Coming Out Is Good Mental Health.

Throughout this life, I have felt alien. I feel much less alien now than I did 10 years ago, but still alien. I know this is hardly a unique experience. We human beings are weird. Even as I gain insight to myself, I feel disconnected. Maybe that’s a learned experience. Maybe there’s another lesson for me somewhere.

I knew I was different as early as five years old. That has nothing to do with my sexual orientation or identity. I was born with a bilateral hearing loss. Without the benefit of hearing aids, I am something well short of profoundly deaf, yet some distance from hearing reasonably well. Even after I was fitted with hearing aids, isolation was tangible. Being around other children with varying degrees of hearing loss went part of the way to minimize my alien status, but I eventually pushed back against it. I’m really not sure why. I started out in a full-blown educational experience with a group of children with hearing disabilities, but by the age of 15, I’d abandoned those advantages in favor of being “normal”. Being normal, or being invisible? Was this compounded by my being a closeted gay teen? Probably.

By the time I was in the 5th grade, I started to feel a different kind alien status, as I discovered the feelings for my classmate Joe ran deeper than I was able to understand. I was 10. Another four years would pass before I began to have my a-ha moment, but in the meantime, I mooned over Joe. We did a production of George M Cohan’s “George M!” in my school that year, and I looked forward to the moment when we would sing the song “Harringan”. Joe had a similar Irish name, and I would giggle, and look knowingly at him while I deliberately mis-sang the lyrics.

Ah! Young, innocent love.

Since that time, there have been others. I have many stories to tell of the young men whose affection I craved, most of whom were not equal to my needs, by no fault of their own. I was far too intense for the good of anyone, and scared away most of those men. I have great compassion for them, especially for those who were not gay, and I can understand the confusion that might have caused.

I came out incrementally, beginning at the age of nineteen. I can best qualify the process by demarcating its happening with each new work experience. Every time I started a new job, I came out a little more. Still, I didn’t fully come out until about 15 or sixteen years ago.

I’m very fortunate I wasn’t caught up in a dangerous, life-threatening situation but only once. A boy I like when I was 19 led me to believe he liked me too. Instead, I know what it’s like to look down the barrel of a gun, and to be absolutely unsure if my life might end then and there. It could have, and it haunts me still. Perhaps it should have, and by some grace, it did not.

And yet, I do wish I had come out sooner, and with greater bravado. As it were, I was forced to come out to my family in a manner not of my own choosing, not on my own terms.

There was a time I would have spoken of this experience with hyperbole. I would have used superlatives to express the pain, and the anger, the frustration, the depression, and the alienation. It didn’t aid my coming out to others outside of my family — in fact, it pushed me further into the closet for a little while. Now? I characterize it as sorrowful, though I’m not sure that’s enough; “regrettable” sounds like I was somehow complicit, “unfortunate” like a sort of misstep.

In short, anyone ready to come out should do so whenever it is safe. If it isn’t safe, find a support network that will help to empower you until the time is right. The sooner it is possible, the better, because that’s the sooner you can live your life on your own terms. Make good choices.