National Coming Out Day
Today is National Coming Out Day.
...or it will be for another half an hour or so, at least. Hi, my name is Puel, I am late for everything, as most of y'all have probably noticed.
You've also probably all noticed that I'm queer (though I'm starting to wonder if "same-gender loving" might be a more accurate description, yay for all the lovely nuances in the LGBTQalphabet soup spectrum). It's not a secret in my personal, academic, or professional lives; I've been out to my immediate family (and out on the Internet, to an extent) since I was fifteen and out to most everyone else since I was seventeen.
It's a privilege to be out, don't get me wrong. I jokingly refer to myself as the most privileged queer ever, because I do have the support of my family and of my community, and I have the financial and cultural wherewithal to live and work in places where I can be open about my sexuality and not face repercussions. A lot of people don't have that privilege. A lot of people in places very close to me don't have that privilege, in fact -- people I go to school with, people I work with, people I live near. Homophobia's not restricted to red states; it isn't solely the province of the undereducated or the ignorant or the repressed or even the evil. It's rooted, deeply routed, into our culture, and it's easy to condemn its most extreme expressions but harder to see how less overtly criminal manifestations of it create a climate where kids kill themselves because they've learned that who they are isn't okay. That it's shameful or lesser or funny or fundamentally not right, subject to jokes and snide remarks and erasure. That kind of thing builds up, and it's hard not to contribute to that kind of atmosphere because it feels so normal to disparage what, apparently, isn't.
And yet. And yet people are sometimes capable of astonishing generosity, and sometimes you find unconditional love and acceptance in places you never expected to, and I think it's important to remember that, too. That yeah, our culture's pretty fucked up about this, and yeah, it goes deep, but people do change, and re-evaluate old beliefs and gain new perspectives, and sometimes love does win out over fear.
I said above that I came out when I was seventeen. That's a little misleading. I waited until I was nineteen to come out to my extended family on my father's side, after Mith and I started dating. My father's side of the family is considerably less liberal than my mother's (not that that's saying much, considering) and my grandparents had made enough remarks over the years that I suspected they'd have a hard time coming to terms with me being queer. My other family members agreed: my sister suggested I introduce Mith as my "friend" to my grandparents when she came to visit, and my aunt told me not to tell my grandparents that I was gay. Even if she meant it as a joke, it hurt more than I expected it to. It hurt to think that my family might not love me anymore because of who I'd fallen in love with.
In September of that year, my grandmother and grandfather came to dinner. We ordered Chinese and started ribbing each other. Nothing out of the ordinary. My grandparents did know I'd broken up with my boyfriend, and my grandfather asked when I was going to dip back into the pond.
"Actually," I said, "I've been seeing someone for a few months. It's long-distance."
My grandfather leaned forward, smiling. "Where does he live?"
"She lives in New York."
My grandfather's eyebrows shot up to where his hairline used to be before it started receding. "She?" Next to him, my grandmother jumped a little in her seat.
"I didn't think it was all that surprising," I said. My father smiled vaguely at his shoes. My sister kicked me under the table; I could hear her teeth grind, see her smile strain at the corners, and I might not be the best person at picking up social cues but I knew a can't you shut up for the love of god when I saw it. I tried to crack a smile or start a round of nervous laughter or dissipate some of the damn tension.
"Not to you!" my grandfather said. He didn't quite laugh. Nobody else seemed to want to, either. I excused myself a minute later.
I saw my grandfather again in a few weeks, right before my birthday. He took me out every year for a pre-birthday shopping excursion and dinner -- this is the first year he won't, actually, since I'm living a few hundred miles away and not a few dozen. I wasn't sure if I'd be getting a birthday dinner at all, but my dad said he still wanted to take me out. I'd just gotten out of that week's LGBTQA Alliance meeting; we'd been calling voters in California and trying to secure more "no" votes on Proposition 8. I've done a lot of phonebanking. I'm usually pretty good at it; I'm good at getting my voice to do what I want it to, most of the time, and I have enough acting training to make the scripts sound natural. I can even handle "no"s gracefully -- when I'm working on a political campaign, I know it's not a "no" to me, it's a "no" to my candidate, and that's a disappointment but not a reflection on who I am.
It was harder to maintain that kind of distance when I was talking to voters about Prop 8, when people I couldn't see and would likely never meet thought they had the right to tell me I didn't deserve to get married.
Why is it any of your business? I wanted to scream at them, but that wasn't in the script.
My grandfather picked me up for dinner two days later. We chatted amicably enough in the car about my school and his work, but he fell silent when we got off the highway, and I braced myself. He cleared his throat. The rain washed down the windshield, and I wanted to drip down onto the floor of his car, melt into the carpet. He cleared his throat, looked at the streetlight through the smeared glass. Fuck, I thought, he can't even look at me.
"Grandma and I want you to know," he said, "that we love you, and we want you to be happy. We're so proud of who you are, and we always will be. You'll always be our granddaughter."
I started crying. I didn't stop until we reached the restaurant. I think I made a few halfhearted attempts to explain why and how much his words meant to me, but my grandfather put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed, and I knew I didn't have to say anything more.
We're kind of a selfish species, as a rule, and we forget that our actions sometimes cause other people pain. But we're also capable of reaching outside of ourselves, of saying "I am not you and I don't know what it's like to be you, but I love you. I love who you are."
That's the gift my grandfather gave me, and that's the gift I want to give to you. I want you to know that fear and ignorance and hatred don't always win, that people do listen, that there isn't only an impulse for great selfishness when people are confronted with things they didn't expect, there's also one for great generosity. I want you to know that people do love you, and will love you, not in spite of who you are, but because of it.
Happy National Coming Out Day. Love who you are.
♥
.
...or it will be for another half an hour or so, at least. Hi, my name is Puel, I am late for everything, as most of y'all have probably noticed.
You've also probably all noticed that I'm queer (though I'm starting to wonder if "same-gender loving" might be a more accurate description, yay for all the lovely nuances in the LGBTQalphabet soup spectrum). It's not a secret in my personal, academic, or professional lives; I've been out to my immediate family (and out on the Internet, to an extent) since I was fifteen and out to most everyone else since I was seventeen.
It's a privilege to be out, don't get me wrong. I jokingly refer to myself as the most privileged queer ever, because I do have the support of my family and of my community, and I have the financial and cultural wherewithal to live and work in places where I can be open about my sexuality and not face repercussions. A lot of people don't have that privilege. A lot of people in places very close to me don't have that privilege, in fact -- people I go to school with, people I work with, people I live near. Homophobia's not restricted to red states; it isn't solely the province of the undereducated or the ignorant or the repressed or even the evil. It's rooted, deeply routed, into our culture, and it's easy to condemn its most extreme expressions but harder to see how less overtly criminal manifestations of it create a climate where kids kill themselves because they've learned that who they are isn't okay. That it's shameful or lesser or funny or fundamentally not right, subject to jokes and snide remarks and erasure. That kind of thing builds up, and it's hard not to contribute to that kind of atmosphere because it feels so normal to disparage what, apparently, isn't.
And yet. And yet people are sometimes capable of astonishing generosity, and sometimes you find unconditional love and acceptance in places you never expected to, and I think it's important to remember that, too. That yeah, our culture's pretty fucked up about this, and yeah, it goes deep, but people do change, and re-evaluate old beliefs and gain new perspectives, and sometimes love does win out over fear.
I said above that I came out when I was seventeen. That's a little misleading. I waited until I was nineteen to come out to my extended family on my father's side, after Mith and I started dating. My father's side of the family is considerably less liberal than my mother's (not that that's saying much, considering) and my grandparents had made enough remarks over the years that I suspected they'd have a hard time coming to terms with me being queer. My other family members agreed: my sister suggested I introduce Mith as my "friend" to my grandparents when she came to visit, and my aunt told me not to tell my grandparents that I was gay. Even if she meant it as a joke, it hurt more than I expected it to. It hurt to think that my family might not love me anymore because of who I'd fallen in love with.
In September of that year, my grandmother and grandfather came to dinner. We ordered Chinese and started ribbing each other. Nothing out of the ordinary. My grandparents did know I'd broken up with my boyfriend, and my grandfather asked when I was going to dip back into the pond.
"Actually," I said, "I've been seeing someone for a few months. It's long-distance."
My grandfather leaned forward, smiling. "Where does he live?"
"She lives in New York."
My grandfather's eyebrows shot up to where his hairline used to be before it started receding. "She?" Next to him, my grandmother jumped a little in her seat.
"I didn't think it was all that surprising," I said. My father smiled vaguely at his shoes. My sister kicked me under the table; I could hear her teeth grind, see her smile strain at the corners, and I might not be the best person at picking up social cues but I knew a can't you shut up for the love of god when I saw it. I tried to crack a smile or start a round of nervous laughter or dissipate some of the damn tension.
"Not to you!" my grandfather said. He didn't quite laugh. Nobody else seemed to want to, either. I excused myself a minute later.
I saw my grandfather again in a few weeks, right before my birthday. He took me out every year for a pre-birthday shopping excursion and dinner -- this is the first year he won't, actually, since I'm living a few hundred miles away and not a few dozen. I wasn't sure if I'd be getting a birthday dinner at all, but my dad said he still wanted to take me out. I'd just gotten out of that week's LGBTQA Alliance meeting; we'd been calling voters in California and trying to secure more "no" votes on Proposition 8. I've done a lot of phonebanking. I'm usually pretty good at it; I'm good at getting my voice to do what I want it to, most of the time, and I have enough acting training to make the scripts sound natural. I can even handle "no"s gracefully -- when I'm working on a political campaign, I know it's not a "no" to me, it's a "no" to my candidate, and that's a disappointment but not a reflection on who I am.
It was harder to maintain that kind of distance when I was talking to voters about Prop 8, when people I couldn't see and would likely never meet thought they had the right to tell me I didn't deserve to get married.
Why is it any of your business? I wanted to scream at them, but that wasn't in the script.
My grandfather picked me up for dinner two days later. We chatted amicably enough in the car about my school and his work, but he fell silent when we got off the highway, and I braced myself. He cleared his throat. The rain washed down the windshield, and I wanted to drip down onto the floor of his car, melt into the carpet. He cleared his throat, looked at the streetlight through the smeared glass. Fuck, I thought, he can't even look at me.
"Grandma and I want you to know," he said, "that we love you, and we want you to be happy. We're so proud of who you are, and we always will be. You'll always be our granddaughter."
I started crying. I didn't stop until we reached the restaurant. I think I made a few halfhearted attempts to explain why and how much his words meant to me, but my grandfather put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed, and I knew I didn't have to say anything more.
We're kind of a selfish species, as a rule, and we forget that our actions sometimes cause other people pain. But we're also capable of reaching outside of ourselves, of saying "I am not you and I don't know what it's like to be you, but I love you. I love who you are."
That's the gift my grandfather gave me, and that's the gift I want to give to you. I want you to know that fear and ignorance and hatred don't always win, that people do listen, that there isn't only an impulse for great selfishness when people are confronted with things they didn't expect, there's also one for great generosity. I want you to know that people do love you, and will love you, not in spite of who you are, but because of it.
Happy National Coming Out Day. Love who you are.
♥
.