Part 1: Coming out to ourselves
I’ve been out of the closet a relatively short amount of time, given my age. Always a late bloomer, my journey into self-acknowledgment and acceptance followed a predictable path of desperately trying to be who I thought I needed to be, rather than who I was. Overthinking and over-feeling my way along through life, I had to sift through mountains of religious brainwashing (I mean, conditioning,) enmeshed family dynamics, and my own white-knuckled desperation for a particular brand of heteronormativity before I could come out. If I were an outsider to this experience, I would have guessed that coming out to myself would be the hardest part of it all; the absence of self-honesty is one of the most effective tools for self preservation in our existential toolkit, after all. I was wrong.
Coming out to myself was probably the easiest thing in the world. For all the ways and times I had lead myself through a tacit conversion therapy process, there were traces of queerness that defied my attempts at burial or reframing. My inability to feel safe amongst straight, cisgender men. My empathic creativity that always lent a nuanced, outsider’s take on a subject. My insistent sex dreams and furtive, guilt-ridden forays into gay pornography were infrequent enough to let me convince myself that I was simply working through the trauma of being “falsely” bullied for being gay in school; their profundity and ability to throw me wildly off my emotional center, however, made them monuments that dotted my internal landscape. The way that I carried myself through the world was queer enough and self-censored enough, demanding enough of straightness that most folks in my orbit shrugged me off as “artistic;” and after all, I was an upstanding member of the church. A minister, a Bible-class teacher, a loving father and husband. I was genuine and sincere in how I lived my life, even if in retrospect I see how sincerely knotted up I was in my own illusions. Dogged by a constant hunger pain for some kind of authenticity and meaningfulness of being that always eluded me, I assumed that depression and anxiety were simply part of what it meant to be “me.”
As I said though, coming out to myself was probably the easiest thing in the world; not because it wasn’t painful, but because it was such an honest, transparent, simple truth. The first time I kissed a man, I felt myself clicking into instantaneous alignment. Like a complex combination lock in some sort of heist film, cogs and pins tumbled into place. Distinct memories and experiences that had long puzzled me or which had been relegated to the shrugs of life’s mystery flashed through my mind with mesmerizing clarity. Only now, they had a unifying thread of context. For the first time in my life, I felt whole. More so than when I found my identity in faith, more so than when I affirmed it in my familial or cultural background, more so than any of the stories I rested in to find a semblance of stability for living. I was sitting on the bank of a small pond as it happened. I had just kissed a man - more than kissed him, I had experienced him. He had kissed me back. A mystery of butterflies had exploded into a maelstrom of experiential truth.
“Are you okay?” He had asked. I’d been sitting for a few minutes in the silence of a brief orgasmic reverie, staring at the water.
“I am,” I had said. “I keep waiting for something to happen - for the heavens to open up and the lightning to flash. I keep waiting for that feeling of guilt. Of condemnation. But all I feel is… peace.”
When you grow up in a fundamentalist Christian tradition as I had, you’re taught that there are two truths that you rest on to guide your life. The first, is the ‘infallible’ word of God as the arbiter of concrete morality. The second, is peace; the “peace that passes all understanding,” as we’d referred to it. The absence of conflict as pure, sacred truth brings your spirit into alignment with the spirit of the sacred. I had thought I’d known that peace before, and had staked my worldview and my life on it. In that moment, I realized that the peace I’d pledged myself to back in a church pew at age 15 was a promissory note, and not a fulfillment of the reality I was now experiencing. I’d been taught to follow that peace as the spirit of the divine that would lead me in the pathways that god intended for me. In that moment, I knew that the only thing I could do was to follow that peace, and trust where it would lead me.
This is what I and my queer brethren wish our heteronormative counterparts could understand, but that somehow gets lost in translation. To understand and embrace our gayness is not a fringe aspect of our humanity; it is a core part of the collected dimensions that define what it means for us to be fully human. We embrace and celebrate it because our authenticity of being is the gateway to accessing all of our gifts and resiliency for living. Attempting to give up or reject that aspect of ourselves is not a noble or holy sacrifice - it’s a granular form of genocide.
In the last meaningful conversation I had with my mother, she had encouraged me to live celibately, in accordance with her faith’s teachings. To her, god and my family don’t care at all that I’m gay. They care about what I do with the fact that I’m gay. To them, living out my sexual identity is a black-and-white, non-debatable abomination. A one-way ticket to eternal damnation. She urged me to repent and go back to living the only way that she believes can bring the hope of salvation. For her, it’s a life and death decision. I couldn’t convince her that for me it was a life or death decision too, only for me death would be the annihilation of the gift I had been given. The gift of being who I am.
“You say you don’t care that I’m gay,” I had said. “I wish you cared more that I was.”
Coming out to ourselves is one of the easiest, most natural things we queer people can ever do. It’s always there, waiting for us in simple honesty to be acknowledged in its indelible truth. And the peace it leads us to is divine. To me, that’s what it means to be gay, at least in part. In the words of the self-described “notorious” drag queen Trixie Mattel, “Being gay is easy, other people make it hard.” In my next essay, I’ll unpack a little bit more of what she means by that.
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