Coming Out Stories

[grovyle]

Oh man, it's really nice to read everyone's stories! The funny ones and the sad ones and the emotional ones and everything in between. Really drives home the point of there not being one single "correct" way to be queer!

I haven't had many coming out moments because my family wouldn't be the most supportive, so I keep it pretty quiet. I won't say I'm straight if people ask, but I won't be saying I'm queer if the conversation doesn't specifically go that route and I don't feel I'm like 98% safe. But there are two funny moments that come to mind!

First was at uni, first year. I went to a big city so I could study, small town girl living in a lonely world and such. I've always had a pretty strong gaydar (it's a survival strategy at this point) and this guy in my philosophy class just. Couldn't NOT be gay. So me being the weird social animal that I am, sat close to him the entire year, befriended his friends, but almost never spoke to him directly. In one of our first conversations he was telling me and my/his friends something funny and he went "my boyf-uhhhh girlfriend!!" and I swear. In that moment I realized he was a weird social animal too and had been playing the same game that I was. So did I take that information in and use it as a normal human being? Of course not!!! I waited patiently until we got to the ancient greece unit, where queer men were sure to be mentioned, and instead of taking notes when the moment came I started VIOLENTLY SCRIBBLING on my notebook things like "OMG SLAY!!" "QUEER ICON!!!!!" "ANCIENT GREECE MORE LIKE ANCIENT GAY!!!". He's sitting right next to me and my frantic pen noises make him look towards what I was writing. And he turns around and I SWEAR TO GOD writes in his notebook "SOCRATES WAS THE FIRST GAY ICON!!!!" as big as he can so I see it.
For six years we continued to share many classes together and to this day we aren't friends. We don't even follow each other on instagram. We barely spoke. I think we're both playing the long social awkwardness game.

Second one for which I'll give little context so as not to give too much personal info away. But I was in a place where I used to work in the after-lunch recess with many of my coworkers (all girls + one openly gay guy). We were talking about how awesome one of our superiors was, a woman in her 40s that's an expert in her area. She isn't directly above us in the work hierarchy, couldn't give orders to us and such, but she is many levels above us on other team unrelated to ours (think cooks vs housekeepers in a hotel, something like that). We were all very obviously swooning over her because work talk about her expertise had quickly turned to "and she has A THOUSAND HOBBIES and she's good at ALL OF THEM" and "she has THE PERFECT LIFE that she built ALL BY HERSELF", so I think hey, this might be the chance to try to come out! This group of people feels safe! So I tell a story about a time she took me aside to help her with something (not to brag but she told me I did a great job) and I finish by saying "and that's when I kinda fell in love with her". To which four girls, two of them 100% straight as said by them, retorted "we ALL fell in love with her". Gay guy went "yeah me too". I was trying to use my not-even-serious attraction to this woman as a way to come out and turns out she trascends sexuality and gender and literally everyone at that workplace would consider marrying her. Lmao. Over my dead body guys, we accidentally touched hands when doing a task together once!!! (jk)

[Memory]

I've come out multiple times, but I think coming out as bisexual was the funniest one - I came out at 12 to my mom. It wasn't any big dramatic thing either because I just didn't think it was that big of an issue. My friend had come out to me as gay that day and I'd went "Well I guess I'm bisexual, I do like girls too" and then when I came home, my mom asked me how my day went at school and I responded "Good, I found out I'm bisexual but not much else happened" and then turned to walk away.
This wasn't that surprising to my mom considering that her and my dad were certain I was going to turn out to be a lesbian growing up (and I mean, some members of the system do identify with lesbianism so not totally wrong) and went out of their way to make sure I knew being gay was okay, I guess I just came out so nonchalantly that my mom thought I wasn't taking it seriously. So she called me back into the room and was like "You do know biphobia and homophobia are things, right?" And I went "Yeah, duh." And she was like "Alright okay I accept you for who you are I just wanted to make sure you were prepared. I'll let you tell your dad on your own time." And I went "I don't care if you tell him lol".
Basically: my parents made me so confident in my orientation that when I came out, they thought I had no clue homophobia existed and got worried for me lmao.
Also, apparently everyone in middle school was 100% sure I was a lesbian and they only thought to tell me this when I came out as transgender at the end of middle school. Literally I was talking to some guy in my grade about just random stuff, not even concerning LGBTQ+ stuff, and he interrupts me and goes "Hey by the way you know we all know you're a lesbian and it's okay right?" And that's how I came out to him as trans and bi!
Then when I started passing as a dude and making guy friends who didn't know me pre-transition, I would literally joke in front of them about finding dudes hot and they assumed I was just a cishet guy kidding around. One day a guy friend who knew me pre-transition and was also bisexual started talking with me about being bisexual, and our other guy friend sitting there just looked at me and went "WAIT YOU'RE BISEXUAL???" Dude... I have never hid this from you, I thought you knew. So that was how I came out to a lot of my guy friends in high school haha.
I haven't really had any big coming out moments with my asexuality, but I'm not really secretive about it either. I've just been out in general for so long at this point that it's kind of not that big a deal to me.

[Thorn]

I came out when I went to college by joining a bunch of queer student organizations, so it wasn't really a surprise to anyone at my university since I was open from day 1.

Coming out to my parents as bi was hilarious though. My parents had planned to take the family to the pride parade in our city the summer after freshman year because one of our family friends was going and my younger sister had come out as bi a while back, so I figured I should probably come out before we actually hit the parade route. I decided to do this by dressing in a t-shirt with a rainbow graphic on the front, rainbow party store suspenders, knee high rainbow socks, and a bisexual pride flag tied around me cape style. My dad got home from work first, and said "what's that flag for?". I told him it was the bi pride flag and he said "oh nice who are you supporting with that outfit?". I looked at him and said "me, because I'm bisexual" which somehow took him by surprise because "well your younger sister we get because she was always into musical theater and politics but you're like a hardcore science nerd who did girl scouts and orchestra". My mom came in the door 30 minutes later and we had the exact same conversation verbatim. At that point I was a little tired of the "well you don't seem gay because your into science and aren't super expressive or dramatic like your sister" take, so I half-sung half-shouted "I'm bisexual!" a couple of times and spun around sailor moon style in the kitchen in front of everyone while covered in rainbow clothes and a pride flag cape. My parents were ultimately supportive, but it did take that level of in-your-face action to get them to understand.

I came out to my parents as non-binary 2 years later by sending them a plethora of enby-related memes because at the time I was living 150 miles away from them so I figured texting would allow me to clear up misconceptions more than calling on the phone. It took 2.5 hours of back and forth texting and a crap ton of memes, but eventually they got it.

[JINSBEK]

I don't really have funny or interesting coming-out stories regarding people I'm close to, because I never had anyone close to me when I began FtM transitioning. All right, there was my ex at the time, but god I don't even remember what their specific reaction was. They didn't like it but I also didn't give a shit and went ahead with testosterone therapy anyway, so I guess that was that.

My funniest coming out experiences all have to do with total strangers of brand-new acquaintances who have no idea I used to be a chick. Inner-city rappers have a popular reputation for being socially retrogressive and misogynistic etc, but honestly, once you're cool and shoot the shit, and somehow being a trans dude comes up (I honestly don't know how, I guess I just casually mention it in relation to the current conversation topic), they're like, "WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAT? You chose to be a N####R???? Bro why would you do that? You had it so easy as a chick! Being a N####r IS TOUGH" and then congratulations on me completing my transitioning, etc. And then it's back to music production and business...

My other interesting experiences are being introduced to other genderqueer people at all and them not clocking me as trans. Like, is this peak? Is this peak masculinity? Lmao. They'll quite clearly know that I'm some kind of queer, but not trans.

[Rosaria Delacroix]

Coming out is highly contextual for me- I am closeted in many facets of my life, simply because I don't think it's particularly anyone's business, or it may not be conducive to what I'm trying to do (such as accessing healthcare without facing down bigotry), or I'm just indifferent enough towards their opinion of me, that it doesn't really register as being worth the effort to sit down and talk to them about how I identify or move through the world.

I look fairly androgynous, though generally choose to present in a feminine, campy fashion- all vintage glamour with sterling silver and sapphires gleaming, or drenched head to toe in pastel coordinates. More masculine outfits are much more business professional, dark, dour- funereal chic, if you will. Usually mentions of partners are glossed over with whatever assumptions people choose to make. I have been mistaken over a range of identities: even from those that hold them, (trans woman is quite common) but it's especially confusing to cis men, who cannot decide if I'm just a quirky cis girl or an effeminate gay man.

The story of how I came out as nonbinary to my brother was admittedly, kind of funny, though. He had long clocked that I had a complicated relationship to womanhood, though he never really asked- he trusted that I would communicate to him whatever worked best for me at my own time and pace. He often referred to me as his little sister when talking about me to others. I eventually wound up coming out to him because of a goddamn fanfiction a friend of a friend had written, of all things- about my favourite character, who I deeply related to.

In that, the character comes out as nonbinary- but is still generally masculine presenting, and still has his gender identity respected, even if other people would look at him and make the assumption that he's just a cis man. Something about that broke down the barriers I'd built up around not wanting to unpack my identity, because I had long assumed that the people in my life would never really bother to learn, or respect how I saw myself- because they would look at me and merely assume 'woman,' and it would be pointless to even try to advocate for myself, because of course I'd just be some girl, that's how they'd met me and known me as for years.

I had recently begun reclaiming fashion and playing around with gender presentation and embracing my personal aesthetic, and so it made it even more exhausting, because I felt like I had to choose between reclaiming something a roughly decade long eating disorder had taken for me (my physical appearance and how I chose to adorn it) and being respected as a person, and I wasn't ready to tackle even more on that front: so I had stayed closeted, already defeated by the prospect of no one accepting me or being supportive of something that felt so hopeless to even hope for.

My brother didn't miss a beat. He's cis, and straight- and happily married to a woman who is the love of his life. He's not really used to really contemplating big ideas of sexuality and gender: in large part, because he never really had to think too hard about it. Funnily enough, he actually defaults to using they/them as gender neutral pronouns for everyone, because that was how he'd been taught back in his English classes in highschool. Even for cis people who generally just use she/her or he/him. He'd not really known many trans or nonbinary people at all, though, not until the last few years of meeting some of my friends.

He paused, after I had blurted it out nervously, and said that that was just fine by him, because he loved me as his little sibling, and his love for me wasn't something that would change. He immediately switched over to using my preferred pronouns, chosen name, and how he referred to our relationship to others- and took it upon himself to correct others if they messed up, firmly, but politely- as he always does, when conflict arises. He's admirably restrained as a person. It wasn't something that he whined about, or pushed back on- it was just immediate embracing and warm acceptance, a reaffirmation that I was loved and would always be loved and cherished by him, and that if this would make me happy and comfortable in my own skin, of course he would. That even if I wasn't his little sister anymore, I was still his little sibling, and he loved me, like he always has.