DJ: Coming Out to Parents, part 1

It’s always nice when someone can come out at their own pace and not have to worry about influences from other people. This is especially true when it comes to parents. No one wants to come out to their parents before they’re ready. Unfortunately, this is the situation I was put in when I had to come out to my parents, it wasn’t of my choosing.

I come from an interesting family. My entire family is comprised of active Catholics. They’re very old fashioned and very conservative republicans. On top of that, they have an outright dislike of the LGBT community and they’ve been very vocal about it since I was old enough to know what gay meant. It was not going to be an easy task coming out to them, so I had decided I was going to wait until I was financially independent from them before I told them. This mean I was going to wait until after college and I had decided this freshmen year of high school.

My plan worked well throughout high school. I kept my private life separate from my family, but this effectively forced me to grow apart from my family. Throughout high school, my relationship with my mom and dad grew weaker and weaker, fueled by my more distant attitude and the growing realization that they’d hate me if they knew what I really was. This gave me hope for college, knowing that I’d be away from their watchful eye and could finally feel free to do what I wanted and be myself.

Waving goodbye to them as they pulled away from my dorm freshmen year was almost an exhilarating feeling. I had managed to keep them in the dark for nearly four years, and now that I was at school, it’d be even easier.

It turns out I was very, very wrong. The internet was my demise. I had a page on the insanely popular MySpace, and on that page my sexual orientation was listed. The only person in my family who knew of the page was my cousin, and she knew about me already. I had bought myself a new cell phone, an early Christmas gift and decided to add it to my daily blog. My cousin liked it and decided that she wanted one. When my mom asked her what she wanted for Christmas, she brought up my blog and showed my mom the picture of my phone. With that action, she unknowingly started the outing process to my parents.

My mother asked what site it was and she told her that it was mine. My mom sat down and started browsing through it when she came upon the main page. Among picture of various male celebrities and Paris Hilton, she saw the box where my orientation was listed.

Then my phone rang. I answered the phone as usually thinking she was calling to send me more money or something. I couldn’t make out what she was saying; all I heard was a bunch of screaming. I then received and IM from my cousin with the words, “I’m sorry”. At that point, I knew what was going on, I had been outed to my mom. The yelling lasted for about 20 minutes before she hung up. She called again the next day to tell me that she told my father, and that was the last time I’ve heard my mothers voice. It’s been well over a year now and my mother hasn’t spoken a word to me. She hasn’t called me, she changed her number so I would stop calling her and she hasn’t even sent me an email. Most people may view this as a bad thing, but I’ve learned to see the good in it, and there’s a lot to be seen.

(Continued in a second article).