Part 2: Coming out to family
One of the key difficulties for my coming out and living as a gay man, as it is for many of us in the queer community, was coming out to my family. We are organisms biologically primed for survival, and our evolutionary inheritance has left us with mechanisms for securing that imperative. We think strategically, constantly gathering data and scanning our environment for signals of danger so that we can plan our steps carefully through the world. Sometimes, and I’d argue the majority of the time, this works well for us; we learn tact and social graces, and cultivate heuristic intuitions that help us to make snap-decisions for responding to an ambiguous world. Other times, these processes can go awry through over-activation, prompting selective attention that brings about cognitive blind spots and less favorable outcomes.
After I had come out to myself, I wasn’t sure on which end of the spectrum I would fall as I would let my most important people in on this new revelation. That internal debate keeps a lot of us at an impasse while we try to negotiate the path that exists between truth and safety. I didn’t feel fear in knowing that I was gay, nor did I experience any divine existential condemnation. I instead felt overwhelming dread, anticipating that the pursuit of my truth meant the unraveling of an entire assumptive world that had built up around me. I felt the doom of knowing that pursuing my freedom meant embracing others’ pain and heartache. I felt the primal fear of anticipating my family’s response to what could only have been their worst fears for me growing up.
My parents had never openly acknowledged my sexual difference as a child. Instead, there were many cursory conversations that would arise after an ‘incident’ would present itself. I remember finding a book in my dad’s nightstand, loosely titled “What to do when your Christian son comes out,” or something like that. He doesn’t recall ever having such a book, but I trust my memory on that one. It was a chilling find amidst a childhood of slurs and bullying that my parents felt compassion for, but were largely ill equipped to address. I had been raised in their faith tradition and was well-studied on the doctrines of the church, the Bible we read from weekly, and my family’s own “wise as serpents, harmless as doves” attempts to rationalize some of the harsher aspects of our belief. I had a lot of data to indicate where safety was, or wasn’t.
I also had the best wife and partner I could ever hope for, as well as a daughter who taught me what it meant to embrace both love and responsibility. The thought of bringing pain into their lives by pursuing my truth was devastating. In my faith tradition, marriage was approached in a unique way compared to other cultures. We observed faith as the guiding process for finding a spouse (after meeting certain practical and spiritual benchmarks). I became engaged to my ex-wife without ever meeting her in person, instead relying on prayer, meaningful dreams, and a collection of personally significant experiences before reaching out to her local minister and extending my offer of marriage. She prayed about it for a week before giving her answer and just like that, we were charted for a lifetime relationship. There are few women that I think I could have had a successful marriage with from that church, and she turned out to be one of them. As friends first and partners second, we had navigated a thorny process of examining and deconstructing our faith, finding solace in each other and our chosen family in the aftermath (the church recommends shunning or at least social ostracism as a response to apostasy). She supported me in first coming out as (I thought at the time) bisexual, and later gave me the encouragement and space that resulted in my first gay kiss.
It was knowing what my new experiential knowledge would bring into her life that brought me the deepest grief. I spun into the worst depression I had known, and the moment that I revealed my truth to her will forever be burned into my memory. I feared the worst from her, and felt deserving of whatever she might give me in the aftermath. I share this with you, my dear reader, to highlight the intensity of struggle that every single queer person faces, no matter their circumstance. “Coming out” is not a matter of arrogant self-assertion to others. It is an act of bravery; a willingness to sacrifice all that is not true in the pursuit of cultivating something that is more honest, real, and enduring. In each moment that I shared my queerness with my loved ones, a timeline of shared futures died. All of the givens that we rested on to create a semblance of safety for the coming years were now gone. In short, coming out is an act of disruption. In a poetic sense, coming out is an act of sacrifice, with shared dreams as the bloodied offering.
My ex-wife surprised me. In my priming for grief and fear of the outcomes, I expected the worst from her. And, in my expectation I treated her as such, for a time. All of the pain and grief that I predicted would be there certainly manifested, but my scanning of the environment for danger prevented me from seeing the depths of her humanity and love for me. Our path forward would certainly be different than what we had expected some eight years prior when “two flesh became one” as they say in the church…. But she showed me that sometimes, when it counts most, our worst fears are stories more than they are based in facts. My brief retelling here is a flagrant simplification of our journey, and nearly four years later it is still unfolding. Because of her, however, I don’t fear for where it will end.
Coming out to my immediate family was very different. To their credit, the response was fairly muted compared to the stories I’ve heard from others in our community. My father only commented on the assured damage that coming out and divorcing would have on my daughter. My mother inquired if this meant I would be coming out as trans soon (a common conversation within uneducated or indoctrinated families). My three sisters’ responses ranged from open attempts at shaming me to pledges for prayer on my behalf. It left them all in a quandary. To follow the strict dictates of the church would mean that I should have been shunned outright, as I had made myself an “enemy of the faith.” The love that they had for me, and the empathy it might give them access to served as an existential threat to the bubble of reality that makes up their worldview. Unlike the time when I had left the church a couple of years prior, this time there was no overt push-back beyond the initial responses; they instead had to resign themselves to the loss of their loved one. There was no room for curiosity or an interest to understand my journey, nor could they allow the largeness of their grief to make space for connection to mine. We became distinct islands of familial loss that will likely never be repaired. Sometimes the worst fears anticipated are realized.
Trauma as a concept is fairly new to our social awareness; its earliest public acknowledgment was in the observation of “shell shock” in military veterans during the First World War, and for a long time was thought to be the result of personal frailty. Experts believed that soldiers with trauma lacked the psychological fortitude to handle the rigors of war like other “stronger” men. Trauma wasn’t recognized as a wider phenomenon until the same emotional and behavioral symptoms were observed in survivors of sexual assault. We are less than a hundred years into our research and treatment of trauma, with the bulk of development taking place only within the last 30-40 years. Trauma can be overt or covert; not all trauma is the result of a near-death experience or (lived or threatened) physical injury. The formula for cultivating trauma is remarkably simple: increase threat and danger (physical, emotional, relational, financial, spiritual, etc.) and decrease personal empowerment/autonomy. The more trapped a person feels in their circumstance, the less voice they have to advocate for themselves, and the less access to resources for self-preservation, the greater the likelihood that a trauma response sets in.
It is these factors that make being gay and coming out to family members traumatizing for many queer folk. We are pursuing a path of self-realization while walking a knife’s edge that threatens to remove our social supports, our attachment figures, and give access to humiliating or overtly dangerous messages delivered by those we love most. The scale of resources for non-affirming families is much larger than those inherently available to the individual. When families overtly reject their queer loved one, trauma is there. When families covertly reject someone by acknowledging only the convenient parts in order to preserve a relationship strained by inconvenient queerness, trauma is there. When a queer person is fighting to create honest visibility within themselves, the erasure of their voice and its significance by those they love creates an internal experience symbolically akin to being tied up in the basement while the dinner party goes on upstairs. You can scream yourself hoarse, but no one is coming to see or save you.
If families of queer people truly love them, they need to empathically connect to this subjective reality. I suspect that without the reinforcing restrictions of thought pervaded by cultural inertia and fundamentalist religions, more families would be able to. All things being as they are however, coming out to family means entertaining the very real risk of relational death, without the socially sanctioned means for grieving and recovering from that death. This is trauma. This is what makes coming out, hard. In my next essay, I’ll explore the societal and cultural forces that make it so difficult for families to unequivocally embrace their queer family.
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