saquigley@watmath.UUCP (Sophie Quigley) (02/06/84)
I don't know if this has been discussed in this group already or not. If it has, please disregard this article. I have noticed a discussion on the difficulties of "coming out" to one's parents. I think that if I were to ever decide to start having homosexual relationships, this would be one of the two hardest things for me to do (being an only child certainly doesn't help). The other thing would be simply deciding whether to let people one has just met know that one "is" homosexual (I don't like this categorisation, because I don't consider myself "heterosexual" or "homosexual" or "bisexual", but simply somebody who has all sorts of relationships with all sorts of people, and it simply happens that so far, my sexual relationships have been with MOTOS; I also tend to perceive other people along those terms, which is sometimes a mistake; but to simplify the discussion, I will talk about "being" homosexual) It seems to me that one's personal sex life should not be relevant to relationships with people, yet it turns out that people think it is; it also turns out that at some points, it becomes relevant, because not telling about it becomes hiding. I recently had a friend of mine (she is a friend now, she was just an aquaintance then) tell me that she fell in love with another woman. She had so far only had love affairs with men. I was a bit worried about her at the time because I could sense that she was sort of apprehensive about how I would react. This is very understandable, because she didn't know me that well at the time, but our conversation was arriving to a point where it was really silly of her not to tell me as I was sort of getting confused about it was eaxctly that she was telling me: she was talking about that woman as she talked of a lover, and yet from previous talks I had with her, I had understood that she was not interested in women as lovers as she had had a very unpleasant experience with a lesbian friend of hers, so I deduced that they were not lovers. Anyway, telling me that this woman was her lover became relevant at this point, so she did. So, how do you deal with this problem? Do you just let everybody you meet know that you are homosexual from the start even if this is of no relevance whatsoever with the type of relationship you have with that person, or do you wait until the moment is ripe, in which case, do you tell some people, but not others? how do you decide? or do you simply not tell anybody but your homosexual friends, which can make you feel as though you are living two different lives? or do you let people guess, which will make it so that homophobics will probably come very fast to the conclusion that you are homosexual and the others will probably not guess as they are probably accustomed to think in heterosexual terms. How do people react when you do tell them? have you lost many friends that way? Have you gained any? (I gained one, and she gained me) I hope I am not offending anybody with these questions. I realise that I am somewhat of an outsider to this group, as I have never had sexual relationships with MOTSS, and because I am a woman in a group which seems completely made up of men, but I do not feel different, even though I might be perceived as different by some of you. So, if you perceive my questions as voyeuristic, please forgive me, they were not meant that way. Sophie Quigley watmath!saquigley
rob@denelcor.UUCP (Rob Wahl) (02/08/84)
For me, the process of "coming out" to my friends and co-workers wasn't nearly
as difficult as making the decision to come out. The reason I came out was
because I felt I could never lead a normal life as long as I was hiding such
a large part of my life. How can you think positively about yourself if you
are constantly negating yourself?
How do you choose the right moment to come out to someone? Well, I really
didn't want to make a big thing out of it - it shouldn't be a big deal - so
when someone would ask me what I did over the weekend, I'd tell them I went
dancing with Rick at the Foxhole, or I went to chorus rehearsal (Oh? What
chorus? The Denver Gay Men's Chorus). This kept me from acting a scene
out of "True Confessions", and allowed them to gloss over the matter without
a confrontation.
Coming out to my parents was different. Whatever reaction they had, I didn't
want them to think they made me gay. They could hate me, feel sorry for me,
anything, as long as they wouldn't think they were responsible. As it turned
out, what hurt my mother most was that I hadn't told her sooner. She still
worries about me (she's afraid I'll get knifed by a psychopathic lover, or
get AIDS), but I'm closer to my family than I've ever been before.
A note to women: Please, please don't feel that your input is not wanted!
This newsgroup is as much for lesbian issues as for gaymale ones. For that
matter, no one ever said you had to be gay to comment on gay topics.
Some of my best friends are fruit flies :-)
Robert Wahl
Aurora, Colorado
{hao,nbires,allegra}!denelcor!robamigo2@ihuxq.UUCP (John Hobson) (02/08/84)
My younger brother is gay, and when he decided to the our parents about it, he came to me to get some advice about how to tell them (just for the record, I am not gay). After telling him that his sexual orientation made no difference to the way I felt about him (he had been afraid to tell me for years because he feared that I would reject him), we discussed what we thought might be our parents' reaction. As it turned out, we got their reactions completely backwards--we thought that our father would refuse to accept it while our mother would be supportive, and it was the other way round. One result of his opening up to me was that it made us closer than we had been in years. He now feels that there is someone in the family that he can confide in, and his openness to me has made it easier for me to be open to him. However, whenever I think of him, I do think of him as "my gay brother", not as "my brother". (We have another brother whom I think of as "my twin brother", but that is a very different--and very special--relationship). I love him, and I care about him, but his homosexuality keeps intruding when I think about him. I was raised in a fairly traditional Catholic atmosphere, where "queers" were looked down on. I try to accept other people as people, but I still get twinges of racism, sexism, and homophobia. I try to fight them, but they are still there, and, I suspect, always will be. I will say that the only time I spurned a relationship because of someone's homosexuality was when he kept making passes at me, even though I let him know that I simply was not interested. If he had not kept doing it, I would have liked to have kept him as a friend. John Hobson AT&T Bell Labs Naperville, IL (312) 979-0193 ihnp4!ihuxq!amigo2