my sexuality is assumed. Everyday I am forced to make choices between playing it safe and keeping this knowledge to myself, or letting my shielding down, making myself vulnerable and undermining heterosexual presumptions. I am “out,” but for the most part I remain invisible.
I remember playing snakes. We would slither over each other on his bedroom floor, each of us encapsulated in our sleeping bags from the sleepover the night before. We would pause for breath with one of us on top of the other, but I know for myself this was only an excuse to lay on top of him, to feel his warmth, and to rub up against him with my erection. I was 9, maybe 10, and for the moment this was guilt-free and felt good.
The first time I can remember hearing the word gay was when I was 10. I had just started Intermediate School and we were changing in the swimming sheds. I knew I had made a mistake, but I thought if I was quick I would have my togs on and be out of there before it mattered. I had gotten completely naked while changing, instead of following the established code of always wearing at least something whilst getting changed. But I was noticed, and I was taunted as ‘gay.’ I don’t know if I knew what this meant, but I knew it had to be bad.
I had crushes on girls throughout this time. Although I can’t be sure now if they were actually crushes or if I was merely performing what was expected from guys, or if there’s actually much difference. I never had a girlfriend, but I was safe from accusations of being a fag by also being a nerd. At least with nerds there weren’t strong expectations of girlfriends.
I had always had periodic fascinations with boys. I would become obsessed over them, drawn by a strong urge to become close to them, and know everything I could know about them. I often even desired to be them, for our bodies and beings to be fused. Sometimes I did become close to them, and other times I would be resigned to watching in awe from afar. But these were for the most part non-sexual; at least I wasn’t conscious of them being sexual, and I thought little of these desires being directed at boys.
My first realisation that I might actually be gay came from a dream during my first year of High School. In it, an old friend was in a cage hanging from the roof in my old school. I don’t remember much else, except that he was naked and he had an incredible erection. I loved that erection, and it helped get me off during my newly-discovered masturbation. This was the first time I began to notice other boys sexually, and I knew this was taboo. I was only 12 but I knew this side of me had to be kept hidden and had to be suppressed. My occasional “crushes” on girls had come to an end, but I fought a losing battle for several years yet to get off while thinking about girls.
Coming to terms with my sexuality was not helped by my conversion to Christianity. I had been quite vehemently atheist for most of my life but my new best friend brought me round to being a fundamentalist Christian in a surprisingly short period of time. From the beginning of Third Form until a climax at the end of Fifth Form I fought a battle to suppress all aspects of my sexuality, including my prolific masturbation. I lost on all fronts.
I developed strategies to partially act on my desires whilst desperately seeking to keep them hidden. The school bus stop was my favourite. There were never enough seats on the bus and this guaranteed a mad push for the bus door once it arrived. Of course, I jumped at the opportunity to be crammed in with other boys, each of us struggling against each other to get on. For this brief moment there was no concept of personal space and I had free range to push and brush against virtually any body part I liked.
There is a strange similarity between schools and prisons. Certainly, at times I feared school just as much. School was for me a violent place. As it was, I had to develop all sorts of survival strategies to survive. The idea of opening myself up to the even more extreme violence of compulsory heterosexuality was tantamount to suicide. My secret was my own. A boy came out in Fourth Form, or so it was rumoured. I saw him the day I heard, and asked him if it was true, both curious and secretly sympathetic. He simply told me to shut up. I saw him only once again.
And I did my part to patrol the borders of sexuality. At a friend’s place one day I discovered gay porn on his computer. The next day I ‘outed’ him to our friends, presumably strengthening my own claim to heterosexuality in the process. The rumours didn’t spread, thankfully, and the suspicions around his sexuality were quickly forgotten. It was six years later that I got a late night text from him coming out to me.
I was 15 when I began Sixth Form, and the combination of my recent total abandonment of Christianity and the arrival of the internet set the stage for a new period of self-discovery. The anonymity of the internet was liberating and I grasped it to its fullest extent. Late at night after everyone had gone to bed I perused the offerings of pornography, gay chat rooms, gay youth websites and all sorts of coming out stories. I was not yet prepared to call myself gay and I still entertained ideas of a heterosexual future, of somehow being fixed. This was my secret, and my normal straight-acting exterior hid the internal torment that raged inside. I remember I once printed off an image of a naked guy and had to burn the page within a day for fear that something may happen to me, maybe I would get killed or something, and in the discovery of that page my secret would be revealed. Being known as gay was more terrifying than death.
I don’t remember being aware of other public gay figures, at least none I could identify with. I was ashamed by what I perceived as “gay culture:” I didn’t get the flamboyance, I found the gay stereotype was annoying and the culture around the Hero Parade was alienating for me. I did not identify anything in “gay culture” I could be proud to be associated with, let alone draw strength from.
I became friends with a number of other gay youths online. For the first time I had the chance to talk to others about my sexuality openly. By the time I turned sixteen I finally began identifying as gay, but I still entertained the notion that I could keep this a secret for the rest of my life. The notion of “coming out” wasn’t ever on the cards until I began making friends with some who had come out and through devouring other people’s coming out stories. One particularly strong online friendship, with a fifteen year old boy who had come out in Texas of all places, helped develop within me the strength to come out.
I remember in those final weeks before coming out lying on a bunk bed, having been woken early in the morning by someone else masturbating in the room. It was Seventh Form camp, and my best friend and crush (for me, it has always been both) was lying in the bunk directly beside me. Softly sleeping, his eyes gently closed, I could think of nothing else in the sexually charged early morning atmosphere. I desired only to be close to him, to bring him towards me, to know him in every sense, but my way was barred. Three years later, three years too late, I would finally get to kiss him.
I picked my 17th birthday to come out to one of my closest friends at the time, the same one who had first converted me to Christianity and who was still a strong Christian. Despite this, I felt he was a safe person to come out to, and I felt I could depend on him for support. We spent a lot of time together on my birthday, thirteen hours in fact, and a lot of it was just us. Yet I was terrified. I simply couldn’t broach the subject. It was now late at night, and we were preparing to go our separate ways when I managed to tell him I needed to talk. Now I had committed myself to telling him and my stomach was all over the place. We left our friends and he began walking me home and I managed to delay the inevitable for as long as possible. Finally, he asked what it was I needed to talk about, and after an eternal pause I managed to whisper out “I’m gay.” I choked on the word “gay” and I felt like throwing up. I looked at him, seeking a reaction, trying to anticipate his response. I don’t remember what he said back to me, I was hardly conscious. But he was OK with it, and he offered to support me. We talked at the end of my driveway and hugged each other before he left back home. I didn’t feel relieved though. In fact, I began to second-guess myself. What had I just done? What had I committed myself to?
I kept things tight. It was the end of Seventh Form and I had exams coming up; I only let a couple of other friends know. It wasn’t until just before exams that I asked them to let others know for me, confident that I’d have finished High School before having to deal with any backlash. My friends were generally positive in their responses or either quiet about their reservations. Around my friends I was safe to be open about my sexuality and I found it incredibly powerful to be able to speak about my feelings for the first time.
My family was still in the dark. Towards the end of the summer holidays after High School, Mum sat me down for a “talk.” My stomach felt queasy again and I became anxious. She wanted to discuss a few mundane things, and I thought that was the extent of it. I was preparing to leave when she said she had one more thing to talk to me about.
“You’re not going to like what I have to say, but I found a letter you wrote to someone on the computer desktop.”
I froze. I had been busted. I had left one of the letters to my online friends and mum had found it and read it.
“Whether or not you think you’re gay it doesn’t matter to me.”
“Mum, I am”.
I couldn’t actually say the word “gay.” Somehow being “outed” was far less satisfying than actually coming out. I wanted to cry and I wanted to get out of that room. She wasn’t prepared to accept that I was gay and clearly hoped that this was just a phase. She didn’t want her son to become known as a fag so long as there was any opportunity I might turn out to be straight, and she counselled me to never tell my Grandma. My brother also knew; he had read the letter too.
I left feeling sick and upset.
I began attending university. It took me weeks to build up the courage to attend the university queer group but I finally went one night and spent an awkward couple of hours making pleasant conversation and trying to keep myself together. This was my first real life interaction with other gay people. They were all a lot older than I expected. I needed support but I felt scared by the sexually charged atmosphere. I returned home feeling unfulfilled but also quite adventurous. I came out to my Dad that night in short email.
This is where I believed my “coming out” to be complete. It had taken five or six months since my 17th birthday to come out to both my friends and my immediate family. It had been both liberating – allowing me to open up in ways previously prohibited – and constraining, as I battle the constant stereotypes that are imposed both from within and without.
I have realised since that my coming out has never finished. As I’ve made new friends, entered new groups or got involved with different projects, I have been constantly forced to make decisions between correcting people’s assumptions about me or leaving that battle for another day, if at all. My grandma died never knowing that her grandson desired boys, as per mum’s advice. And I dare not tell my Dad’s parents, and the rest of the extended family. I don’t know how they’d react, though I’m sure it would be one of polite acceptance, at least to my face. I choose not to tell them simply because it’s not worth it, and I don’t know them that well anyway.
I don’t identify as gay anymore, as in “I am gay,” as in a particular type of person. My sexual desires are overwhelmingly homosexual, no doubt, but they are many other things too (I love petit, androgynous body forms, blues eyes, and an intellect to match). I reject the categorisation of my self based on just one aspect of my desires, and I reject too the dangers of the norms of Identity. Coming out no longer means revealing an important aspect of ‘who I am,’ or at least I wish it would not, but rather simply reveals one among the many aspects of myself.
Coming out is a constant process that all queers fight, as we (can we speak of a ‘we’?) struggle to counter heterosexual assumptions in everyday life. It’s liberating and it’s painful, but I would have lost myself if I hadn’t come out.
