Please don't feed the trolls!
My company, a finance institution with 44k employees, celebrated (you heard me) Coming Out Day on Thursday. I led our local celebration, and I've never been so proud to work at a company before.
Everybody knows I am gay, I make no effort to conceal it. Last week I confronted two teenagers using the word "faggot" and told them to stop doing so. Happy Coming Out Day!
The only drawback of being a big old queen - from earliest childhood - is that I've almost never had the chance to tell anybody (or at least tell them with the least anticipation of causing any surprise at all).
Nonetheless, I like to think that by being out in the big bad Middle East, I'm doing my part. I'm amazed constantly at people's basic decency, good humor, and understanding.
My Dr. and his husband would just look at me and say "you can't come out if you were never in".
Anderson Cooper? Queen Latifah? Condoleezza Rice? You guys have anything you wanna say? No? Oh, well...there's always next year...
rep. david dreier of california, sen. mitch mcconnell of kentucky, sen. lindsay graham of south carolina, rep. heather wilson of new mexico, rep. patrick mchenry of north carolina, come on out...
I am out! It feels normal! Call me crazy, but it was never an issue.
Closety http://www.dickipedia.org/
dick.p...Anderson_Cooper
Out where? Where are we going? Do I need to change shoes? Do these jeans make me look fat???
dont forget Senator Kohl who got clobbered by a male hustler
20th Anniversary? I celebrated the --first-- one by buying the coffee mug and putting it on my desk at work. Everybody already knew I was gay, or if they didn't, I acted as if they did. My then-boss was a lesbian, and we worked at a union office helping blue-collar construction workers.
I never got to officially 'come out'. Apparently the unicorn and Care Bear posters I hung all over my room gave it away. Or maybe because by time I was in 1st grade I'd already kissed half the boys in my class behind the gym. Hmmm....or maybe it was when I was nine and begged for those Jazzercize lessons...NO WAIT! Maybe it was when I asked for a My Pretty Ponies for X-mas when I was...
Nope, officially I must still be closeted.
I've been out for 19 years and have never hid it since. I'm here, I'm queer, and I need a beer. :P
Cheers to National Coming Out Day!!!
Take the step, it's very liberating.
it sucks that we still have to worry about coming out, doesn't it? it IS a lifelong process and that completely sucks balls. and not in the good way.
i still get nervous and sweaty every time i have to do it.
i hope to never be IN again...
Never? Lord, I'm exhausted already.
Great post. Sad to see that Sarah Palin wouldn't recognize National Coming Out Day in Alaska.
I'm 40. I didn't come out to anyone except a few male strangers until I was 32. I didn't come out to my family until I was 36. I didn't come out at work until I was 38. I came out to the rest of my friends when I was 38. Life is good. Why didn't I come out sooner? I didn't want to deal with my worst fears. My biggot father would have disowned me and made my family life difficult, I imagined. When he died, sad to say, I allowed myself to live.
Times have changed so much in the last 10 years. Even the last few. That's no excuse for what I put myself through. There's no reason for people in civilized society today to not come out.
Thanks for asking, Joe.
I'm out to my family and I'm out to my friends, I'm even out to my Dr.'s but I'm not out at work. I was out at my last job but something told me to hold back on this one. My feelings were confirmed when my manager stated one day
"There was a good supervisor in your position before you but we had to let him go because he was gay."
So I'm glad I'm not out at work and for the time being I have no intention of coming out but if it should happen that I'm outed, I really won't care.
Out completely since 1997. Yay for 11 years!
Out since 1973.
Even dead people know I'm gay.
Knew I was "gay" before I was in puberty but, didn't know what "gay" was until the Phil Donohue show featuring PFLAG.
I have been in the military and outed twice with no consequences. I officially came out to family at 32 and have finally reached the point where I don't care who knows. If they have a problem it's their problem not mine. NCOD helped me realize that hiding in the closet was counter-productive to living.
"Tim who?", what are you on? If I heard that I would have gone completely berzerk on that person. Which medication do you use to stay so calm (clueless)?
Out sinse 1982.
WAY out for a while in the late 80's and early 90's when I went to _every_ gay pride parade and event and wrote letters to the editor of the local paper, etc...even had a full color photo published in the local paper riding on the sholders of my hunky shirtless best friend while waving an enormous rainbow flag (this is how he came out to his family).
Then I got old and tired.
I decided to come out when I was 22 years old which was 33 years ago. Evidently I was the last human being on earth to acknowledge this fact, which simultaneously made it easier to admit and yet also deflated the sense of "Eureka!" I hoped to instill in others.
Perhaps most telling was my best friend's response: "Olin, when you were twelve you borrowed $3.oo from my dad to buy the Barbra Streisand 'People' LP. This news is ten years old!"
Happy Coming Out Day!
And is the debt still unpaid?
We have a new Nazi James Dean or, should I say, 'Crash-Test Nazi' in Jörg Haider. A closet case, he was on his way to his mother's 90th birthday party.
(I'm not deducing his secret homosexuality from the nature of the event, only noting its fine ironic timing. His farfegnugen is our schadenfreude.)
"Happy Birthday mom--I'm dead!" Don't feel too sorry for her though: she was in the Nazi Group for German Maidens or somesuch. And Haider lived on a mountaintop farm confiscated from an Italian Jew during the Holocaust.
When practicing fencing, he used an effigy of Simon Weisenthal, who lived to the age of 96. Sometimes, God seems to be paying attn. And, somehow, it seems fortuitous that Sarah Palin drives herself home 50 mi. to Wasilla when working in Anchorage; if only road conditions were occasionally more risky there, or she were to be pursued by papparazzi...like The People's [Palin].
I've been queer (and out) for forever (1972).
But it pisses me off that it's a process and not an event. I worked hard for a long time as a teenager and as a young man to get to the point of my first "coming out."
And it's been a constant uphill battle ever since.
Darlin', I am out all over.
To family (since 1985, when I snatched up an Overeducated Redneck husband)
All friends (since college 1983)
All coworkers (since 1993)
All neighbors (since 1985)
All doctors (since 1985)
Life is better when you are out.
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