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| Photo from But I'm A Cheerleader (1999), dir. Jamie Babbit |
In junior high, I came out to my mom as bisexual.
“Okay,” she said.
“I’m serious,” I
replied, and I really was, which was rare at the time.
She looked at me like
she thought I was joking—like before I’d even said it she knew that it was just
some “phase” I was going through. “How can you be bi if you’ve never even had a
girlfriend?”
That was the end of that
conversation. A few years later, I tried to do the same with my grandmother.
“What would you do if I
was gay?” I asked her, voice smaller this time—more unsure. My hands were
clasped together and I was fidgeting.
She was silent for a
moment, frowning. Her eyes seemed vacant as she responded in a seemingly blank
tone, “then I’ll pray for you.”
Coming out to my family
was bittersweet. On the one hand, they didn’t kick me out, and they loved me
all the same. But on the other, they dismissed my realization about my
sexuality with a simple flick of the wrist—with a monotone “okay.”
I had no problem telling
my friends because I knew that to them, it was no big deal. A lot of them were
going through the same thing, and our generation is just more open, more
accepting of this sort of thing. But with my parents…suddenly there was so
much doubt, anxiety, and fear. Looking back at those memories fills me with an
empty sort of sadness; I remember the millions of questions running through my
mind as it all happened:
Maybe I’m not really gay? Maybe it’s something I’ve made up? Maybe it’s
just my pre-pubescent brain trying desperately to make me seem different? Maybe
it isn’t real, maybe I’m not real, maybe none of
this is real? Please, can none of this be real—please?
I keep thinking about
why I did that, why I felt like I had to tell them, or why I felt like I owed that
to them. As if they had any contribution, any say, on something as personal as
my coming out—this huge part of me that I was still trying to figure out.
These questions
continued piling up, only getting worse when both confrontations ended; I kept
asking myself why I told them and honestly couldn’t come up with an answer. To
be honest, I didn’t want to. I didn’t see the need to. But at the time, I was
really into Glee, a show that’s now been turned into a meme of creepy teachers
and grown adults playing teens. When I was a kid, though, it was one of the
first shows that taught me that it was okay to like boys and that it was okay
to like girls—and every time a character was revealed to be gay, they always
had that big coming out scene.
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| Photo from Pinterest |
So many LGBTQ+ films and
shows have that one coming-out scene, and while at times they can prove to be
powerful, there are others wherein they feel forced and unnecessary—like it was
something the plot called for, and not the character or anything about them. To
me, that’s what coming out to my family felt like. I wanted it to be over
before it even started.
As I grew older, I’d
find stories of other people coming out to their parents. Then one day, I came
across one person saying they never did; when asked why, they simply responded,
“why? Do I have to?”
Something in my
brain clicked after that. As a queer person, I thought it was something I had to
do—an obligation I owed to the straights of the world. An announcement of “hey, sorry to tell you, but I’m gay, actually!”
This aspect of queer
culture has become so normalized that a lot of us have forgotten that it’s
meant to be something that we do for ourselves. It isn’t for the benefit of
your friends, your parents, strangers on the internet, or anyone else. It’s
just for you. That’s something I wish 14-year-old me knew: that you don’t have
to do it if you don’t want to—and this isn’t me saying that coming out is a bad
thing.
Coming out can be a beautiful experience, of course. It’s an expression of your identity, a proclamation that you love who you love and you aren’t afraid to say that. It’s something that can be wonderful as long as you do it for yourself.
