The older I get, the more I start to see the importance of a day like today, especially when I look back at my own childhood and elongated coming out process. I grew up in the 1980’s, and in a rather sheltered/cocooned household. Raised by strict Catholic parents, I never heard anyone talk about being gay, not in my formative years, not when it mattered and would have made a world of difference. And there was no internet or gay bookstore in Amsterdam, NY to help me see any possibility for all the confusing feelings I had.
If you do not see yourself in the world around you for the majority of the first two decades of your life, you do not see yourself as a valid part of humanity. You feel a little lost, but the truth is there was never a path that I saw, so it’s a sense of being lost that allowed for no way to being found. Looking back at that time, it’s a wonder I wasn’t an even bigger mess than I was. It’s like an orca that has been born and raised in captivity – the dorsal fin droops, there are all sorts of health issues, and the poor little creature doesn’t know any other way of life, so it gets afflicted with all these problems without knowing what its life could have been. Do those animals feel the pull of the ocean, the pull of who they were meant to be? I felt it subtly, without name or explanation, and it mostly came out as me feeling alone and different without exactly knowing why, which only served to feed into my social anxiety and create an absolutely debilitating environment in which to grow up. It’s hard enough for a kid to make it unscathed through childhood – adding these other elements imbued my time as a child with a sense of terror – and the absence of that terror in what I could see in my friends only added to my confusion and feelings of inferiority.
Whenever I wonder whether I should keep this silly blog going, I think back to my twelve-year-old self, and how impactful seeing something like this would have been. Not because I’m so wonderful and fabulous – but because everything I’ve put forth here is a pretty accurate reflection of my mundane, dull, boring, yappy, crappy, sappy and happy life. I didn’t need to see a famous celebrity come out, or a glamorous historical figure outed – I just needed to see the possibility of being gay as something that existed. I needed to see someone simply living their life, being accepted, occasionally celebrated, and working on just being a better person. Instead, I saw a heteronormative world that had no place for me or what I was feeling. For twenty years – arguably the most important years of a person’s life – I did not see myself. That’s something that doesn’t ever go completely away, and it’s the reason that moments like National Coming Out Day still matter.
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