Emailing a coming out
Egregious or Acceptable?
“I like women. I am attracted to women. I am gay. I am a lesbian. I don’t like men. I am not attracted to men.”
What you just read is an unvarnished quote from a coming out letter I emailed to my parents on the brink of my freshman year of college, over 5 years ago at this point. Today, as a sort of pride month special, I’ll be sharing various chronological chunks from that letter, one because I think it’s incredibly funny and two because it’s revelatory.
Don’t get me wrong, emailing a coming out letter might be as egregious an act as sending a plate back at a restaurant with a written note of grievances about the dish. But it was totally in character for me and nowhere near the apotheosis of evasive behavior I had engaged in up to that point. Mustering up the courage to revisit this letter, I’ve taken it upon myself to squeeze the best lines for all they’re worth. To interrogate my motives as a character, and parse through what was behind it all.
Before all that though, a newsletter update:
Over the past few weeks I’ve been messing around with different series to make here that would be fun and sustainable once I start film school in a few months, one of those is the Game Show which, if you aren’t aware, is in the works. But in an effort to increase my bandwidth for this and the other offshoots of the newsletter (Movie Meditations & Tidbits), I’ve decided to suspend one existing series that was already victim to some severe neglect: Artist interviews. However, that doesn’t mean artist conversations won’t happen here, they’ll just move to the Bonus section of the newsletter and occur less frequently. You’ll find the Eric Barone interview and future features there, alongside specially curated content available at just $5/month.”
Chunk 1
“I will say it a couple of ways for clarity. I like women. I am attracted to women. I am gay. I am a lesbian. I don’t like men. I am not attracted to men.”
This is the opening line; an interesting way to start because it’s so obviously aflame with perturbation. Reading it actually takes me back to the frustration I was feeling at the time. The months of back and forth exchanges surrounding my assertive abstinence from all matters of heterosexuality. The walking around eggshells my folks were doing in response (and perhaps in preparation). It was all tumult in my head, with absolutely no resolve. So this letter came at a time when I was ready to rip the bandaid.
Chunk 2
“I still have bouts of self loathing today (otherwise known as internalized homophobia). I stepped outside of your lenses of tradition and found that there is an entire generation of accepting and progressive individuals who are willing to fight for positive change and improve the lives of queer youth and adults alike.”
Defensive posturing is an inevitable step forward from the last. This statement seems to function as a counter-argument to several potential responses, one being something like “your life is going to be much harder if you’re gay” which I had heard remnants of in the direction of other gays throughout the years.
Chunk 3
“Straight is the default. Straight is the norm.
Compulsory heterosexuality” affects people of every gender, but it’s mostly been studied as something that affects women.
This is because compulsory heterosexuality easily ties in with the misogyny that causes women’s sexualities and even identities to be defined by our relationships with men.”
More context dumping from the iconic Lesbian Masterdoc to lighten the load and appeal to my folks, who are fierce academics before anything else. It was also an attempt to narrativize my experience, given all the years where this went undetected by them. Not that I had to do any of this, and in hindsight, knowing how strongly they became advocates for me and queer people of all kinds, I could’ve just left it at Chunk 1 and hit send.
But then I wouldn’t have a post for this week.
Chunk 6
“I have questioned it for as long as I can remember. For what feels like my entire life.
Which not only makes me a great liar but an awesome suppressor of feelings and emotion.”
Lol. Not exactly a sound flex, but we’ll let it stand. This chunk, in much fewer words, captures the quirky way I discuss my coming-of-age inquisition into gayhood and subsequent self-denial turned repression. If my life were made into a series of crucial vignettes from near-fetus to adult, in An Angel at My Table fashion, every age would contain its own very overt, very gay reckoning, which I’d pass off as ‘normal straight behavior’ until about 15.
While I didn’t feel like this letter in particular was the time to describe all the crushes I had on math teachers, friends and public figures, there was certainly no shortage of that. I chose, instead, to be cheeky in some moments and flat out perturbed in others.
Chunk 7
“Another thing I would reference for convincing was my “desire” for fictional men/male celebrities. Then I began to understand that allowing myself to feel “attraction” to unattainable attractive male figures was a very safe way of hiding. I would never have to interact with any of these people. It was like a “safe bet” if you will.”
During the soft-launch phase that preceded this email, I would do things like: stay silent when my mom or siblings invited input on whether a guy in a show was hot, demonstrate the gap of nuance when told that I had at one time vouched for the attractiveness of said men on tv (mind you in the peak of my denial). This chunk is a way of combatting the confusion this may cause to the untrained hetero eye. Lining up my defense even further perhaps
Chunk 8 & 9
“But since accepting myself, and allowing myself to live, I no longer feel muted or broken, or like there is something wrong with me. There is no longer a lingering voice in my head trying to convince me that I will be happy with a man one day.”
“What excites me about the future is not only pursuing my passions but being able to finally explore relationships, dating and have social balance and normalcy.
I am optimistic and a big contributor to that optimism would be 2 supporting parents… but regardless, Thank you for listening.”
A bit of hopeful ingratiation to finish things off. An invitation to step forward into reality if you will. As I read how I ended the letter, I experience the relief I felt while writing it. This moment so many build up as a cataclysmic, cinematic turning point was finally behind me. Despite all the defensiveness on display in this letter, I maintained at least some sense that this email wasn’t life-ending for me. Cuz it wasn’t. Unlike many queer kids coming up in exactly the wrong environment to thrive, I knew I would be just fine in the end.
There’s more than a handful of organizations doing phenomenal work for queer people across the country that deserve all the eyes and dollar signs. Here’s just a few I’ve stayed in tune with the most:
https://www.theokraproject.com/
And on the opposite end of the same spectrum, here’s pattiegonia listing off some FREE queer resources prime for the taking:
Next week, I’ll be rounding up some of the formative queer films as a way of interrogating why some coming outs on screen can ring hollow, despite what they reveal about character in a purely functional story sense, and why some feel hard earned.