All About Trey

National Coming Out Day

The problem with short weeks is that everyone tries to cram 5 days of work into 4 days. So while I had planned on writing something longer about today, I'm going to cheat and steal some lines from some fellow bloggers.

Jimbo said: "I came out when I saw that a gulf was growing between me and my family and friends. I was able to forsee a time where they wouldn't know me, and I didn't like that version of the future. The things I thought I had to keep quiet about where making me a mystery to both me and them - and that's just not my style."

And that's why I finally came out to my Dad. It's not that I wanted to share my homo-loving stories with him. It was that I wanted him to know who I was. All of me. I've done that, but it hasn't been pretty. On my cruise I sent an email to my parents with the joke about how bombing a gay cruise would be like a terrorist triple word score. Come on, that's funny! My dad went off the deep end saying that he didn't ever want to hear anything about my homosexual life, homosexual cruises, homosexual anything. Ever. And he does love to throw the word homosexual around. I think of it as bigger stick to beat me with than just gay. If he doesn't want to know about my life, then that's his loss. I've tried. And I'll keep trying. But at some point he'll either learn to accept me, or he'll never know who I really am.

My second quote stealing is from Andrew Sullivan. He's been on a tear lately and he wrote this about the Foley scandal a couple of days ago: "The closet is so psychologically destructive it often produces pathological behavior. When you compartmentalize your life, you sometimes act out in one compartment in ways that you would never condone in another one. Think Clinton-Lewinsky, in a heterosexual context. But closeted gay men are particularly vulnerable to this kind of thing. Your psyche is so split by decades of lies and deceptions and euphemisms that integrity and mental health suffer."

And he's right. Living a compartmentalized life is hard, both mentally and emotionally. Keeping separate friends (Navy vs. gay), keeping separate lives (professional vs social). Worry about what you can or can't say depending on where you and who are you with. It's a hard way to live. Coming Out is not easy. But staying in the closet would have been much worse.

And now, I'm off to watch Project Runway. Yes, I'm gay!

posted by Trey @ 9:23 PM