What I Learned When I Came Out

It can take a lot to be gay.

Coming out isn’t like a coat you just put on one day. Or a decision you make because it’s who you want to be.

Rather, claiming your queer identity is a slow burning knowing that gnaws away at you, until you do something about it.

For me… I waited. And avoided. And pretended. And repressed. I didn’t come out as a lesbian until I was 52. By then I’d raised two kids and had a husband for 25 years. And day after day, I’d been the van-driving soccer mom who tried like hell not to want women.

I was the ‘good girl’ raised to please her conservative parents. So I waited until one had been dead for 30 years and the other had serious dementia. That way I’d never have to tell them who I really was.

But God bless him, I married a man who was much more broad minded. And who could see me for who I was. By the end of our marriage, he was encouraging me to own myself fully.

“If you have to leave me and come out,” he told me on a walk one day, ”then I’ll just have to accept it.”

I protested loudly that afternoon. “I’ll NEVER leave you!” I insisted. For the sad truth was, I was so used to being a straight pretender that I could barely wrap my head around being queer and out. It seemed perilous… and who would want me, anyway?

This touched new levels of vulnerability I couldn’t even imagine. So I waited.

But within a year, a remarkable thing had happened. I met a gay man named Jeffrey at a conference. Conveniently, he lived in that citadel of all things gay, San Francisco. In no time, I’d decided to merge my business with his… and not long after that I started to think about leaving.

And starting over again.

By then my daughter was launched and no longer living at home, and my son would depart in four months to be an exchange student overseas for a year. It seemed the time to make the leap was now.

I had a dream then in which my long dead father came to me in a white robe. Around us I saw Jeffrey’s gay neighborhood in the Castro. “I’m moving there,” I said, and my father nodded his head and smiled. I dropped to my hands and knees, and began vomiting up all kinds of old, rotting text. They were all the negative beliefs I’d been force-fed about being gay. About being an ‘other.

I woke up relieved, knowing I had to make a move.

Actually claiming my space as a lesbian was remarkably easy. In no time I’d reestablished myself in San Francisco, after driving my tiny moving truck west. I made a practice of staying open, seeing what would happen next.

I found meetup groups, like the local gay and lesbian chapter of the Sierra Club. I went to queer dances, and had awkward but still strangely right flashbacks to high school. I met a pretty girl and we danced at a club until midnight. Then we sat in front of my building and made out.

This was working. Every day as I walked down Market Street and saw all the Pride flags fluttering around me, I knew I’d done the right thing.

I weathered a tough first lesbian relationship that lasted a little more than a year. A few years passed, things happened, and only then, when the exact moment arrived and I was no longer a scared ‘newbie’, I met the woman who is now my wife.

If you ever doubt that true love can happen later in life, when you’re living as no one other than yourself, don’t.

I am truly the happiest, and the most ‘me’ I’ve ever been in my entire life. I have an incredible community and get to spend each day with the love of my life.

All because one day I finally decided to take a chance on me and speak my truth.

If you’re sitting on the edge of reason, come out my friend.

Trust me. You really can trust who you are.

Happy Pride!

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