Coming Out Stories Gallery - Sean

A rather anticlimactic end to something that I had been trying build up the courage to tell her for several years. I'd wanted to come out before my father died in July of 2000 (Lung cancer cause by smoking. Nasty, ugly habbit.) but I just never found the right time, we thought that my Dad was going to be with us a lot longer than he was.

I came to the realization that I am a queer when I was in junior high, right about when I was 13 years old. I suddenly felt very out of place with my friends at the time. Most of them made up stories about girls that they were doing or the 'faggots' that they had beaten to a pulp and what have you. A very scary place to be when you realize that you're the very object of their animosity. It is at once rediculous to think that these 'friends' of mine were actually doing the things that said they were and frightening that they talk of doing these horrible things. 13 year old boys are jackals. I was at a small junior high were rumors travled fast so I just shut the hell up and burried myself in role playing game manuals as a way to hide, most of my friends just that I was a geek and left it at that.

High school was quite a bit different for me though, I was able to make a clean break then and there from the friends that I was in many ways scared of. Being a much larger school I was able to find friends that I could better relate to and were interested in the things that I was and soon I was pretty much lumped in with a very openminded group of close friends. After knowing them for roughly a year and a half we were all chatting late one night about random stuff and when it rolled around to the topic of sexuality I ventured forward and admitted that I thought that I was gay. I was happy to find that my new friends didn't reject me out of hand and were quite accecpting of it. It felt good to have people my own age that I could feel comfortable around and be myself.

Sometime in the few years that followed I let one of my two older sisters in on the secret. Though she was a bit freaked out by the idea that her little brother was a 'gay homosexual' she was honored that I chose to tell her instead of my other sister, whom I'd been closer too. It was a good feeling to have somebody in the family that I could openly talk to about my feelings. I think of this as having been step two of three.

I wanted to come out to my parents quite a bit sooner than I did but I just never could bring myself to do it. In some ways I was quite worried that they would be dissapointed with. There was also the fear that if I'd come out while living under their roof I'd be tossed out on my ear, which happend to a friend of mine. In the back of my mind I knew that I didn't really have to worry about these things happening but the uncertainty of it was there. As a result I didn't come out to my mother until I was 25 years old and my father had passed away.

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