My First Time at Pride and a Fax Machine Outing
Coming into full bloom
“Have you ever been kidnapped?”
“Have you been in a natural disaster?”
I answered quickly and dutifully. “No.”
“What is your sexual orientation?”
I paused. This answer was not so simple. “I’m still kind of figuring that out. Umm… I guess maybe… mostly heterosexual?”
I had decided a year earlier that the term heterosexual felt like a room of stifling air. Then I found this word queer and it was like someone put in a small window with pale blue curtains. Breeze flowed in.
Shrugging, my psychiatrist turned to her notes. “Sexual orientation: Uncertain.”
That was when I first came out: as a matter-of-fact albeit bumbling answer to a simple question. In the days following, I realized that I’d added my therapist to my list of providers for medical records access. If the office sent her my records, the part about my sexual orientation would leap from the page like that annoying Kool Aid jug and fracture every bit of trust we’d built over one year. I came upon a horrifying possible reality:
I might be outed by a fax machine.
One week later at the next therapy session, I fidgeted and avoided eye contact. Did…
