Not Happy About Coming Out Day
It’s National Coming Out Day 2016 and for a lot of people, it isn’t happy.
This year, the day falls after World Mental Health Day. The coincidence doesn’t ring a bell, but it makes the same sense as a pile of happenstance disasters before a job interview. Last year for National Coming Out Day, I wrote a lengthy recount of the various traumas that happened as a result of the divide between heterosexual and everything else. It’s not a happy day.
There’s a couple of things I want to talk about this year as my social media timelines fill with congratulations from heterosexual friends and sober reminders from everyone else. Why are we coming out at all and a friend’s hoodie hanging on my front door.
It’s still odd to me that anyone would say, “Happy National Coming Out Day!” For many of us, it’s more of a day of remembrance or memorial. “Who’d you lose when they found out?”
A Day Of Remembrance
I was married for a few years to a woman I was with for a total of 7 years. We spent every holiday with her family, who was distinctly never my family. Christmas, Easter, Mother’s day, St. Patrick’s day (her grandma’s birthday and our anniversary), birthdays, hospitalizations, graduations, weddings, and everything else that’d end up a photograph in your social media that makes life passing and viewable. They never did ask about my family. We never had to divide the days into Chicago and New York City. My mother who struggles to apologize, my step-father who asks for forgiveness in 4-figure checks I tear up, and my brother who is still closeted. I was married to a woman whose family kept their distance because they understood. They might’ve said something like, “Happy We Know How Fucked Up People Are To Gays So We Don’t Ask Day!”
I’m 34 and the holidays are a rough time for me in the office. I’m not lonely. My friends are my family and they keep me company. They assume my power of attorney and they’re my emergency contacts. My friends keep my calendar swollen with the annuals that make everything ok — worthwhile. The difficulty is the dreaded question, “blah blah family something something.”
It’s such an innocuous and benign question if you’ve never had to come out. Maybe it makes less sense as a trauma if you grew up in this time of Montessori schools, corporate gender-neutral bathrooms, and pride parades sponsored by beer companies renowned for encouraging toxic, gay-fearing culture. I grew up among baseball bats and “that’s gay”. Does the internet know they’re saying, “Happy They’re Waiting For You Outside The Locker Room With Bats Day!”
For some people, they’ll enjoy the deserved and, what should be ubiquitous, yet rare environment of a nurturing and loving support system that’ll treat their identity the same way you treat a child who openly loves the color red or blue.
For the rest of us, coming out is the repeated and traumatic event of declaring who you are to a world and environment that might want to kill you. It’s every time you board a bus and the ominous “they”, people who hate The Gays™, can tell and you worry if you should get off at a different stop while living in a city that hosted the gay games. It’s when every one in the room is talking about their spouse and you can’t participate, but secretly having a family to talk about helps your standing in office politics. When I wrote that essay last year, it was about how as a queer person “coming out” isn’t a singular event or moment. It’s almost constant because we live in a divided society.
I have always imagined it’d be nice to fight with a partner about where we’re going for Thanksgiving, but I don’t visit family. I did visit my mom for the first time in years last year for 20 minutes before the conversation devolved into finding a man and ghosts haunting my childhood bedroom where I hid myself in countless ways from family. I would fight with my ex-wife over what to get someone for Christmas but it would be her family. When I was married, I could tell the countless people who ask in the office, “Oh, we’re going to the suburbs to visit her family.” Staying in Chicago for the fifteenth time was an acceptable family activity now.
Before marriage, I dodged the question. You know, coming out can have that affect. You lose your entire family. The internet chimes, “Happy National Lose Your Entire Family Day!”
Solidarity And Solitary
I understand the significance of showing collective support around such an anxiety-inducing moment in life. There is no shortage of group therapies and support resources around the trial of coming out from housing to emotional for young and old. It’s terrific when you’re terrified and you can truly know you’re not alone.
He’s a skinny kid picking at the styrofoam of a water cup. She’s a 30-something adult with two kids freezing in the cold hospital room. They’re a towering but meek immigrant with a thick Igbo accent and a name they’re used to repeating at least two or three times before people give up trying to pronounce it. He’s a handsome tall salesman and his parents named their restaurant after him, their first son — their first American son.
“Am I touching him ok? I’m worried it comes off as gay. Like I have to act a certain way. I already hate my body. I hate that I sometimes like men. Do people know?”
The skinny kid asks a million questions about what his fears are and whether they’re unfounded. The group therapy room is full for once with 10 people in a circle listening to him. I’m watching his thin and bareknuckled hand leave indentations on that cheap white styrofoam cup.
One by one we skip through the room like a ricochet talking about what it was like when we realized we were gay. We’re coming out and talking about our family, who knew, how they knew, how they responded, and the only common thread is fear. Our backgrounds varied and how we lived through it is wildly different, but everyone was scared to hell about what would happen to us. This was never supposed to be a gay therapy group. It was intended for people with depression and mood instability.
Recent Gallup polls will say that only 4% of the population identifies as gay, but this room was 8 gays, 1 transman, and only 1 straight person. Depression and anxiety runs rampant among people who constantly fear social reprise. I apologize that he’s afraid of hugging someone because it might look gay. I don’t know why I’m apologizing for it. “Happy Apologizing To A Kid You Hardly Know For A World That Shouldn’t Make Him Feel Like Everyone Will Give Up On Him Because He Hugged Someone Weird Day,” are the words I hear from the Internet that’s trying to apologize in their own way for a shitty world.
J is listless. In the psych ward of the hospital, the nurses run the floor every 45 minutes and check our names off a list to make sure we’re ok. On a floor where you can’t even have shoelaces, it’s important to make sure nobody hurt themselves or someone else. The bedroom doors have smaller doors so when you sleep, they can make sure your body is in bed.
Today J’s fiancé will visit. My friend will visit with her husband. She’s talking about giving her a picture frame and a jewelry box she made during Occupational Therapy which is hospital-psych-ward speak for arts and crafts to teach you how to stay alive when you’re too functionally depressed to contend with your life. “Dude! You’re masculine! Do you think this is too femme for her,” J asks excitedly on her toes while I watch Castle, “Sure, why the fuck not? I’d use it.”
I would use it. It’s a black wooden box with matte black paint that says “love” and little jeweled stickers. It’s definitely femme, but I think it’s adorable and I think J misses her kids and wants to be with her fiancé so bad it’s coming out in acrylic, water-soluble glue and glitter. She talks about moving up to Minneapolis. She hears it’s a good town with lots of black folks and it’s queer-friendly. She’s tired of her family. She wants to go some place with her fiancé to raise their family, safely. She’s discharged earlier than me. She gives me a hoodie with New York Yankees patches all over it, “because we’re both from NYC and I’ll always remember you.” I keep it on the back of my front door. It’s the only thing hanging there so I see it every morning when I leave for work. “Happy National You Can Leave Your House Today”, I say to myself when my meds are enough.
I’m tired, so very tired, of addressing the countless varieties of identity tied to gender and sexuality when it seems to be rolled into the spectrum of humanity that the distinction rigs us to fail. I don’t want to apologize to a younger generation anymore. I want to hear about how happy my friends are about the stories they hear. I want more people to be happy about the life they get to lead safely without fear. I really hate marriage, but I recognize the legal importance of it while the government extends contractual benefits to people who are married.
We are everyone you know whether we’re out or not.
Don’t come at me with a “Happy Coming Out Day”, but instead please donate to a group like the Hetrick-Martin Institute who have made it possible for someone like me to be out if you’re happy I’m here.
