My Experiences with Undercover Homophobia

Coming out of the closet is a strange experience, but one of the things that I remember about this experience is that, by-and-large, most of the interactions I had were far better than I could have imagined.  It was thirteen years ago, of course, so time tends to gloss over the worst moments of the experience, but people were supportive.  Friends I'd had wanted to know about my crushes and dating life, and were proud of me finally coming out of the closet.  But in the process, I remember losing one of my best friends, and as I'm trying to get a bit more personal (in prep for NaNoWriMo, a mention I'm sure you're all sick of hearing at this point, but I feel like if I write it enough times I'll actually do it so this is a bit of self-actualizing), I figured I'd tell that story as it still feels resonant today, as it's something that sneaks up on my own experience.

The first person I came out of the closet to I did in a letter.  It went well (it was the fastest that friend, whom I still adore, ever responded to an email in her life), and I moved on relatively quickly to coming out to people by actually talking to them in person.  One of the first people I did this with was a friend whom I lived in the same dormitory hall with.  We'd been friends for about six months, and were part of the same circle.  I really liked her a lot, and considered her one of the closest people to me, and I knew she'd be supportive as she was one of the more progressive of our friends when it came to her politics.  She was predictably supportive, and excited to learn more about this secret life I'd been living.

We started to, because it was still a popular show on television at the time, refer to ourselves by Will & Grace type names, and went shopping and discussed boys and guys we thought were cute.  It was really exhilarating, something that I had never experienced before.  When you're in the closet you spend so much of your life hiding from the world that, quite frankly, you never really feel open.  It's a crippling sort of internal loneliness, and to be able to burst your full self forward is such a release, such a joy, that that unhindered openness changes who you are in some ways.  Honestly, this seems a weird thing to say, but at this point in my life I'm not nearly as good of a liar as I was when I was a teenager, as lying becomes so hard to do after you were forced to do it for twenty years.  Suffice it to say, I was happy.

I was also, admittedly, not dating any guys at the time.  I had no way to meet men, as this was largely pre-dating app (the only ways to meet men online were extremely seedy, not the highly-catered Match.com world we live in now by comparison), and I was still, with the exception of a handful of friends, not out of the closet.  The thought of going up to a man, asking if he was gay, and then seeing if he also wanted to go on a date with me was petrifying, particularly without support. But I knew this was the next step, and one I was desperate to start taking, so I decided to ask two of my friends if they would come with me to a gay bar, so that I'd at least wouldn't have to ask if the guy was gay, and I'd have some support while I was doing it.

One of the friends was raring to go, excited about me going from a "theoretical" gay to an actual one (I literally had never even been kissed at this point), but my other friend, the Will & Grace friend, kept dragging her feet.  She still wanted to go out shopping and talk about the guys she was trying to date, but I could tell that she didn't like the gay part of me going from theoretical to reality.  Finally, I confronted her about it, and she said "I'm not comfortable going to a gay bar."  This confused me, as we went to bars together, and had gone out dancing, and then it occurred to me-she wanted Will Truman, the character on a broadcast network who doted on Grace but largely was only gay in terms of quips and sighs about fashion & George Clooney, not an actual gay man who wanted to date (and more) with other gay men.  She wanted an asexual gay man, one who could mirror her and make her look trendy, not a real true person who was going to date gay men.

Suffice it to say, we didn't go to the gay bar.  I met a gay couple through a random dating website who agreed to be my "sponsors" at the gay club so I wouldn't be scared (a story for a different day), and eventually got less scared about dating men.  In the process, though, I could never look at that friend the same way again, and it scarred me a bit when it came to most of my coming out process later.  I began to judge friends not on the scale of whether they accepted me as a gay person, but whether they accepted gay culture itself.  The ones who stuck took me as someone who had to be himself, and not just be a caricature of a man from TV.  I learned that it was easier to take homophobia that was obvious and base than sneaky like what my friend showed, one who would like to treat me as something to augment her own self than be a genuine friend with whom to spend time.  When people ask me if I had any bad experiences coming out, I usually say no, but this is the one that sticks out in my mind when I hear that phrase, as it was the first time I felt prejudice as an openly gay man, and it was from a place I had felt was a safe place.