Forget birthdays, forget winning prizes, forget someone telling me they love me: the most valued I ever feel is when someone comes out to me.

I didn’t realise it when I was young, but I was incredibly lucky to grow up in an area and a family where the closet didn’t really exist. My mother had gay and lesbian friends all through college and most of her adult life, and they were frequent visitors. I got my first “sometimes men fall in love with other men” talk when I was about five, and when I was nine my mother’s friend Ballet Brian gave me some beautiful books about gay history and culture, and that was that. Homosexuality was perfectly cool by me.

It took a long time for me to realise that not everyone thought that way. I don’t remember a particular moment of epiphany; it happened very gradually. Calling something “gay” was a popular pejorative in England for a while, and eventually I suppose I figured out that not everyone thought of “gay” as either “lighthearted and carefree” [sic] or just a thing some people were. As a descendant of German Jews, I was considered old enough to study the Holocaust well before my Bat Mitzvah, and that’s how I began to learn about persecution. Though I don’t recall exactly what book or story first turned the light on for me, I do remember the shock of realising that not only did not everyone think it was okay to be gay: some people were so opposed that other people’s lives were destroyed because of it.

The first friend who ever came out to me did so just after my Bat Mitzvah. He was a friend from a Jewish Studies class: a gentle, intelligent, softspoken boy who introduced me to Firefly and had a girlfriend when I met him. We hadn’t been friends for all that long when he invited me up to his bedroom during one of our regular hangouts, shut the door, and told me that he was dating a boy.

This was over a decade ago, so I don’t remember many details of that day. What I do remember is being far less surprised that my friend was gay than I was at how nervous he was to tell me. I told him, flatly and firmly, that I didn’t care whether he dated boys, girls or both, but that if he dated someone who treated him badly I would break both that guy’s arms. Unfortunately, the boyfriend turned out to be a bit of a dick, and I never did make good on my promise to mutilate him, but it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that that particular friend’s coming out set the tone for all the coming outs to follow. He was no different after he told me he was gay than he was before, except perhaps a little more relaxed around me. The person who really changed that day was me, when I realised what an honour and a responsibility it is to be so important to someone that they cannot bear to lie to you.

Some people exit the womb waving rainbow flags and singing Cher. There’s no coming out for those people. They tell their parents, and then everyone just sort of knows. I have friends like that: flamboyant and fabulous; butch and beautiful; out and proud. They are inspiring in their confidence and love of their own identity. Many of them travel hundreds of miles to find homes as proud and openminded as they are.

But theirs is not the usual story. The parents who try to “pray away the gay” may be only a vocal minority, but there are plenty of parents out there who, with the best of intentions, sweep the issue under the rug because they have no idea how to deal with it. Maybe it’s religious; maybe it’s political; maybe it’s regional; maybe it’s just being happily settled in a Sears-catalogue traditional family picture, but there are a million ways that a person’s family and lifestyle can subliminally, unintentionally say, “we don’t do homosexuality here”.

School is even worse. Children can be cruel: teenagers even more so. When conformity equals safety, any kind of otherness — even an otherness that makes you feel complete — is dangerous. Middleschoolers are vicious: at the all-girls’ school I went to for nine years, calling someone a lesbian was the de facto way to get under someone’s skin. Since there was no opportunity to pull a convenient boyfriend out of the woodwork, once the rumour got going that one of the girls was a lesbian, it usually stuck.

The second friend who came out to me was one of my closest friends in middleschool. She had a terrible time of it from day one: tall and skinny for her age, she was highly intelligent and socially awkward, and had a persistent difficulty keeping up with the pop culture that was so essential to making friends. She and I were two misfits who had bonded by default in eighth grade, and one day she told me she thought she was attracted to girls.

My Jewish Studies friend was very lucky: while he went through a little grief at school, he had a kind, supporting family who always kind of suspected anyway. His parents welcomed his new boyfriend in to their son’s life the same way they would have a girlfriend, and in the end coming out was a relatively smooth experience for him. My middleschool friend was not nearly so fortunate. Already the victim of merciless bullying at school, she came from a strictly Protestant family, and her parents — though they would never have admitted it — were fundamentally homophobic.

She and I talked for a long time, over many days. One day she’d be convinced she was a lesbian; the next she wasn’t sure but that she was just confused about everything. For the first time I saw, firsthand, the absolute misery of someone who wanted to explore something about herself, but was terrified that doing so would lose her her family and the few friends she had. I was as supportive as I knew how to be: just like before, I told her that I didn’t care whom she dated as long as they treated her well, and I knew that it was a rare, terrible kind of privilege to be allowed to see such a struggle.

Supporting my middleschool friend while she questioned her sexuality was a lesson in how difficult it can actually be to come out. She turned to me because at the time she really had no one else, and because the struggle with her identity was too daunting to face alone. I firmly believe that a person doesn’t change just because they come out as gay, but there’s no question that your identity does. The dating pool turns on its head. Some social scenes open up; others close. The politics of gay rights become almost unavoidable as you suddenly have to consider whether it will be legal to marry or have children with the person you eventually fall in love with.

Even if it doesn’t change you, coming out irrevocably changes your identity, and the choice of whom to tell is daunting. There is no predicting how someone will react. Will your friends stick by you? Will your family? Who will view you differently; who will pretend you never said it? Which of your same-sex friends will shift away from you on the couch at get-togethers; which of your opposite-sex friends were just in it for the chance they might sleep with you some day? What if someone you were close to recoils in horror? What about the people who say they’re happy for you but then gradually stop talking to you? Does your three-drink lesbian friend think girl-on-girl is cool but guy-on-guy is icky? Will the devout Christian friend try to pray for you? Does the friend with the “straight allies” t-shirt who marches in Pride every year only do that because she lives in San Francisco and that’s what San Franciscans do? How can you tell? And what if, after all these questions are answered, there is no one left?