October 1990

A Different Life: Coming Out

by Patricia J.

I still remember the time as a child
when I picked up what I thought to be a
beautifully patterned rock only to be
startled into dropping it when the t:urtle’s
head and wiggling legs appeared. That
image retumed recently as I've been im-
mersed in yet another stage of my own
coming out process and close to friends
involved in theirs.

Although my parents have “known”
for 13 years, it has felt like a secret we had
pledged to keep from everyone else by
never talking about “it” beyond our imme-
diate circle - and then so rarely I can still
count the times on one hand! Until this
summer, when I realized that most of the
people around me at work and home are
aware that I’m lesbian, returning “home” to
family felt like crawling back into a box. I
didn’t want to do it any longer.

So I told a favorite aunt and uncle,
trusting that they would probably not reject
me (and discovering that was t:rue) and
began to break the silence by saying the
words “gay” and “lesbian” out loud. In my
family, no two words could be more
avoided or more loaded with discomfort
and fear. I had hoped that if someone else
my parent's age (70's) knew, then they
might step out of their isolation and dare to
share some of their feelings of anger, disap-
pointment, and confusion. When I had
asked over the years is they could talk to
anyone, my mother always said. “Of course
not. No one would understand and anyway,
we don’t want them to know.”

Over and over again we and our fami-
lies stand behind the fear of what it might
mean to be gay or lesbian, and that fear
silences and separates. Years of family
gatherings - picnics, weddings, reunions,
holidays - were all pleasant and superficial
while we tried to ignore that I didn’t bring

a partner (she hadn't been invited) or that I
didn’t have children. It seemed there was
little else that mattered enough to talk about
while what we didn’t say hung like a cloud
over everything - or so it felt to me.

“Why do you need to come out?” some
people ask. “It’s your private life, so why
talk about it?” I don’t necessarily wam_to
talk about my private life or about the
intirnacies of my loving, but I do need to
have some people hear how it feels to live
and love in a world that wants to narrow
loving down to male/fernale relationships.
Iwantmypartnertobetreatedwiththe
same respect and welcome as my brother's
wife - and would settle for acknowledge-
ment that there's even a similarity. But that
acknowledgement didn’t come during 15
years of living with one woman, so I don’t
cormt on it in the future.

Why do I/we need to come out? To
stop the feeling of living a lie, a lie we aren't
telling but that others are hearing, a lie that
allows people around us to fix us up with a
date or presume we’re still looking and
waiting for the right man (or, for the gay
man, the right woman); to silence the
thoughtless remarks about queers and
weirdos overheard by cormtless gays and
lesbians who people presume are some-
place else; to free ourselves from the dark-
ness of a closet in which no one should live.

Weneedtoopenthatdoor, if onlytolet
in a crack of light at first and air enough to
breathe. Once that’s done, we can see more
clearly and discover that fear is weaker in
the light. There is reason to be afraid of
coming out...there are no guarantees of
what responses we'll receive. Some are
devastating, others may be refreshing, and
most are jarring, at least in the
beginning...for much the same reason as
my experience with the turtle.

People think they know who we are

 

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and they're startled, dismayed, disoriented,
confused to find we are different from what
they had assumed. We may be injured as a
result, and we may also experience some-
thing valuable. Fortunately for me, my
turtle survived and taught me a lot that no
rock ever could (even about loving). We
can hope our friends and families will
someday feel the same...and meanwhile
remember that when we open the door, we
also discover each other.