However, I got carried away. *cough* What was meant to be a short write-up quickly became long-winded, overly detailed, filled with digressions and anecdotes, and long-winded. :p It's not surprising if you know me, but still. *g* Anyway, below is the gigantic write-up that I sent to my friend; I titled it "Pupate." Please read it if you're bored and need to procrastinate. *g*
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(written 4 June 1999)
Sometimes I feel like the conversations are almost formulaic. After I tell someone that I'm gay, after they've gone through the funny faces of surprise or trying-to-hide-surprise (I still can't decide which is funnier), and after they say "Cool!" or "Really?" two of the questions I'm invariably asked are: "When I did you know you were gay?" and "When did you first come out?"
Thanks to retrospect and a vivid memory, the former question is relatively easy to answer if I take the long-winded approach: I've always been attracted to guys for as long as I can remember, and in some corner of my mind I always knew I was gay, even though for years I had no way of labeling my feelings and thoughts with that magical, scientific-sounding word most parents don't like to say around their children: "homosexual." My best friend at school in sixth grade was this half-Filipino, half-German boy with the sweetest disposition, and at first I looked up to him a lot (he was over a year older than I was since I had skipped a grade, and when you're only ten, "over a year" makes a big difference), but then I developed a major crush on him (which I was able to hide skillfully, even though I had had a depressing dream where I chased after him, trying to kiss him, but he kept running away, managing to stay just out of my reach... a hilarious dream now that I think about it, but it saddened me at the time).
But yes, I hid my feelings skillfully - even by the time you're ten your peers and society in general manage to give you the message that such feelings are wrong and ugly and disgusting, and that if made known they could be a subject of ridicule that would be even more sinister than the ridicule I was already getting for being a brainiac, for being a wimp, and for being Korean. Even at ten, you pick up these feelings; society manages to have that much of an effect on you.
I even remember an incident with another boy when I was four (yes, four!) and our family was still living in a ratty apartment building - I bring this up because it's the one incident I can still remember which was from a time when I wasn't society's child yet and I didn't think my feelings toward another boy were evil. At any rate, one day the boy in the next apartment, who was about twice my age, came over to play; all I can remember about that afternoon is that we were playing on the bed and he pretended that the floor was quicksand and he rolled off the bed onto the "quicksand" going: "Help help, I'm sinking!" I was playing the role of the heartless bystander who didn't care if anyone was "drowning" and so I just lay on the bed on my stomach, staring at him as he made a few more dramatic pleas for help. Yet as I stared, I got this sudden urge to kiss him. Obviously it's not like I was precocious enough to know how to French kiss or even think of using my tongue in some other way besides sticking it out at people at whom I was angry, but all I know is that I remember wanting to kiss him.
I didn't do it, but the point I want to make is that I vividly remember not being ashamed at all about the feeling itself - just plain old shy. I even remember that when he left that day I very shamelessly made a private vow to kiss him the next time he visited me, but then my parents and I moved into our house before I could see him again. It just says something to me about how frighteningly easy it is for the mainstream to wash the brains of children when I look back and see that somewhere between the ages of four and ten I acquired a terrible shame about my feelings.
I relate these stories and thoughts in rebuttal to the questions I hear too often: "Why is coming out such a big deal to you people? Why do you make coming out such a big deal and have to be in everyone's face about who you sleep with?" Excuse me? There are some queer people out there (and I use queer since it's less cumbersome than lesbian/bisexual/gay/transgendered) who never have cared for what other people think and who have been out of the closet all their lives, but they are few and far between compared to the number of queer people who have been affected by society to the point that they think that their feelings are wrong and terrible, and that they themselves are wrong and terrible for it. Still others, like my own self when I was in junior high and high school, knew or came to realize that being queer was not a bad thing, but it was something that still had to be kept hidden, lest all hell break loose in their personal lives.
By coming out, you do a number of things: you take one step further in accepting yourself, which is a personal task everyone must undergo, queer or not; you're showing that you're not afraid of what people think or ashamed of whom you choose to love (and for those who can't relate to that, try thinking if you were you ever in love with a person you couldn't tell your friends or family about); and you're showing society that you exist, in a world where everyone is presumed straight until proven queer. "Being in everyone's face" is just a homophobe's way of saying that they don't like the fact that you're not "out of sight" and "out of mind," and it's a blatant double standard in a culture where fourteen-year-old heterosexuals French kissing is considered routine fodder for family sitcoms while Ellen DeGeneres saying, "Yes, I'm gay," on TV is considered an act of being "too vocal about one's sexuality."
Coming out is merely a simple act meant - among other things - to keep ourselves from becoming an invisible minority, and for pretty much all queer people, coming out entails the risk of harassment, ridicule, ostracism, loss of job, and/or physical injury, even loss of home. Taking all that into account, coming out is in itself a political act, and even if it wasn't it is still a very big deal on the personal level.
Going back to the beginning, the latter question is a lot harder to answer, because I think I came out "for the first time" on two different occasions. Before I explain that, let me first point out that coming out is a process - realizing that you're gay is not an overnight revelation on one's part and it's not as if once you come out you never have to come out again. As I said before, we live in a society where you're presumed straight until proven queer, so that means every once in a while you have to break the news yet again, like the woman at the store who asked if I was buying a certain gift for my girlfriend and I smiled and said that actually, it was something for this guy I liked. Usually, I find that talking about a certain guy I think is cute is the best way to come out without having to actually say "Yes I Am Gay," but I don't usually talk about guys with sales clerks, so one has to take a more direct approach sometimes.
As to what led me to come out, it was basically a slow build-up of incidents, helped along by a fast build-up of hormones. I know I said that in retrospect I always had feelings for guys and that in some corner of my mind I always knew I was gay, but it wasn't really until the start of puberty when I was twelve and the onslaught of that wonderful thing called testosterone that I fully understood (so to speak) what it was I was feeling. I am not my sexuality, but like my race and gender it is a fundamental part of who I am, and as anyone who has gone through puberty will attest, that physical transition gives a bit more importance to the role of sexuality in one's life than before.
Nevertheless, I had terrible denial, and I was somewhat confused as well - my sexuality had been a large part of my thoughts since I was twelve, but I tried not to think much of it, and automatically/subconsciously pushed the entire issue out of my mind. I knew I was attracted to boys, but for some reason I also thought that I would get married to some nice girl just like every other good, all-American, capitalism-loving, God-fearing boy does.
Little did I realize that only the idea of settling with a girl appealed to me, and even then the only reason that idea appealed to me was because it was the only thing I had ever known or seen (on television, in books, and in real life), not because I myself would actually be romantically attracted to any girl. I had this weird dichotomy in me: while I was out with friends and interacting with society I'd think to myself, "Oh, she's pretty and funny, maybe I like her," but when I got home and was alone with my OWN thoughts I'd daydream about the cute guy in the advert for boxers, or I'd flip through my yearbook and get hot and bothered by the cute senior guys while I played my Beatles CDs and listened to Paul's husky tenor voice. (In fact, I'm listening to Rubber Soul as I write this, as it helps my memory to reminisce with aural and visual aids.)
In effect, this meant I had two brains that I was able to automatically turn off and on depending on the situation, and because of this it was very easy for me to deny my homosexuality. It's not that it would have been something I would have been ashamed of, for I had pretty much gotten over that lame idea as the years passed, but I just didn't want to be gay because of all the trouble it would cause, with my parents, my school, and my friends. I was afraid for myself; very afraid that I would be hurt emotionally, mentally, and physically. I saw the way our school discriminated against John (the only openly gay guy at our high school while I was there) just because the other boys' parents didn't want John sleeping in the same room with their sons on a school trip, and call me a coward but I wasn't ready at that time to deal with such treatment. I got enough stares for being a nerd, for being friends with a "fucking gypsy girl," and for being suspected of being a pothead just because I believed in peace and love and vegetarianism and Birkenstocks, and I basically didn't want more crap on my plate - one gets enough of that at the school cafeteria.
I would have gone on being in the closet for quite some time, had it not been for some really wrenching incidents that slowly, inexorably, were killing my fake brain, the one I used around friends and strangers, leaving only my true brain. The first incident sticks out the most vividly.
I was in the jazz band the first three years of high school, and I immediately developed a mild crush on Rick - he was a year ahead of me in school and he played the saxophone. Rick had this beautifully pale skin, dark hair and brooding eyebrows, dark eyes, and his cheeks would flush dark red - not pink, dark red. My tenth and eleventh grade years I played the saxophone as well, which meant I got to sit next to him and Chelsea, and when Chelsea and I weren't cracking jokes about Barney suede, the sexiness of corduroy shoes, and "Strolling with Bone," we were teasing Rick. I realize now that that was my rather indirect way of flirting.
Every year the band and chorus of our school would pick a place to vacation at during spring break and then raise money to get there, and in my tenth grade year we went to New York City. Sheepishly I have to admit that the highlight of that trip - besides spending thirty-seven dollars at the Russian Tea Room and seeing Miss Saigon and Kiss of the SpiderWoman - was sharing a bed with Rick. We stayed at hotels on these trips, and there were always four people of the same sex in a room with two beds, and to my utter joy and absolute consternation I was sharing my bed with Rick. (Incidentally, this was the trip that caused the parents to complain about John, as he was in the chorus.) Every night of that week was hell and heaven at the same time - imagine being in the same bed in a state of undress with someone that beautiful two feet away, not being able to say a word or do anything. Lying awake trying not to think of the person next to you and wondering if you might never be able to make any move, let alone love anyone, because you fear the repercussions.
I remember that one night on that trip Rick and I didn't sleep at all; we were too busy sitting in bed talking to each other, and while he was lying on his back with a book on his stomach, I snatched it from him - it was under the pretense of wanting to see what he was reading, but I really just wanted an excuse to slide my fingers across his stomach. I realize that's the kind of thing that makes people blink when you tell them about it, but the point I want to make is that it felt so indescribably natural to flirt with a guy (and yes, to put my hands on him as well, for however fleeting a moment); it felt completely like me, whereas when I tried to think of girls in that sense or any romantic sense for that matter, there was nothing really there.
Incidents like the one with Rick were making me face my homosexuality, but like all things that are under threat, my denial started fighting back, and it was at its worst my junior year. My best friend had been dating a terrible guy for a year, and I was wondering if I should interfere or not; furthermore, I couldn't tell if I wanted to interfere for her sake or if I just wanted to get her boyfriend out of the way so I could perhaps date her myself and forget about the guys I had been thinking about, and it was agony trying to puzzle out what I was really thinking and what was actually denial and fallacious rationalization. At the same time, there was this guy in my A.P. Chemistry class whom I had befriended and fallen quite in love with, and I saw him every day and could not stop thinking about him. It was like that dichotomy, that "two-brain" phenomenon I was talking about, was finally dominating my every thought; my mind felt paralyzed, and at times I felt like I couldn't breathe.
Finally, I broke down in front of my best friend one day and started crying, and that was the first time I had done that in front of her. I asked her if she would go out with me, but looking back at the way I was acting I really asked her that just so I could hear her say no. In fact I'm actually laughing, cause the worst time to ask someone to go out with you is when you're crying and acting pitiful, but I never intended to get a yes. Maybe my pride was a little disappointed, but I was too relieved to hear her say that she wanted us to be "just friends" that I didn't care. I didn't even explain to her why I had asked her out, and it caused a gap of awkwardness between us for a long while (I know I felt awkward, at least), but I don't think I really had the words to describe what I was going through at that time at any rate. My current loquaciousness is the result of analytic hindsight and memory retrieval.
But anyway, that incident sort of clinched it for me. My relief at the "no" answer my friend gave me told me quite clearly that I really was gay, and it was an odd feeling to finally accept it. It was as if the dichotomy that had been with me since I was quite young disappeared with a zap. I admit that in that sense it was very much like an overnight revelation, but there were a lot of events and a lot of time leading up to and preparing me for that revelation.
For the next few weeks, I was pretty much dazed at this new view on things. I was further put off-balance when my best friend started dating the very guy in my A.P. Chemistry class whom I had liked. Even though I had accepted the fact that I was gay, it naturally made me a feel a bit weird that my best friend whom I had half-heartedly asked out was going out with someone I liked. Finally, I had to tell someone about all the stuff I was feeling, and I came out to a friend of mine for the first time.
She and I were just having a blast together after school since we had to wait until the evening when we would both be performing at the school's music concert that night, and we had been shopping and talking on that warm May day in California, enjoying the last lazy days of school. Incredibly nervous, I managed to stammer out to Shenaya the fact that it wasn't Emiko but Emiko's boyfriend that I kinda liked, and she took the news well, thankfully. Shenaya never talked about the issue with me again though, and for some reason my subconscious worked in such a way that I promptly forgot over the summer that the incident had ever happened; in fact for a while I completely forgot that she was the first person I came out to.
This was because even though the incident with Shenaya was in the back of my mind all through my senior year, I never really connected it with coming out - all I had admitted to Shenaya was that I "kinda liked" Mark; I didn't say: "I Am Gay." Doesn't seem like that much of a difference, but for a lot of people there's a big step between admitting that you just like someone of the same sex and that you're the type of person who likes those of the same sex. Later I learned that it's very typical for people starting to come out to only admit that they like only one person of the same sex - as "an exception to the rule" - instead of admitting that they like people of the same sex as a general rule.
So my senior year, I started gradually preparing to truly come out, in very subtle ways. (This is what I meant by coming out "for the first time on two separate occasions" - once to Shenaya, and later to someone else.) I blabbed to my friends about how "cool" I found the young Paul McCartney, and I began writing gay male fiction based on Greek mythology for my school's underground magazine. It was my preface to coming out - people would compliment me on my writing quality and my stories and give me weird looks, but they never were brave enough to ask the question: "Does this mean you're gay?" Obviously, not many straight men would write stories about two guys falling in love, but in the same vein what one writes about does not necessarily reflect one's own persona and tastes, so those stories were my way of practicing how to come out yet still keep people unsure as to the truth of the matter. I decided to be sneaky and even submitted a hetero love story just to keep people off-balance.
When spring of my senior year approached, I was ready to come out. I had written enough stories and I had spent enough pupating with my thoughts, and I was ready. This time, I didn't want to just come out to one person; I needed to tell all my friends that the person with whom they were friends was gay. He didn't just kinda like this one guy; he was gay. I even decided I was ready for the entire school to know about it (not that I'd get up on a cafeteria table and announce it or anything), but what I was not ready for was for my mother to find out, and if the entire school knew she would find out sooner or later; therefore, I decided to tell only my friends about it.
So, during a stay down in Southern California for the California convention of a national Latin/classics club I was part of (some of you may have heard of it - it's the Junior Classical League/JCL and it's for high school students taking Latin), I told John - the aforementioned only openly gay person at my school - at three A.M. in the morning that I was gay while our two other roommates slept soundly in that hotel room, and I spent some good time crying/shaking in happy relief on his shoulder. Looking back, it was amazing how much better it made me feel to just simply admit that fact to another person. Even though John wasn't a close friend of mine, I was one hundred percent sure that John of all people would be okay with me being gay. With my close friends, I was only ninety-nine percent sure, so I decided to tell John first and get the practice and courage to tell my closer friends. There may not seem to be a big difference between ninety-nine and one hundred, but believe me, when it comes to revealing something which may ruin yourself in the eyes of friends and family for life, one percent makes all the difference!
At the rest of the convention John and I would pass by each other and exchange these stares; it felt like we shared something that would mean our deaths if anyone else found out. I felt so relieved by coming out, but I was a bundle of nerves the entire convention, mainly cause it was such a new feeling to have finally admitted the truth to someone else, but also because I was afraid that everyone at the convention must know. It was an irrational feeling, but it shows how much fear is instilled into most queer people - we are so afraid of the repercussions that we can't be ourselves, and even when we do take a step in conquering that fear, it is still there and it is irrational, even if its cause makes it quite understandable. In fact, I was so nervous and scared that when I learned I won first place in the mythology contest at the convention, I literally yelped and hugged this girl next to me; and if you know me, I never act that spastic when I win something, especially since I had been placing first in mythology at every convention I had attended of this nature.
I got the courage after the convention to come out to Emiko, and then I started telling more and more friends. What surprised me was that after I had done so, three of those friends came up to me later and admitted to being bi. Sounds corny, but it felt good to know that by coming out and sharing that secret, I was able to make them comfortable enough to share their own secrets as well.
I graduated high school, and summer passed. When I was about to go off to Brown University, all my friends knew about my sexuality; the only person whom I wanted to tell but who still did not know was my mother.
The summer before I went off to Brown, I attended the National JCL Convention, and I sort of conducted a little "test" - I thought to myself that I would be at a week-long convention with about a thousand or so people whom I wouldn't know and would probably never see again, and so I decided to try to be completely open about myself while I was there and see what happened. Not unexpectedly, my experience was the epitome of the best and the worst that happens when one comes out.
I didn't go around shouting "I'M DAMN GAY!" but I made no compunctions about discussing cute guys with some of the girls from the California delegation or checking out cute guys. I even flirted with this guy, complimenting him on his shirt and looks, in the presence of a friend of mine. It was a new and freeing/pleasing experience for me.
Problems started when my friend and I were in the cafeteria during the middle of the convention. As we passed by the table where the the entire California delegate was sitting, one of the boys asked me in front of everyone: "So you're gay, right?" He used such a derisive tone of voice when he spoke to me that my friend gave him a dirty look and answered for me in an equally condescending tone: "I think it's pretty obvious by now." I felt very grateful; I was well prepared to answer for myself, but it's always nice to have support.
Things got worse when the next night I got back to my dorm room (we were staying in college dorms for the convention) and I saw a note on my door that read: "Fucking Queer Fag."
I knew the boys who had written the note, and the first thing I did to remedy things was to call the woman responsible for those people (we were high school students after all, and we had teachers accompanying us, so I called the teacher from the same school those boys were from). However, the woman wasn't very sympathetic, and she told me it wasn't her responsibility to discipline her students due to "disagreeing opinions." She reduced that note on my door to a disagreement of opinions.
After that pointless call, I went to the room of the guys who had written the note, quietly told them all that no queer fag who wanted a good fuck would be attracted to shits like them, and I walked out of the room feeling much better - even though they were all laughing at me as I left. I then went back to my room and called a friend to cry and bitch about what had happened, and that helped quite a bit.
It sounds like my coming out experience at the convention wasn't successful; but even the learning experience in itself was worth it, and I also met Grace and became great friends with her because I was willing to be open about myself. She and I became friends at the airport, just before we got on the plane to go back home. We were both in the California delegation but hadn't talked to each other during the whole convention since we didn't really see each other about but she was sitting next to me in the airport, and she turned to me and inquired about the rainbow necklace I was wearing. She said she liked my necklace and pointedly asked if it stood for anything, and I sheepishly grinned at her and said that it was supposed to symbolize gay pride.
After that, we talked non-stop for the entire three-hour plane wait (and no, we did not talk just about sexuality), and we even moved away from everyone else so we could talk in private. We exchanged addresses and made a vow to sit next to each other on the plane to talk more, but we were so tired once we boarded that we both fell asleep and didn't wake up till the plane landed. I got e-mail access a week after that and we've had a very close relationship since then. So yeah, I did get some stress thrown my way that week, but in the end I won a great friend, all because I wasn't hiding myself.
It was the same when I got to college: a mixture of good and terrible. At Brown, I didn't announce my sexuality or anything, but everyone who knew me found out sooner or later that I was gay. It was extremely liberating - not only was I out of the house, on my own, and in a kickass college, but I was free to be myself. More accurately, I was permitting myself to be myself.
I did experience a lot of homophobia though - my roommate said to me that he was bisexual, but in actuality he treated me so badly (from shouting at me and kicking me out of my room while I was typing up a lab report to criticizing my taste in men and saying that I was in everybody's face with my sexuality) that when I told a friend about what he had been doing she immediately said that he was being homophobic toward me. I was too busy with homework and life in general that I didn't see the homophobia till it was pointed out to me, but my friend was absolutely right. Things got worse when my roommate's best friend accused me of sexually harassing him just because I had given him a birthday card in the spirit of dorm unity, and then this Christian girl befriended me just for the sake of "converting" me, cause she thought that if I wasn't going to be straight then I could at least be Christian instead of agnostic and have SOME chance of saving my soul. Little by little my life at college, which had started out great, became extremely stressful, and my image of Brown as the most liberal, open-minded, and politically active of the Ivy Leagues was quickly replaced by disillusion. I still loved the school, but it wasn't the academic Utopia I had envisioned.
The worst was when I finally came out to my mother. I knew I had to sooner or later, and what made me decide that I was ready to do so was that I realized that the clerk at a local music store I frequented knew I was gay while my mother, whom I considered a close friend, still did not. Therefore I made it a goal to tell her at least as soon as a week after my birthday (which is 8 November). The big day came and I told Sara, a friend of mine, that I was ready to do it, and she told me to call her if anything went wrong.
I was shaking so badly when I called my mother that my roommate on the other side of the room looked at me oddly. When she picked up the phone, I managed to breathe out: "Mom, I need to tell you something."
She paused, cause she could hear that I was upset, and she asked, "What is it?"
"I'm gay."
The silence was the worst part of that call. She was silent for maybe five seconds, but five seconds never went by so slowly. Finally she came out of the shock and said, "No, you can't be!" I told her I was serious, but she kept denying it, saying all the textbook phrases I had prepared myself for: "You don't mean it." "You haven't found the right girl yet." "It's just a phase."