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Years later, it bothered me how men would stigmatize gay men but sexualize gay women and I got a little more open with my sexuality but wouldn’t say I was bi. It wasn’t until I dated a woman for several months that I embraced the term, but I had no plans of coming out to anyone. The people around me knew. My partner knew. That was enough. However, my “nephew” (an older cousin’s son) was debating coming out and so scared because of a lot of the anti-gay and bigoted rhetoric he had heard around him, his family and in the media. To encourage him, I posted on Facebook “hi- I’m bi. Bye” and didn’t think much of it. Because I was already steadfast in my sense of self, I didn’t need the validation, which I think is such a privilege for me as a white, straight-passing cisgendered woman. Then, last summer in having a lot of conversations around BLM and anti-racism and bigotry, my maternal grandmother used gay slurs and I let her know it was unacceptable and that she shouldn’t speak that way as a Christian and having a gay granddaughter. She told me that all of my opinions regarding BLM and Trump “made sense now” and I broke contact with her after some more insults were hurled around. My mom approached me, asking about me being gay and how she didn’t know. I told her I didn’t feel like I needed to come out because it’s inviting someone into a part of my life that’s only shared with sexual partners. She said she was proud of me for standing up for myself and asked if I wanted pizza. I’ve taken to using the term “invite in” instead of “coming out.” I’m not secretive about who I am, but I dislike the box that coming out puts you in, as I think about sexuality and gender as fluid.
Coming-out isn’t typically a one-stop shop, one and done. For me, the process unfolded over about 14 years, using sexuality as a stepping stone to my gender identity. In 2001, when I was a senior in high school, I told a few people I was bi. Then, when I was accepted to St. Bonaventure University, 344 miles away from my little town in Virginia, that was my chance to hit the reset button and start coming out. But as it turned out, one person who was from my town also went there, and I was so afraid that word would get back home to my mom, and I didn’t want to disappoint her. That kept me from pursuing therapy. But I was so fortunate that I found women I could trust and confide in, people who let me be my authentic self and, in turn, I could let them know that because I wasn’t a man, they could talk to me like any other woman. I wasn’t a threat to them. But I wasn’t out to any of my guy friends at all, because I wanted my identity to be the metalhead, the funny guy, not the gay guy.
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A lot of the social pressures at that time made the idea of living as an out trans woman and living a happy, fulfilling life beyond my reach. So I went stealth. I would go out at the gay clubs or industrial metal goth shows (where all the guys are wearing more makeup than the girls anyway), but it wasn’t my day-to-day reality. Then, in 2005, I competed in a gender bust competition where I got to dress as a woman. I looked amazing and I felt absolutely euphoric, until I saw the reaction to photos posted online by the campus newspaper. They were so negative, they shoved me violently back in the closet.
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