Coming Out
Want to submit a coming out story anonymously? Please email us at lgbt@uccsocieties.ie with your story and we’ll happily feature it on the website. The best part? Nobody will know it’s you!
Go here for some information on coming out.
Submitted on October 18th, 2009
By Tiarnan O’Sullivan
Well, it was my brother’s birthday and after deciding to come out to my parents but not knowing when to do it, he told me he would love for me tell them that night. I thought it was a brill idea but when push came to shove I got really nervous and chickened out.
THEN I decided to have a few glasses of wine and ran into the television room with my bro giggling away with excitement and the tv was turned down. My parents looked confused to say the least and I started off the conversation by saying “Knock Knock!”, to which I received a very shaky “Who’s there?” from my mother. Then I said “Me!”, to which I got an even shakier “Me who?”. All allusions to this being a joke quickly left the room when I said “Me your second gay son!”. The inital response was Coronation street being abruptly turned back up to full volume as they tried to digest the very big bicuit which I handed to them, then they got over it and me and my bro went to Instinct and got smashed!
Submitted on October 18th, 2009
By Tony Rogers
I was never intending on coming out before I was 18. My intention was to simply turn 18 and when no longer dependant on my family or friends, then tell them. It was a security issue. That was turned upside down when my best mate told me he was gay and I was only 15. He said I had the worst reaction of anyone he had told which I would later realise actually has a label, ‘internal homophobia’. I didn’t tell him when he came out. Matter a fact I actually got more distant.
In the coming days I would be forced to deal with it. He has an example of how it was completely impossible to keep bottled up. I then started to go into town and starting accessing gay support sites but not before I would set up a faceparty profile which was so obviously me that my friend could tell. I eventually found gaycork.com and emailed in asking for help or what to do and was replied to very quickly and referred to the Cork gay project which ran a gay youth group (Unite). I met up with the youth leader in the other place cafe and for the first time told someone I was gay. Looking back I find it rather bizarre that I outed myself to a complete stranger before I did to my own best friend who happened to be gay.
While talking to the youth leader a boy from my school walked in who was not only out but in the youth group. This led to be almost having a panic attack and wondering whether or not I had just completely outed myself for good. I was told it was all confidential and would be kept as such. Over the following months I would go every week and develop a new group of friends and begin leading double life. It all looks so silly looking back now. I didn’t tell my other friends till I was 16 but not before I could make sure school wouldn’t find out. That worked perfectly until I was outed at the end of 5th year, still 16, and surprisingly had no negative experiences.
My family would be the last people to know. It eventually happened during an argument with my mother and grandmother which resulted in them then blaming one another for me not being comfortable enough to come out sooner. Now 17, I had been going to a gay youth group for two years and bottled up all these secrets and suddenly was almost angry I didn’t get a more dramatic reaction which I have learnt seems to be the case for a lot of lgbt teens.
It feels strange that what was once a problem and biggest haemorrhage of my life is now something I forget someone may find strange or uncomfortable with.
Submitted on October 16th, 2009
A Gay lad‘s story.
From a very early age I knew there was something different about me. I liked boys, not girls. But I instinctively knew this was somehow wrong, that it had to be kept secret and eventually forgotten about. During adolescence the one or two girlfriends I had were to me vindications of my “normality”. Though fantasising about, and indeed experimenting with, the same sex never waned but in fact intensified until eventually culminating in my falling for a guy on holidays. This was the first time my physical and sexual urges were in line with my emotional and romantic ones. I realised I was gay and accepted it for the first time at about 16.
About a year passed before I expressed my being gay to another person. It was a friend of mine who was also gay. He helped me through the last months of the closet so to speak. A visit to a local gay bar in Cork ended in me being out to another school friend, also gay! The three of us are still close friends.
By this stage I had moved from accepting my homosexuality to embracing it! I was frustrated that I was hiding who I was to the world. I came out to my mother and the relief was followed by floods of tears and some difficult times on both our parts. Today both my parents are accepting of who I am. I’m quite masculine so people tend not to guess I’m gay but I don’t hide it from anyone, I’m in the LGBT, been to prides etc and I’m essentially proud that I’m gay, not so much my sexuality but how I dealt with it, how it’s influenced me as a person, the people I’ve met and experiences I’ve had because of it all make me grateful I’m a right shirt-lifting queer!
P.S. You might notice my internal coming out takes up a far larger part of my story than say coming out to my parents, that is because I believe coming out to ourselves is the hardest part, but that’s easy to forget at this stage. And my advice to people in the process of coming out is that all we can expect of others is to accept who we are, but we have to embrace who we are. Oprah moment or what?
Sir. Anonymous Jones
Submitted on October 14th, 2009
It’s impossible for me to talk of “coming out” without feeling a tad hypocritial as I’ve never actually “come out” as such. I’ve always been of the school of thought that if being gay/bisexual is natural there’s no need to announce it to the world so I really just let people find out if it can up in conversation rather than making an impromptu declaration.
I was in the lucky position in school that no one really cared one way or the other and although there were definitely rumours that I may have been seen locking lips with a girl on Saturday night – they were likely to be quickly forgotten when someone else mentioned that so-and-so was off her face or you-know-who was with the other one’s fella. Yet my family all presumed I was 100% straight and I reckon all but my best friends presumed I was just “experimenting” or something or that if I was bisexual I would end up with a guy anyway.
Like most people at that age I hid quite a few of my relationships – looking back probably extraordinarily badly. Although I said I didn’t want to define myself at the time, I actually cringe at a number of occasions that could have easily been avoided; a friend unknowingly crashing me and my other “friend’s” dates, heading clubbing with my girlfriend only to see her swarmed by a throng of guys, inventions or changes of names to their “boy” equivalent. At that age, having to account for my moments was the only thing I found stressful – that if I was with gay friends or a girl I was seeing I had to have elaborate excuses at the ready and constantly manage the “real” and “fantasy” stories and different groups.
I was pretty naive in thinking I would never be “found out” by my uber-conservative parents. I figured after college they would stop caring and I could do what I wanted. Following being caught in a rather compromising situation by my mother and a huge confrontation though I told them that I was indeed bisexual but “would only be with boys from now on”. That was weeks before I started college and I think it was the freedom of being away from home, the opportunities of meeting new people and the fact I was forced to confront everything after being outed to my family that made me realise i was definitely on the ol’ gay side of the Kinsey scale.
Again in college I never specifically told anyone I was gay but obviously people found out if I mentioned my girlfriend or the LGBT society to them; and as I have always maintained, the people who matter don’t really care and the people who care don’t really matter.
I continued lying to my parents that I’d attended the counselling they’d sent me to and somehow been miraculously “cured” for over a year. Living away from home it wasn’t too difficult to keep the two parts of my life separate – but even questions when I got home at the weekend or over the phone had me on edge. Eventually I think it twigged with them that I was spending a little too much time with one particular friend and when they asked me about it I didn’t lie.
To say they were ecstatic would be a horrible lie but once I’d calmed down and accepted they knew (and it took months) I was relieved I wasn’t fabricating different stories constantly or having them try and set me up with guys anymore.
Finally, I don’t know how “out” someone can be. No matter how many people I tell, or feel the need to tell every time I meet a new person they’re going to presume I’m heterosexual as that is statistically more common. I don’t necessarily want to tell everyone always – usually I’ll correct someone if they ask if i have a boyfriend or something along those lines but I guess no one, with the exception of celebrities comes out only once.
This page has some sub pages.
October 15 2009 05:09 pm
UCC LGBT » Coming Out Stories on 18 Oct 2009 at 1:39 am #
[...] Coming Out Stories [...]