So, you're a closeted gay. Maybe it took you a while to figure out you are gay and maybe part of the price is now you are a sexual sadist and/or only get off on "the dirty stuff" because you carry shame and disgust that someone inculcated you with.
If staying in the closet is making you miserable and/or turning you into a monster but you feel like you simply can't come out of the closet, it's time to do some threat assessment and/or reassessment of your reasons why you think you have to keep hurting yourself.
If you live in a country where being LGBTQ is relatively safe, and there are gay people living full lives while openly gay (say, the US, probably most European countries), there are three areas you should look at:
That linked piece is mostly about things that could have become phobias but didn't. When I was active on homeschooling lists, I was befriended by a woman with a bright child who had a raftload of phobias and after she spent some weeks or months talking with me, her child was able to begin setting aside those phobias by figuring out what "dumb" ideas fostered them at an earlier age.
If objective reality suggests that you probably won't be murdered for being LGBTQ yet you feel very, very strongly that coming out of the closet is life threatening and you simply cannot do it, that attitude may essentially be a neurotic attitude rooted in something that happened in your life at an early age.
If you are all grown up -- a legal adult, living on your own, etc -- it may be worthwhile to try to figure out what happened that caused you to feel that way. You may simply conclude "Yeah, I misinterpreted that." or "Yeah, that was someone else's stupid baggage. I did nothing wrong and I can let this go."
For many people, simply revisiting what happened in early childhood and seeing it through their now-adult eyes is sufficient to let go of a LOT of suffocating baggage relatively effortlessly.
If this is destroying your mental health and this person close to you STILL just cannot accept you being openly gay, I highly recommend you move them out of your life no matter who they are. Blood relative or best friend or whatever, if they love their homophobia enough to let it destroy you, they don't REALLY love YOU.
Let it go and get over it. That's on THEM, not you. You do not have to stay and let this warp you.
Additionally, if you are not just a hermit, people who know you will react to you coming out. Some folks will react really strongly and get up in your business no matter how you handle it because lots of folks Got Issues.
I write elsewhere about my hypothesis that having a career requires one to have a relationship to "the public" in a way that being a homemaker does not. To me, no matter how much of a public footprint you have, if you need to support yourself with paid work, that falls under having a relationship to the public, so these two things will be distinguished somewhat but are being addressed under the same section.
When Caitlyn Jenner began growing out her hair and talking about plans to get a sex change operation, I was like "No, this is some kind of joke, like the garbage you see in The Enquirer about my toaster is possessed by demons, right? This cannot be real."
I didn't know Jenner personally, so she never had to hear me go "Do what??" and it didn't stick in my craw. I wasn't like "This person CANNOT do this. I will NOT ALLOW THIS. Let's put a STOP to this." I was just like "Nuh-uh. This is NOT For Realzy Realz, nope. Does not compute."
I was not the only one having trouble with the concept. Jenner went through the transition and the world got over it and accepts that this is real now. And Jenner is very famous and was very famous when she began her transition.
No matter how big your public footprint, it is possible to come out as whatever you feel you really are. Some thoughts on how best to proceed:
DO NOT TAKE IT PERSONALLY. It isn't about YOU.
Give people time to PROCESS the information. Try to let people know in a way and under circumstances where they have the opportunity to DIGEST the information.
Do NOT take it upon yourself to play therapist to every single person you run into who has some trouble with this concept of who you really are after years of knowing you as something else. There is not enough time and energy in your life to do that a zillion times, though you may need to do some of that with your inner circle and doing so with SOME people can also help you process, especially if these are people who actually care about YOU more than about their homophobia.
Learn techniques for disengaging from the emotional baggage of people outside your inner circle who feel like they are entitled to dump on you, impose on you, etc. because they learned this private detail about you and it is blowing their minds and they are having a cow. Do all in your power to take a position of "Not My Problem."
And the best way to do that is, for starters, do NOT rebut their crap anymore than you absolutely must to PROTECT yourself from them and their garbage. Do NOT make yourself responsible for their emotional welfare, their mental health, etc.
As much as humanly possible, pursue a policy of "Well, it's really a private matter and I don't really care to get into it." You may need "the public" to know you are gay, but beyond "I am gay," you are not obligated to divulge more private, personal info than that to people outside your inner circle.
Be aware that SOME of those folks are not homophobic assholes trying to intentionally hurt you. Some of them will be one of the following:
For one thing, if they have not told you -- and told you HONESTLY -- what their motivation is, you may be guessing wrong. For example, you assume they just want or need useful info for themselves or a loved one but they are actually hitting on you. Good luck getting rid of them after you divulge a LOT of personal info while stupidly trying to be "helpful." (Ask me how I know.)
For another, it's just not a best practice. It's not something you are likely to be able to "fix" for them in a five minute conversation.
If you have enough of a public footprint, it may be helpful to YOU to post a list of recommended resources somewhere so that people who are struggling with their own questions about their life or a loved one can go to your website/social media/whatever and get directed to what they need and get off your back.
And, of course, they may actually be a homophobic jerk with an ugly agenda Just Asking Questions. It's best to give such people as little of your time and energy as possible and since you may not know who is "innocently" bleeding you like they are a vampire and who is intentionally doing so with malice aforethought, you want to develop policies that, to the best of your ability, sidestep the issue and give people few opportunities to bleed you for any reason at all.
If you are older, you might be comfortably well off and in a position to say "Screw it. I can't breath anymore. I can't pretend anymore. I'm coming out and if that means living off savings -- at least for a while -- so be it." If so, you can consider yourself to have my permission/approval if you need someone to give you some kind of validation.
Maybe you are old enough that officially retiring is an option. Coolios. Go with that.
In both cases, the big issue most people will have is "HOW in the heck did you NOT know sooner? WHY NOW??????" You will need to be prepared to both face that attitude and also continue to err on the side of protecting your privacy and NOT oversharing.
Deal with that question privately first because otherwise every yay-hoo that reacts with shock and gets up in your business will get a much more personal reply than you really intended because it is getting big feels from you and you need to process. Do your best to keep Public Relations and your own need to PROCESS separate.
It will NOT go good places to use the talk show circuit or the inappropriately invasive questions of random jerks as "free therapy."
If you are not comfortably well off, not ready to officially retire, not already doing remote work and are concerned that you could get fired from your job (or shunned for new contracts), you may need to PLAN a career transition to something else before you can come out.
Please do not cut your own throat. This is a BLOG with GENERAL information and opinions. I don't know you personally. STOP and think about the details of YOUR life and err on the side of protecting your welfare while trying to figure out how to come out so you can stop going nuts from living a lie.
Last, be kind to yourself. If you are coming out as gay, this is not a thing you have done before and probably you haven't done anything quite like it before.
When you inevitably blurt something you end up regretting -- because, WOW, can some people be AWFUL -- don't beat yourself up about it. Some people will be awful on the slightest excuse and are just waiting with bated breath for an opportunity to POUNCE and pretend it is YOUR FAULT.
It may be worth examining the incident and thinking about how to handle it better in the future, but just accept that you do NOT control the outcome of social interactions. SOME portion of the outcome is in the hands of the people with whom you are interacting and, unfortunately, not everyone is making a good faith effort to be good to everyone around them.
Being gay should not be illegal. I think gay people are simply BORN gay and as long as they are engaging in consensual sex, they are doing nothing wrong by having sex with a same-sex lover instead of an opposite-sex lover.
If staying in the closet is making you miserable and/or turning you into a monster but you feel like you simply can't come out of the closet, it's time to do some threat assessment and/or reassessment of your reasons why you think you have to keep hurting yourself.
If you live in a country where being LGBTQ is relatively safe, and there are gay people living full lives while openly gay (say, the US, probably most European countries), there are three areas you should look at:
Early Childhood
An officer in the Army who had been stationed in Asia once said to me "I know just enough Chinese to get myself into trouble, not enough to get myself out of it." That kind of sums up the social and emotional intelligence of a lot of toddlers and preschoolers who sometimes jump to crazy conclusions.That linked piece is mostly about things that could have become phobias but didn't. When I was active on homeschooling lists, I was befriended by a woman with a bright child who had a raftload of phobias and after she spent some weeks or months talking with me, her child was able to begin setting aside those phobias by figuring out what "dumb" ideas fostered them at an earlier age.
If objective reality suggests that you probably won't be murdered for being LGBTQ yet you feel very, very strongly that coming out of the closet is life threatening and you simply cannot do it, that attitude may essentially be a neurotic attitude rooted in something that happened in your life at an early age.
If you are all grown up -- a legal adult, living on your own, etc -- it may be worthwhile to try to figure out what happened that caused you to feel that way. You may simply conclude "Yeah, I misinterpreted that." or "Yeah, that was someone else's stupid baggage. I did nothing wrong and I can let this go."
For many people, simply revisiting what happened in early childhood and seeing it through their now-adult eyes is sufficient to let go of a LOT of suffocating baggage relatively effortlessly.
Child Molestation
If you realize you were molested in early childhood, you need help beyond what a few bullet points can give you BUT:- You may have been told it was YOUR FAULT you were molested. This is a LIE. Child molesters routinely tell their victims it is somehow their fault or similar messages to make the child cooperate in covering up the abuse. It is NOT your fault. No child is somehow at fault for an adult CHOOSING to abuse them. See also: Abusers abuse people. It's what they do.
- You are NOT gay because you were molested. You were also NOT molested because you are gay. Even if you were molested by someone of the same sex, it is a COINCIDENCE. I am unaware of ANY evidence linking child molestation and sexual orientation. And rest assured I have looked for things like that for DECADES.
Your Inner Circle
If the country you live in is not a place where being gay is illegal and yet you still feel the social climate of "your world" is extremely hostile to you coming out, it may be due to one or more people in your inner circle who are homophobic.If this is destroying your mental health and this person close to you STILL just cannot accept you being openly gay, I highly recommend you move them out of your life no matter who they are. Blood relative or best friend or whatever, if they love their homophobia enough to let it destroy you, they don't REALLY love YOU.
Let it go and get over it. That's on THEM, not you. You do not have to stay and let this warp you.
Career/Relationship to "The Public"
In the US, being LGBTQ puts one at high risk of homelessness, which is the original raison d'etre for this blog. It's not unreasonable to feel threatened by a potential threat to your ability to support yourself financially.Additionally, if you are not just a hermit, people who know you will react to you coming out. Some folks will react really strongly and get up in your business no matter how you handle it because lots of folks Got Issues.
I write elsewhere about my hypothesis that having a career requires one to have a relationship to "the public" in a way that being a homemaker does not. To me, no matter how much of a public footprint you have, if you need to support yourself with paid work, that falls under having a relationship to the public, so these two things will be distinguished somewhat but are being addressed under the same section.
When Caitlyn Jenner began growing out her hair and talking about plans to get a sex change operation, I was like "No, this is some kind of joke, like the garbage you see in The Enquirer about my toaster is possessed by demons, right? This cannot be real."
I didn't know Jenner personally, so she never had to hear me go "Do what??" and it didn't stick in my craw. I wasn't like "This person CANNOT do this. I will NOT ALLOW THIS. Let's put a STOP to this." I was just like "Nuh-uh. This is NOT For Realzy Realz, nope. Does not compute."
I was not the only one having trouble with the concept. Jenner went through the transition and the world got over it and accepts that this is real now. And Jenner is very famous and was very famous when she began her transition.
No matter how big your public footprint, it is possible to come out as whatever you feel you really are. Some thoughts on how best to proceed:
Who to tell: Order of priority
- Start with YOU. Get it all straight in your own mind before you tell anyone. Do not tell someone, then flip-flop, then flip-flop again. Be sure you know this is a thing you are willing to stand your ground on.
- Next, deal with your inner circle -- the people who are a part of your personal life and important career contacts where trust and communication matter. Tell them PRIVATELY. Don't let them hear it through the grapevine or, worse, on The News (or via social media).
- Then prepare to tell "the public." Before you tell the public, first sort your emotional baggage enough to come up with a good PR position, even if you are in no way AT ALL "famous." These days, ANYONE can post a public announcement for free on social media. Figure out how best to present the info. It's much easier to get it close to right the first time than to do a LOT of backtracking after you have dumped your baggage on everyone listening.
How to deal with the fallout
Expect people to react. Just like I was all "nuh-uh, this is NOT real" about Jenner's announced transition, some people -- possibly a LOT of people -- will react to your news initially with denial.DO NOT TAKE IT PERSONALLY. It isn't about YOU.
Give people time to PROCESS the information. Try to let people know in a way and under circumstances where they have the opportunity to DIGEST the information.
Do NOT take it upon yourself to play therapist to every single person you run into who has some trouble with this concept of who you really are after years of knowing you as something else. There is not enough time and energy in your life to do that a zillion times, though you may need to do some of that with your inner circle and doing so with SOME people can also help you process, especially if these are people who actually care about YOU more than about their homophobia.
Learn techniques for disengaging from the emotional baggage of people outside your inner circle who feel like they are entitled to dump on you, impose on you, etc. because they learned this private detail about you and it is blowing their minds and they are having a cow. Do all in your power to take a position of "Not My Problem."
And the best way to do that is, for starters, do NOT rebut their crap anymore than you absolutely must to PROTECT yourself from them and their garbage. Do NOT make yourself responsible for their emotional welfare, their mental health, etc.
As much as humanly possible, pursue a policy of "Well, it's really a private matter and I don't really care to get into it." You may need "the public" to know you are gay, but beyond "I am gay," you are not obligated to divulge more private, personal info than that to people outside your inner circle.
Be aware that SOME of those folks are not homophobic assholes trying to intentionally hurt you. Some of them will be one of the following:
- Closeted gays themselves who are beginning to realize they are gay or wonder if they are gay or they KNOW they are gay but have no idea how to come out of the closet.
- Hitting on you and doing it badly.
- Having big feels about something in their own life somehow related to this, such as a close relative of theirs having recently come out, and trying to sort their baggage.
For one thing, if they have not told you -- and told you HONESTLY -- what their motivation is, you may be guessing wrong. For example, you assume they just want or need useful info for themselves or a loved one but they are actually hitting on you. Good luck getting rid of them after you divulge a LOT of personal info while stupidly trying to be "helpful." (Ask me how I know.)
For another, it's just not a best practice. It's not something you are likely to be able to "fix" for them in a five minute conversation.
If you have enough of a public footprint, it may be helpful to YOU to post a list of recommended resources somewhere so that people who are struggling with their own questions about their life or a loved one can go to your website/social media/whatever and get directed to what they need and get off your back.
And, of course, they may actually be a homophobic jerk with an ugly agenda Just Asking Questions. It's best to give such people as little of your time and energy as possible and since you may not know who is "innocently" bleeding you like they are a vampire and who is intentionally doing so with malice aforethought, you want to develop policies that, to the best of your ability, sidestep the issue and give people few opportunities to bleed you for any reason at all.
Employment Issues
Some people manage to stay employed while transitioning in terms of being a transsexual, which tends to come with a long, awkward period while one changes their appearance radically and tries to figure out how to make this work. Remote work tends to be helpful for such people and I will suggest it is potentially a good way to go for someone who is coming out as gay as well.If you are older, you might be comfortably well off and in a position to say "Screw it. I can't breath anymore. I can't pretend anymore. I'm coming out and if that means living off savings -- at least for a while -- so be it." If so, you can consider yourself to have my permission/approval if you need someone to give you some kind of validation.
Maybe you are old enough that officially retiring is an option. Coolios. Go with that.
In both cases, the big issue most people will have is "HOW in the heck did you NOT know sooner? WHY NOW??????" You will need to be prepared to both face that attitude and also continue to err on the side of protecting your privacy and NOT oversharing.
Deal with that question privately first because otherwise every yay-hoo that reacts with shock and gets up in your business will get a much more personal reply than you really intended because it is getting big feels from you and you need to process. Do your best to keep Public Relations and your own need to PROCESS separate.
It will NOT go good places to use the talk show circuit or the inappropriately invasive questions of random jerks as "free therapy."
If you are not comfortably well off, not ready to officially retire, not already doing remote work and are concerned that you could get fired from your job (or shunned for new contracts), you may need to PLAN a career transition to something else before you can come out.
Please do not cut your own throat. This is a BLOG with GENERAL information and opinions. I don't know you personally. STOP and think about the details of YOUR life and err on the side of protecting your welfare while trying to figure out how to come out so you can stop going nuts from living a lie.
Last, be kind to yourself. If you are coming out as gay, this is not a thing you have done before and probably you haven't done anything quite like it before.
When you inevitably blurt something you end up regretting -- because, WOW, can some people be AWFUL -- don't beat yourself up about it. Some people will be awful on the slightest excuse and are just waiting with bated breath for an opportunity to POUNCE and pretend it is YOUR FAULT.
It may be worth examining the incident and thinking about how to handle it better in the future, but just accept that you do NOT control the outcome of social interactions. SOME portion of the outcome is in the hands of the people with whom you are interacting and, unfortunately, not everyone is making a good faith effort to be good to everyone around them.
Footnote
If you live in a country where it's illegal to be gay, I'm very sorry. That's really outside the scope of what I can help with. (Edit: Though I do have A Hypothesis.) You may want to consider moving to a different country or becoming politically active.Being gay should not be illegal. I think gay people are simply BORN gay and as long as they are engaging in consensual sex, they are doing nothing wrong by having sex with a same-sex lover instead of an opposite-sex lover.
The TLDR: Keep it among consenting adults.