Outing Yourself: How to Come Out to Your Family, Your Friends, and Your Coworkers
176
Outing Yourself: How to Come Out to Your Family, Your Friends, and Your Coworkers
176eBook
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Overview
From the author of Queer in America comes a complete, step-by-step guide to coming out of the closet—the first coming-out guide to the ’90s. Signorile’s pull-no-punches style gives this book a Susan Powter-ish Stop the Insanity! approach to a difficult and often mishandled experience.
“Signorile’s book does a service simply by updating the crucial coming-out issue and analyzing, demstifying, and reframing it in a contemporary way appropriate to these complex times.”—Torie Osborn, The Los Angeles Times Book Review
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307822727 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/11/2012 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
PREFACE
“IT’S OKAY FOR OTHERS,
BUT I COULDN’T POSSIBLY
COME OUT MYSELF”
Due to the work of mental-health professionals, gay activists, and much of the media, many people have learned that living their lives in “the closet” robs them of a full, rewarding life and forces them to live in fear and shame—even though they may initially have been in denial about the stress the closet creates for them.
But “coming out” of the closet doesn’t necessarily mean telling everyone you run into that you are gay, lesbian, or bisexual. What it really means is no longer worrying about being “discovered” by friends, family, or coworkers.
Obviously you are in the closet if you are afraid to admit to yourself that you are gay or bisexual even though you are sexually attracted to people of your own gender. But if you have come out to yourself and still fear that someone will find out your secret, then you are still in the closet. Many of us—most of us, in fact—are out in some aspects of our lives but still closeted in others:
If you have come out to one or two heterosexual friends or relatives, but have sworn them to secrecy, you are still in the closet.
If you have told a fair number of close friends and acquaintances but haven’t been honest with your family—specifically your parents—you are still in the closet.
If you have told most of your friends and family about your homosexuality but have kept it secret from your coworkers—especially if you have allowed them to believe that you are heterosexual—you are still in the closet.
But if you have picked up this book, you don’t want to remain in that closet. You have taken a preliminary step on the road to outing yourself.
You have probably come to the realization that living without lies and without fear of disclosure would be a liberating, powerful, wonderful thing to do, that being honest would make you feel better about yourself.
But you probably also believe that revealing your homosexuality to the people who know you and love you would be a horrifying, even dangerous action, one that seems completely out of the question for you. You may in fact be saying to yourself, “It’s okay for others, But I couldn’t possibly Come out myself” or “It’s fine for some people, but nobody understands me and my life” or “Nobody knows how utterly unacceptable it would be to tell my family, my friends, or my coworkers.”
You probably feel that your situation is unique—and it is, everyone’s is. You may believe that although other people have come out and continue to come out, it will always be impossible for you to come out fully.
You probably believe that your family, your friends, or your coworkers are far different from those of all the other people who’ve outed themselves.
You probably believe that when it comes to your sexuality, the less your family and friends know, the better.
You may believe that it would be nice if they could accept you, if you didn’t have to lie and live in secrecy, but that telling them the truth about yourself would be an utter disaster, one that would ruin whatever good relationships you have with them now, as well as deeply hurt them—or possibly even kill them.
These are all normal, natural feelings, genuine concerns that need to be taken seriously, worries or beliefs that are very strong and very real and should not be casually or quickly dismissed.
That is why the program for coming out of the closet this book puts forth has no time limit: The process may take you six months, five years, ten years, or a lifetime. The coming-out process is one of self-discovery, and each person has his or her own personal timetable, journey, and destination.
Outing Yourself provides preparation for the process, a guide for that journey, and a friend you can turn to for comfort when the going gets rough, which it will. But once you have decided that you will be happier not living in fear any longer, Outing Yourself will help you deal with the inevitable stress. Because the stress of coming out will never be as hard on you as the stress of staying in was.
Although many family members and friends often have less of a problem with homosexuality than we fear they will have, you can never predict how your own family and friends will react. This book cannot promise that they will unconditionally accept you, but it can prepare you for the various responses they may have and help you to deal with them honestly and openly.
Once you step outside the confines of your closet, you will find yourself at the beginning of a quest for inner peace and self-acceptance. No matter how others may respond to your homosexuality, you will always know that living in the closet is far more destructive than the trauma of coming out. For your own mental health and well-being, you have decided that you are now ready to come out. Do so, at your own speed and when you know it’s safe.
Congratulations, and good luck.
INTRODUCTION
WHY OUT YOURSELF?
Every day, more and more lesbians and gay men are realizing that the continuing process of coming out dramatically improves the quality of their lives. We have come to realize that so many of the things that make our lives as lesbians and gay men miserable can be traced back to the closet. As mental-health professionals have long told us, the basic predicament of living like a second-class citizen and actively hiding the truth about ourselves diminishes our personal dignity and our self-esteem—even when we might not be aware of it—and our impaired self-esteem leads to many complex emotional problems.
Jonathan Rotenberg, a corporate strategy consultant who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, denied his sexuality throughout his teen years, burying himself in his work and his studies. He didn’t date girls or have any interest in that regard; he thought he was just an “awkward” heterosexual. During college, after briefly wondering if he might be gay, he recoiled from the notion because homosexuality didn’t fit in with the man he thought he wanted to be. “There was a tremendous amount of grief at that time,” he told me when I interviewed him for my first book, Queer in America. “I would pour myself into work and try to ignore it. I kept giving myself warning signs that there was a dilemma, but I ignored them too and just kept punching away. A lot of problems developed, all of these irrational things: a fear of flying, just a total meltdown. I just was fighting this so hard.”
Shelley, a twenty-three-year-old Baltimore college student, has come out as a lesbian to herself, has made some gay friends, and is dating a woman, but she hasn’t told her family or any of her straight friends. She constantly feels a sense of shame, that she is doing something behind their backs. That pressure and stress take an enormous toll.
“I’ve always had a bit of a weight problem,” Shelley says, “but it is exacerbated by stressful situations. Since I’ve been living this secret lesbian life, I’ve gained twenty pounds. I just eat myself into oblivion sometimes; I’m nervous and scared a lot of the time, and food becomes my escape valve. I know if I could just relieve the pressure, and just tell my parents and my sisters, a lot of this behavior would stop. And that’s what I’m working toward.”
The stories of Jonathan and Shelley, as well as those of the countless gay people who have come out (and the countless more who still struggle with issues of honesty and openness), attest to the ways in which the closet has been a destructive force in too many of our lives. For some people, like Shelley, the closet has aggravated or even created weight problems. In others, it has led to alcohol and drug abuse, depression, insomnia, phobias, stress, and other even more serious emotional disorders. These emotional problems can then lead to or exacerbate physical disorders, such as hypertension, heart disease, stroke, and even cancer.
When they discuss how they came out, many people use the imagery of a great burden being lifted from them, that they feel like the free souls they were meant to be. This may not happen initially—coming out itself can be stressful and difficult, especially when family and friends react negatively—but in time most gay people say they are happier out of the closet than they were when they were in the closet. They feel better about themselves in general, and this positive outlook carries over into their day-to-day activities.
“Each time I tell someone new—a cousin, an old friend from school, or even a new friend at the gym—I get a certain kind of confidence boost,” says Kathleen, a thirty-six-year-old Dallas advertising executive who recently came out to her family and is now planning to tell her coworkers. “It not only makes me feel better about myself, more honest and less secretive, but asserting myself in this way really gives me an overall self-assurance that carries through at work and even in my relationships. It’s as if coming out is contagious: The benefits spread to every aspect of your life.”
As Kathleen’s comment illustrates, outing yourself changes your life in subtle ways that make you less afraid of the world around you and better poised to take on real challenges and lead a more productive, successful, and happy life.
Coming out of the closet is a process that gets you in touch with the real you, the person you were meant to be before you were forced to wear the mask of heterosexuality. Coming out means you no longer feel like a freak who must hide a terrible secret; instead, you feel like a normal person who is proud of who he or she is, the way normal people tend to be.
“The personal is the political,” goes the old feminist adage. In many countries around the world today, coming out is also a political act—whether you are an explicitly political person or not. Being gay in the 1990s means being part of a large, diverse community of people who are under attack by people who don’t understand homosexuality and are thus afraid of it. Beyond the personal reasons to come out, many gay men, lesbians, and bisexual men and women are also reaching the conclusion that they have a responsibility to a community of people, just as other groups—such as women, blacks, and Jews—feel an allegiance to their communities. These newly politicized bisexuals, lesbians, and gay men have decided that it is time to stand up and be counted, to be identified as part of a community, and to make gay people so familiar that they no longer induce fear. Coming out instills a sense of duty, a sense that you are helping your community in the most effective way possible: by giving it visibility.
Visibility itself builds self-esteem, and thus the process of coming out creates a powerful cycle in which the personal fuels the political, which in turn fuels the personal. Outing yourself brings you to an understanding of a simple but often overlooked fact of life: To help others is really to help yourself, and to help yourself is really to help others.