Big Gay Closet

By 14, Matranga, didn’t want to pretend anymore. So she handed a note to a classmate at Theodore Roosevelt Middle School in Kenner, scrawled with the words, “Pass it on.”

Inside, she wrote: “My name is Jeannette Matranga. I am gay and I’m proud of it. If you have any questions or comments, meet me at the second tree during second lunch.”

via Gay people are coming out younger | NOLA.com.

“I have these beautiful children and this extraordinary family and to think in any way shape or form that that’s wrong or that there’s shame in that or that there’s something to hide actually turns my stomach.”

“What would [my daughter] think if I said, ‘Oh honey, you can’t come with me to work because they don’t know I have an adopted daughter and they don’t know that I’m gay.’ My children and our family, I’ve really never been as proud of anything in my life. I couldn’t be happier at this point in my life, and I feel like we’ve created this pretty extraordinary family.”

via ‘Firefly,’ ‘Playboy Club’ actor Sean Maher reveals he’s gay | Inside TV | EW.com.

This story was submitted to us online by Jesse.

Most people are born with none to very little baggage; I was born with a sack of it. I came out of the womb covered in red tape.  June 4th 1992 is the day I like to call the “Red tape Day”, But you can just call it my Birthday. But this story starts before that, nine months to be exact.

My biological mother, “Robin” was a prostitute among many other things. Adopted when she was a baby she never knew her real parents. Her grandfather raped her when she was a child, so she continuously ran away from home. She ran away to a little town in South Carolina called Loris, but I’d prefer to call it Home. She met a boy there by name of Eddie. They started dating, and she became very good friends with his mom, Mary, The woman that I call my mother.  Well she was found a few months later and token back home. Many years later my mother met a man in Boone NC, and he got her pregnant.  The baby was promised to his mother, my biological grandmother. But one day my grandmother came home and caught her drinking while she was pregnant with me, and they got in to a fight and she left.  She called up Mary (my mother) and told her she was pregnant and didn’t have anywhere to go. At this time Eddie was in jail for armed robbery and kidnapping.

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I’ve always known that I was gay. Well before I had even heard the word, or knew its full implications. I never believed it to be wrong, how could love be so? But growing up in a small country town in Australia with a combination of conservative Catholic parents and religious schooling, I knew it was a difference I had to keep secret. Back then, there were no openly gay people or role models to be seen. I felt very alone. Sometimes I wanted to tell people close to me what was going on, but I remained absolutely terrified, fearful of being rejected and losing them.

I was a shy kid, not naturally inclined or interested in sport. That was always going to be a problem at school. I was one of those kids who wanted to believe no one knew the truth, meanwhile I was pressed against the glass doors of my self-imposed closet like a big gay butterfly for all the world to see. Sensing that, they quickly closed in. Though I was generally a good student, my school years increasingly became something to be endured rather than enjoyed. Constant homophobic taunts rang in my ears. In the last few years of secondary school, the new AIDS epidemic hit the world. The initial highly homophobic backlash that came with it only pushed me even further into that closet, and raised my fears.

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He finally admitted to himself that he was gay. It left him lonely and depressed.
“I felt like I would never, ever be in love,” Challender said.

He thought about suicide, and developed a stutter. He felt so awful and fearful in public restrooms, he’d cross the street to use a bathroom.

By his junior year, however, he was able to talk with friends about it, and they were supportive. He started to accept being gay and told his family.

Today as an 18-year-old senior, Challender has taken a bigger step, telling his story publicly in a video posted two weeks ago on YouTube as part of the national “It Gets Better” Project.

Out of the closet, onto YouTube – A gay Bozeman teen shares his struggles – The Bozeman Daily Chronicle: News.

 

This is possibly the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s an audio interview with Gayle King, and Chris (who plays Kurt on Glee) talks about how his family have simply accepted him, without the need for a big announcement. He also talks about the bullying he experienced in school.

And I’ve been wondering for a while, because I’ve read very early pieces where Chris’ parents say that they didn’t know if he was gay or not, that it’s not something they’d all discussed just yet.

There was later some confusion over comments he’d made, since he’d never actually announced he was gay, that maybe he was “back in the closet.”

Gayle King: Interviews – Chris Colfer on ‘Glee,’ Fame, and the Golden Globes.

I remember at the age of about 13 having an argument with my very Catholic grandmother. We were arguing about the rights of gay people. It wasn’t the first time we’d had the argument, and, as you might expect, I was very pro-gay equality and she was very much not. It’s not like she wanted homosexuals executed or anything, but she considered it an illness. She thought that Oscar Wilde had “ruined his life” with his homosexuality and believed that HIV and Aids were god’s way of eradicating gays.

I remember at the time having not the slightest doubt in the power of my position. I was one of those annoying little gits that went around describing themselves as “an equalitarian” (I’d read it in the dictionary and instantly adopted it) and as I grew older I met friends who were gay or who would later come out as gay. I even wrote a thesis on Oscar Wilde as a school student and remember feeling mortified when, commenting on the death of Freddy Mercury, a family member ‘joked’ to a neighbour that it “served him right for being a poofter”. (Imagine the embarrassment when the neighbour in question replied with “my brother’s gay”).

I guess the point of mentioning this, is to highlight that I myself never had any issue with homosexuality. Or bisexuality. Very much the opposite. That makes it all the more baffling to me that it took me so very long to realise that I myself was gay. I was into my twenties, had completed my degree and had even got married. And then it hit me like a train. I’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. I wasn’t the person that I had thought I was – actually the person I married turned out also not to be the person I had thought he was either, which at least made it slightly easier to leave. But that still left me with a massive problem. I could leave him easy enough – I was pretty much stuck with myself. There was no leaving that behind.

I didn’t so much come out of the closet – more exploded out of there, hurting myself and a few others on the way. I told a close friend what was muddling around in my head. She seduced me. I tried to resist and then thought what the hell. The first time I kissed her I was terrified. No amount of alcohol seemed sufficient to calm my nerves and in the end I just had to swallow them. Once I’d taken the plunge I knew there was no going back. I think it probably remains the best kiss of my life, not only for how damn good it was but also for everything it symbolised. I then fell crazy in love and had my heart broken. It took me three years to patch it back together.

I went off the rails, had some brilliant and some awful times and never stopped to look back. It needed doing. I suddenly had all this catching up to do – there was a whole world out there that I had always known existed, but had never thought applied to me. Now it suddenly did.

I occasionally wonder why it took me so long. The gay community is now the centre around which my life resolves; it’s where many of my friends are, it’s where I go for support and a huge chunk of my social life. It’s where I feel safe. Accepted. Me. I simply can’t imagine my life without it – and I doubt I would want to live somewhere without a significant gay scene. And I suppose the answer is in the two stories I started this with. While I was able to know that there was nothing wrong with being gay, my entire experience of any discussion about homosexuality had been that of it being ‘othered’ by people. Being gay was what happened to other people – not to me or anyone in my family. It’s not like I had the kind of upbringing where we were encouraged to think about the kind of people we were or the lives we wanted for ourselves – there was certainly no questioning, let alone challenging, or perceived norms. We were all assumed to be straight, to be destined for a lifetime of unsatisfying low-paid work, marriage and kids. I bucked the trend by going to university after my history teacher talked me into it, but otherwise I was sleepwalking towards my future. It took the (apparent) finality of marriage and the prospect of a miserable life to jolt me awake and make me ask myself who I really was and what I really wanted. For that reason alone, I remain glad that I did it.

When I came out to my Dad it had been a year and a bit since he came out to the family and a few months before I decided to return to Brockvegas to tell my friends that I was gay. I was living in Brantvegas, finishing up my last year at high school and for some reason I had fallen into the Theatre Fag group at that school pretty darned fast. Go figure. I was bringing home all manner of queer teens for my father to meet, as well as a couple “beards” and “Fag Hags” for good measure.

Really I wasn’t fooling anyone. Hence my decision to come out a tad bit earlier than I expected.

read the rest: Coming Out: To my Dad « Dead Robot.

Dave sits on the swing where we once waited out the effects of a stupid LSD experiment. We shared a common love of gorey horror movies overflowing into practical jokes – when we met he threw a bag of ketchup at me trying to make me look “bloodied”. He was the first person who I could relate to on a nerdy level; that it was ok to like science fiction.

“That’s cool. I guess. What’s it like?” He was always curious. Not “gay-curious” but curious in general – hence I thought it appropriate to tell him on the “LSD swings”. If I had said I tried recreating the Jack the Ripper killings, he’d probably ask the same thing.

Read the rest: Coming Out: To my Friends « Dead Robot.

I love this story. I hope that this is a template for the coming out stories of the future.

A bit of back story for new readers: My oldest brother came out when I was about 11yrs old. I didn’t understand fully what that meant, but I knew there was drama of sorts… my parents were having hushed conversations that were punctuated with “DeadRobot, go to your room.” Later, when I was 16, my father came out of the closet for fear of meeting up with Dan in a gay bar on one of his many business trips to Toronto. Of course the family was shocked, the town of Brockvegas was scandalized, Dad lived a quiet life of a shattered bachelor for all of 10 minutes and then took up with his lover for 14 years. Family came to accept him (including Mom, to a certain degree) and we were happy chucks all again. Okay?

There’s your 8 years or so of drama packed into 125 words or less.

Skip ahead to my 17th birthday. The year I decided that if I was to live my life honestly, I had to tell the people I loved that I was a ‘mo. I decide that I have to make a trip back to Brockvegas to tell friends and family in one fast trip. Get in, drop the bomb, get out, let them decide where their loyalties lie.

Read the rest: Coming Out: To My Mom « Dead Robot.