THOUGHTS ABOUT COMING OUT

I think it took about twenty years for people to stop asking me "when are you going to get married?" It happened a lot at weddings, when the relatives were altogether, or at holiday celebrations and reunions. I always had a polite answer or at least a clever response like "well as soon as the right one comes along." It got to the point where I'd sometimes say " I'm not.".....but that would only set me up for yet another embarrassing query. When Miss Manners was the new Emily Post as far as etiquette was concerned, someone asked her how someone ought to respond to the question and she suggested "Why do you ask?"

It's amazing that just two words can have such tremendous impact on a person's life. "I'm gay" can change everything, and it very often does. I know that when I first said those words I wasn't even sure that it was true. I grew up with very few role models (to say the least!) There was Christine Jorgensen who was one of the first publicly acknowledged transsexuals, and I somehow associated the word "gay" with her. I knew that I didn't mean I was like her, nor was I like the man in the trench coat leaning against a lamp post in the fog with the word "homosexual" above his head on the cover of LIFE magazine. Young gay kids today at least have some great and courageous role models.

That line about "love the sinner but hate the sin" is what Rick Santorum would call BULL____. Telling people that as long as they never fall in love, or want to share their lives with another person, or want to make love will guarantee someone else's approval is nonsense. There is a tremendous amount of negative, hurtful, and damaging rhetoric aimed at gay kids...and unfortunately a great deal of it comes from the pulpit.

Coming out of the closet is risky business. It can jeopardize the future, threaten one's employment, and change relationships forever. It can also be such a breath of fresh air and honesty... It's all about mental and spiritual health.

Aligning oneself with the truth..the whole truth...and nothing but the truth, is the only way to make our lives really worth living. Our individual truth...the quest to be who we really are ought to be our universal goal as human beings. After all this is our brief " blink of an eye" existence...it's not just a dress rehearsal, and the air is very refreshing out here...much better than it is in the closet.