For Goodness Sex (17 page)

Coming Out to Yourself

A
s young children, we experience romantic and sexual feelings for other people before we understand those concepts or have language for those feelings. The best example I can give is drawn from my own experience. See if it resonates with you. When I was a little boy of five or six, I knew I felt somehow “different.” It wasn’t anything I could put my finger on. It was just a general sense that I wasn’t like other kids. What I
did
know was, it had something to do with Donny Osmond. Donny Osmond and his brothers (the Osmonds) were a very popular musical group back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were constantly featured on all of the variety shows that dominated afternoon and prime-time television in those days. When I watched Donny Osmond, who was about seven years older than I was, my stomach felt funny—as though it had butterflies in it. I really liked looking at him, and when the song was over and he disappeared from the TV screen, I felt kind of sad. There weren’t any genital feelings associated with watching Donny Osmond, and I certainly didn’t know anything about sex or sexual feelings, but I
really
liked looking at him. It wasn’t that I wanted to be like him or was jealous of his talent or anything else I could figure out at that age. It was just that looking at him somehow made me happy. I didn’t see other boys on TV who liked looking at Donny the way I did; I mostly saw girls screaming and cheering at him. I also figured out pretty quickly that talking about my liking to look at Donny Osmond was not a good idea. Adults went silent; my boy friends told me that only girls liked looking at Donny Osmond; my girl friends totally got what I was saying but that was confusing and unsettling.

Now, what if I
had been
a little girl instead of a little boy? First of all, I’d have seen lots of other girls on TV screaming at Donny Osmond and cheering while he sang—and I’d also have seen lots of examples of girls looking at boys the way I liked to look at Donny. If I’d told adults that I liked looking at Donny Osmond, they’d probably have asked me if I liked him or even teased me about wanting to marry him someday. They’d have contextualized and normalized my feeling as the way girls often feel about a talented or attractive boy. My friends would also have normalized what I was feeling. Other girls would have shared stories about their feelings, which would have sounded similar to mine. I would have felt understood by my same-gender friends in this shared experience. And the boys might even have wanted to convince me to feel about
them
the way I felt about Donny.

These are both examples of early coming-out experiences, but they play out in very different ways. For parents who want to be more inclusive of their child’s blossoming sexual orientation, think about the feedback loop you’re creating with them. Are you encouraging them to talk about their feelings in whatever way they are manifesting? Are you sending them messages that sexual orientation is healthy when it’s an honest expression of who we are, and that forcing ourselves to fit into a predetermined box is unhealthy? Do our kids get messages from us that normalize their feelings or ones that tell them to keep quiet about their feelings? Those early experiences create the basis for how our kids will handle other coming-out experiences in the future.

It’s never too late to change the way we talk about sexual orientation with our kids. But first, it might be useful to spend some time thinking about your
own
coming-out experience. Here are a few questions I use in class to help my students get in touch with their own, individual coming-out experiences. Think about them in terms of your own life and the life of your child.

At this point in your adult life, you know what sexual and romantic attraction feel like, so try to recall your earliest experience of those feelings. Who was the first person (or one of the first people) you remember having a crush on? What was the earliest feeling or experience of puppy love you can remember? What did it feel like? Try to differentiate between events that were not attached to sexual or romantic feelings and events during which you actually
felt
attraction of some kind. You probably didn’t know they were sexual or romantic feelings then. It may have felt “tingly,” or “special,” or like having butterflies in your stomach. Do you remember telling someone (your parents, your friends) about those special feelings you were having? How did they react? How did their reaction make you feel?

Another useful question to think about is who were your early models of sexual orientation (not gender)? What television shows, stories, magazines, and movies helped you to understand or contextualize your sexual and romantic feelings? There were probably tons of examples of heterosexual people and couples, but what about examples of people who weren’t heterosexual? How were they portrayed? How did people react to them? What lessons did you take from that?

If you find it difficult to answer these questions, it may be because your early coming-out experiences were so normalized that they appear unremarkable. But I encourage you to keep digging. Having a personal experience or example to draw on will make it much easier to talk to your kids about sexual orientation in general and about
their
sexual orientation in particular. The fact is, whether we recognize it or not, we are
already
part of the feedback loop that is giving our kids information about their sexual orientation. Now we can be more deliberate about participating in that process, and more deliberate in communicating values about sexual orientation to the young people in our lives.

Coming Out to Others

T
hink about the last time you were chatting with an acquaintance or a person you recently met. Maybe you met up with a neighbor for coffee, or stopped to talk to the mother of one of your kid’s friends at soccer practice. Over the course of your conversation, did you mention anything about a romantic or sexual attraction you had for another person? I’m not talking about a deep, intimate conversation, here—maybe you mentioned something about your spouse or sweetheart, or talked about a celebrity or sports star you find attractive.

Guess what? That was a coming-out experience.

Coming out to others isn’t a one-time event. It’s a lifelong process. Every time we meet someone who doesn’t know us, we reveal information about ourselves to them both implicitly and explicitly. One of the things we reveal is our sexual orientation. Again, consider the difference between assuming a sexual orientation and presenting or confirming it in some way. Every day we meet people who will make all kinds of assumptions about us. They might assume we’re wealthy or middle-class, educated or ignorant, liberal or conservative. They will also, most likely, assume our sexual orientation. That assumption will likely be implied or mentioned in conversation at some point, and we may confirm or correct it.
That
is coming out.

I talk to my seniors about experiences like this because many of them will soon be leaving for college, where they’ll meet a whole new crop of people. What will they assume about their new friends’ and classmates’ sexual orientation? How might they talk about their sexual orientation when they are forming new relationships? If incorrect assumptions were made about their sexual orientation, how would they go about addressing that? If they have a nonheterosexual roommate or friend who comes out to them, how can they help to make that experience a positive one for the other person?

Sometimes coming out to the people we know best can be even harder than coming out to a stranger. The more important our relationship is with a person, the more care we may take in revealing aspects of ourselves to them, especially if we think it will go against their expectations of us. For instance, if parents make it clear that they assume their children are heterosexual, it can be very difficult for their child to come out with his or her sexual orientation if it’s different from what’s expected. Parents who talk with their children about the joy of falling in love with a sweetheart (leaving gender out of the picture, or being explicit that the gender of the person isn’t an issue) make it much easier for their children to share their sexual orientation honestly once they discover it themselves. If a parent, employer, teacher, or another authority figure assumes your sexual orientation—or worse, makes it clear that they consider only one sexual orientation valid (and it isn’t the one you have)—coming out can not only be emotionally risky, but it may also have social, financial, and even physical ramifications.

Some people ask me, “Is it really necessary to come out to other people?” They often go on to say, “It’s private information. Is it really anyone else’s business other than the person I’m sleeping with or in love with?” It’s a valid question, but it doesn’t take into account the full impact of sexual orientation in our lives. Sexual orientation isn’t just a “category” of our lives—it influences who we are and what we do, every day.

So if you tell me that “sexual orientation is private,” here is my response: see if you can spend an entire day going about your normal routine without making
any
reference to your sexual orientation. No talking about your sweetheart or mate, no gossip about who you think is cute or not, no references to your past or future relationships. When people actually take on this challenge, most find that it’s pretty tough to make it for more than a few hours without slipping up. That’s because our sexual orientation isn’t just about our most intimate moments that happen behind closed doors. Like gender, sexual orientation is a lens we use continually to interpret the world and our place in it. It influences what we say, how we say it, what we do, and how we do it. I’m not just a gay man in the bedroom. I’m a gay man in the classroom, the supermarket, my house of worship, the gym, on Facebook, and everywhere else. I don’t walk into the supermarket and expect someone to come over the loudspeaker and announce, “Gay man shopping in aisle three,” nor do I introduce myself to my students as a gay teacher, but we reference our sexual orientation implicitly or explicitly
constantly. We can’t hide our sexual orientation and be a whole, healthy person. That’s why it is so important to help your child feel comfortable talking about his or her orientation openly with you. Those simple or not so simple conversations make an
enormous contribution to the development of their healthy sexuality.

Sexual Orientation Prejudice

A
s I reentered my ninth-grade classroom, having stepped out to grab my fifth or sixth cup of coffee that day, I heard a phrase that’s actually pretty uncommon in my school.

One boy groaned to his buddy, “That history test was so gay!”

I looked over at the boy who had just spoken, smiled, and said, “Congratulations!” He answered with a “Huh?”

“You must have aced the history test! Great job!” I said.

“No,” he stammered. “It was so hard, like
unfair
hard!”

“Oh, but I heard you say it was so gay? Didn’t you say that?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking even more puzzled.

“And that means it was great, right? Even awesome, huh? So, congratulations! When I hear someone say, ‘That’s so gay,’ I always assume they’re celebrating something.”

A lot of the kids in the room were just staring at me, some blankly, some confused; a few were smiling.

“No, Mr. V!” an overeager and somewhat awkward young man piped up. “When you say, ‘That’s so gay,’ it means something was, you know, like, really bad.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said, taking a sip of coffee. “Being gay is awesome. So is being straight, or bisexual, or whatever. Why would anyone use a sexual orientation as a negative?” Then I asked them to take out their homework and class got under way.

Each
of us has our own values about sexual orientation, and those values can vary widely. We live in a society whose values about sexual orientation are complex and evolving, but whose values about individual liberty are clear. Each individual has the right to live life unencumbered by prejudice and discrimination. Sexual orientation bias, like all discrimination, exists in both overt and insidious ways. One of the core values in my class, and my life, is that sexuality education is a form of social justice education. Therefore I work with my students to recognize and combat prejudice and discrimination based on any aspect of sexuality, including sexual orientation. So when I heard “that’s so gay,” I knew the student was using it as a negative; that’s the typical way the phrase is used in our society. But rather than lecture the young man or the class, I chose to give them something to think about, a way to reframe the idea. A thought-provoking comment, especially when it provokes a little mental puzzle, can go a lot further than a stern lecture. In my own value system—and I should also make clear the value system of the school where I teach—there is no hierarchy of sexual orientation. They’re all awesome, so using any of them to signify a negative is not OK.

Let me take a moment to be clear about what I mean by “sexual orientation prejudice.” I use that as an umbrella term to encompass several different kinds of prejudice and discrimination—many of which your kids may already be familiar with, either from personal experience or through a friend.

Sexism
is prejudice or discrimination based on gender identity or expression. When gender expectations (boys do this/girls do that) are so rigidly enforced that people feel that they can’t behave in ways that feel natural to them, that’s sexism. Any time we force a person to change the way he or she lives, works, looks, or behaves solely because of gender assumptions or expectations, we are discriminating against that person.

Heterosexism
is the belief that everyone is or should be heterosexual, and the conscious or unconscious exclusion of nonheterosexual people from one’s reality. In its most extreme, heterosexism denies that other sexual orientations even exist or denies that any sexual orientation other than heterosexuality is valid. In less extreme forms, it may mean classifying nonheterosexuals as inferior to heterosexuals. The most common cases of heterosexism occur when people ignore or fail to consider the possibility that nonheterosexual people are a part of their daily life.