I know entire point of this website is for coming out stories. Meaning, if you’ve come out, this is where you tell you story. I’ll let you know right now I am not fully out of the closet.

I have been “out” for eight years to everyone but my parents. Here’s my story.

In a urban town on a peninsula in a sweaty Virginia summer between seventh and eighth grade I came to find myself. I remember riding bikes with a new friend thinking about this girl I had met. She was something I’ve never seen before. It struck me that I was attracted to her because the more I thought about her the more I felt that tingling sensation that I knew wasn’t coming from my bike seat. I asked my fellow rider if she’d hate me if I was bi and she laughed. “Of course not!” she exclamed not understanding my amazement that a 12 year old girl could accept me. I went to a new school because my parents noticed a change in me, not spurred by my new found sexual identity, but coming of age in an environement where my best friend was a german speaking d-boy and my crush was a pill popping wiccan fully adorned in a celebration of the colour of her soul, black. My new school provided a haven of sheltered white middle class moldable minds. I came out to my friends immediately who just happened to be the popular people at that very junior high. It was exciting, being able to be who I was, sleep with whom I please, and go through a heternormative lifestyle with out haveing to confront who I was and the burden that comes with being gay in the USA.

I graduated high school with a 2.4 average, honors diploma (dont ask, I dont know), and a gay boy that has sworn his life to holding me through hard times and telling me if my outfit looks bad. A few days after the grad party him and I moved up to the capital to start a new life and find more ways to fuck it up. I was sitting with an old friend out on the back porch drinking a beer and it struck me. I am gay. There is no going back from here. I am a lesbian and there’s nothing I can do about it. I had been living a double life for so long that it never hit me that I can just put down the bottle, put out the joint, throw away the pills, but not shit out the gay. I’ve come out to my parents 3 times before once actually telling them and two others when they were snooping where they ought not to.

Every time they had refused to speak to me, my father wouldn’t even look at me. I was trapped in my home - grounded - and was forced to throw out my cds my vinyl, my posters, writing, and everything that made my space me. It was a nightmare and even now, after I have woken up, cannot face them.

I’m not sure if the zodiac is a valid testimony but it will help me emphisize my love, unconditional loyalty, to my family. I am not always with them, calling them every night, I dont know my brother’s crushes, or where they are all the time - but i love them more than life. Here is my dilema. It is getting so painful to even talk to them on the phone because I need them to know that I’m in love with a girl, we have been together for a year, we are living together currently, and I plan on being with her for a very long time. I need them to know that I am voulenteering at a gay youth center, that I am a member of a campus queer action organization and that my girlfriend works at Equality Virginia. I know they’d hate me. I couldn’t live without them, or at least some sort of family, I don’t know what to do.

Categories: Coming Out Story