Courage, Dear Hearts

Trigger Warning

For many queer people, coming out is not a one-time thing. There is the coming out to friends, the coming out to family, the coming out to coworkers and classmates, the coming out to strangers in the grocery store and the person on the customer service line—the list goes on. Then, there is the coming out again when or if your identity changes.

Rainbow Pride flag

I first came out as “I think I might possibly be a bisexual” in my teens to my parents and shit really hit the fan. I did not really have words for what I was—that was a word I had recently discovered online—and for some reason I thought all those qualifiers might help when they confronted me. They had discovered I had been making out with my best friend through a program called Spector that they had installed on our family computer. It recorded everything, including keystrokes. Instead of telling me it was normal to have a crush on your best friend, that she might eventually see me as the person she had a deep relationship with and stop dating other people, or anything else you might say to a kid, they started screaming and yelling and telling me it was perverse. I eventually escaped to my makeshift bedroom with no doors in the dining room and called her and frantically told her what was going on. She immediately came over with her mom. Her mom tried to calm my parents down by explaining that it was normal for teenagers to experiment, but my parents would not stop yelling, so my best friend took me outside. We kissed and came back inside as her mom was threatening to take me because it did not seem like a safe environment for me. Nothing came of it. The next day my parents told me I was not going to be allowed to be around anyone without strict supervision and sent me to my Christian therapist. Upon hearing the story, my Christian therapist told me there was nothing she could do for me unless I told her I was suicidal and that I had a plan of action to commit suicide and told her that plan for her to write down. I was not suicidal yet and explained this and that I just needed to get away, but when she told me there was nothing she could do to help, I eventually read her a quote from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation about how she imagined committing suicide in a bathtub. She accepted this and sent me in an ambulance to 72-hour watch where the psychiatrist there theorized that I had anxiety and depression and wanted me to take a trip to see my online friends out East. Unfortunately, as I was handed to mental healthcare instead of a social worker, I was released into the custody of my parents and returned into the same situation. It was then that I tried to kill myself. I took a bottle of pills and vodka and slit my wrists straight up and lay down until I thought my heart stopped beating. When I woke up the next day, I felt like a failure, then sick, then just went about my day and felt really alive. No one found out. It was the last time I tried to kill myself.

Quote by Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation

Several months later, over Christmas, I would come out again—this time as a lesbian with a girlfriend—and I would be kicked out of the family. My then girlfriend’s family took me in over the holidays, but I had no home to return to as I had been kicked out of my freshman dorms at Bethel University because I had a girlfriend, even though I was still a high school student. Luckily, there was a small, secret LGBT group on campus, and I was able to couch hop or rotate spare rooms between juniors and seniors for the rest of spring semester.

Finding a community can be essential to survival. I held the identity of “lesbian” for over ten years before coming out as trans.

The first label I found for myself as a transgender person was “bigender.” I was alone. I saw an image of a person with a brief description in a NATGEO magazine I selected from a pharmacy rack. It seemed to make sense. Obviously, I was both genders. It was a spiritual thing. I came out online. I updated my pronouns and gender across platforms to reflect this change. When I started coming out in person, I experienced a lot of resistance: unemployment, houselessness, and eventually, after I had stabilized my situation, a civil commitment.

Cover of National Geographic: Special Issue, January 2017

It was not until I was released that I started receiving gender-affirming care and started learning correct terminology from queer community resources. I started my physical and legal transition and came out again as a trans male shortly thereafter, and I am constantly coming out.

Gene on his way to his reading at Quatrefoil Library in his 'pretty boy' dad hat with his book Bodies in Transition in his lap. He is doing the 'lesbian' sign in ASL. Oops. He should be doing the 'father' or 'cigarette' sign. Wait, he is not a dad, and he only smokes cigars and pipe.

You may be curious why I am sharing this very personal information besides the obvious fact that it is National Coming Out Day. For queer and trans people who do not have a good support system, coming out or being discovered can be very dangerous. We put our homes, our livelihoods, our freedom, and our lives at risk. While I think it is worth it and would not change being able to live genuinely and authentically as myself, I encourage you to consider whatever is best for you, your safety, and your situation, and if your choice is to hide: know there is no shame in it, and if you are discovered, know there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I’m proud of you.