What's your coming out story?

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I was in a mental hospital on drugs that made me disinhibited and... yeah. =)

I somehow derived great joy in telling absolutely everyone in the ward of my sexuality.

What, apparently, a decrease in dopamine can cause.

Hopefully this will become the norm with people of any sexual orientation and/or gender identity. It would be great if, one day, it would all be regarded as unremarkable. I think we'll get there, eventually.



Yeah, I've been in a psych ward, too. Not that I was ever drugged up, but there were plenty of people who were certainly disinhibited because of them. One guy did broadcast about being gay, but he was an extrovert. He loved talking about it (I think, in part, for the reactions it got), and he kept asking all the attractive guys in the ward (patients and staff) if they were gay, too. He even gave me his number.

I've recently just been telling people that "I loved him"... by implication that I'm gay, although I'm never explicit about it. I suppose that might increase the normality of it all in people's minds.

Yeah, that would be the ideal. I don't make a point to tell anyone about my sexuality. If I was hetero, I wouldn't be going around telling people about it, so I'm not going to make announcements/disclosures about it. I don't hide it, but let people figure it out for themselves. If they don't like it, I don't care and if it isn't a problem for them, fine - that's as it should be.

in the army back in the 80s, everybody knew I was bi without me saying a word. I guess I wore it on my sleeves.

After growing up in a small conservative town where there were no out gay people, and my therapist tried to "cure" me with aversion therapy, and after that didn't work I expected Jesus to cure me, then the army, and I was so terrified of AIDS I did not even try to have a sexual experience with anyone but myself, and because I was sometimes aroused by women, I decided I could choose to be straight - right? Wrong. A marriage that began well enough and produced two wonderful children transformed into years of unhappiness in the closet. My wife finally got so fed up with my inability to behave amorously that she asked for a divorce and then asked if I was gay. I said yes and yes. I came out to my family and friends, who were wonderfully accepting. My kids were fine with me being gay. It was the divorce that was really hard on them. My wife outed me to everyone else we knew, which was fine with me as I prefer not to talk very much. A year later I met the man of my dreams and we are now happily married.

^^^
hiya Oqobo welcome to our club

Thank you Auntblabby!

I thought that I was asexual until I was in university and had some room to start questioning. I was raised in an evangelical Christian family, and my bio. Dad's family are pretty f****d up because of residential schools. Reuniting with my birth Mom and hanging out with queer friendly classmates were really important in giving me security to deal with family history stuff and move on to figuring out myself. I came out as maybe asexual and questioning to my best friend first, we talked about having some attraction to each other, but neither of us were ready for a relationship. A couple of years latter I started to develop a crush on one of the girls in my class, and I was more certain of my queer identity. I told my birth Mom, and she was great and supportive (of course, having been there already). I told my adoptive parents and they were really quiet. They weren't happy about it, but they were willing to put the work in to learn how to accept it, and they reassured me that they wouldn't stop loving me. My Mom told me at one point that my Grandma had told her that she needed to accept me no matter how different I was, and getting to know my Grandma and my Mom had really helped her to grow and she felt we all had an amazing relationship as a family because of what we've overcome to come together.

I made the decision to abandon all remnants of my Christian upbringing altogether at that point. (I was incorporating it into my pagan practice at the time). I had been told that this would result in my going to hell so many times that it actually caused a lot of anxiety even though I no longer believed any of it. I had a really bad period of insomnia (several months of less than 2-4 hours total of sleep per 24 hour period), sleep paralysis, and meltdowns (I was also having a lot of stress with school and other things at this time). I realized I was going to have to abandon the entire system of morality and religion that I was raised with, or end up killing myself.

My best friend, who already knew I was questioning, ended up having the worst reaction. I made the mistake of telling her about the crush and my fears about coming out to my family and she became very abusive. I ended up ending the friendship after a mutual meltdown during which she quoted Leviticus at me saying that gay people deserved to be put to death according to her god's laws and that she followed her god's laws and not man's. She also randomly threw out that she felt that residential schools were justified because paganism was also a sin worthy of death. I didn't end up working up the courage to ask the girl I liked out, but I did find out she was a straight ally a couple of weeks latter. I didn't come out to anyone else for a while, although I stopped trying to hide it. I then proceeded to have a random relationship with a guy who I really like as a person and share interests with, but it fizzled.

I've been having problems with some of my extended family which caused me to choose to sped almost all of last Christmas with my birth family. I didn't want the cousins I still have a good relationship with to feel that it was personal, so I emailed them and told them why I was withdrawing from the more conservative family members, which included concerns about how accepting they would be of my sexuality. My birth family also figured out that I was queer, based on a few remarks, without my having to say it directly. No one was surprised there. It turns out that some more cousins on my birth Mom's side and one of my adoptive cousins are in the process of coming out too. So here I am out to most people in my life, but not my extended adoptive family. I might have to tell them soon. My adoptive Mom wants me to tell people about my diagnosis so that we can start repairing some of the damaged relationships between me and my extended family. In some ways I want to be completely out so that people can deal with accepting it (or not) and I won't feel like I'm allowing them to see me as straight when I'm not. On the other hand I'd rather wait until I'm in a relationship and not make it seem any less normal than having a boyfriend.

I've a very short comming out story:

my mom found out that I'm transgender when I was in another country at that time and she read my diaries.

then she wrote me letters that I'm "crazy" and need to see a psychiatrist. I couldn't do anything because I was in another country and also highly depressed at that time. When I came back home I went to a psychiatrist, got hormones and changed my sex.

Well it took me actually alltogether years and everything, but this was my "comming out", so actually I never really had one in my family. I toled my friends and stuff later, but not everyone at the same time.

My coming out story as gay was brief but it took a massive weight off my shoulders. It was my cousin's 21st (I was 18) I had two whiskeys, two peach schnapps and a bottle of Bacardi breezer. I was paralytic and when we got home I just blurted out that I was gay, my mum just went "oh ok love".