I've already come out to everyone I care to right now in my family, and I'm in the process of coming out to my friends as well, but I'm having trouble. I came out to a couple of friends, who I like a lot but am not particularly close to - I wouldn't have chosen to tell them, but they are friends with a guy I dated back when I was trying to be straight and were trying to get me to date him again. So I felt like a little explanation was in order. For the next hour or so they proceeded to try and talk me out of it, saying things like. "Are you sure you want to do this? You can't take it back..." and "You know, you don't have to act on it..." along with a lot of semi-religious rhetoric where they very nicely told me it's a sin and it's against nature. I thought I was almost okay with all this, but after that I started wondering if maybe they were right. I used to have a lot of issues with guilt and such, because I was raised a pretty devout Christian, with the idea that being gay is wrong, and this just feels like a confirmation of every crappy thing I've thought about myself for feeling this way about women. This is exactly the reason I didn't want to come out at all, and now I'm back to feeling like maybe if I don't act on this it'll just go away. None of the people who know are good enough friends for me to feel okay talking about this, and I've been avoiding telling my good friends because I know at least one of them probably feels the same way as the people I got this reaction from. All of a sudden I feel like I'm doing something wrong just by being the way I am, and like telling people I'm gay makes it so. Now I'm just...confused and I feel like all the work I did to feel okay about this over the summer was just a waste of time, or worse, that I'm going completely in the wrong direction and I should be trying harder to make it work with guys...
I think I've been at that place before, a few times. It's partly the nature of guilt and how it can creep back up on you, and partly about "working on it" to bolster your confidence and to educate yourself or prepare for the ways people can approach you on the subject. I find the religious rhetoric difficult to deal with at times, if only because of how politely some of them can talk about it. For me at least, every time I've gone down that road, I end up with the same kind of hurt. Bishop Jim Swilley - don't know too much about it - just came out to his church, and in his speech he touches on a lot of the basic ideas behind what he can and can't control in his life, and what decisions he has made since knowing he was gay as early as age 4, apparently. I think he said he's in his 40's or 50's....so that's nearly a lifetime of trying to make himself attracted to women instead of men, and he has not succeeded, and I think for good reason (ya can't!). I know sometimes it feels like since these guilty feelings keep coming back, it can feel like we're supposed to be guilty, and that these guilty feelings are there to make us change. But they don't, they never do. We get overwhelmed because of what we see, and what we've been taught..and all of it goes contrary to our very personal feelings, which then become very hard to reconcile. You're not alone in this! It might take a few iterations, but it does get easier and you won't always have these feelings creep up on you so easily =)
The whole thing about sexuality is that it isn't supposed to be work. Straight folks don't have to "try to make it work". They just like the opposite sex, and everybody lets them like the opposite sex. You and I are gay. We're attracted to the same sex. That's in the wiring. It isn't against nature - it IS our nature. And there's nothing wrong with acting on it, the same way that straight people act on it. They date, they have sex, they partner up. And you can date, have sex, and partner up. (And in my case, I've already done all three.) My main suggestion is this. You say they gave you this routine for "the next hour or so". Which means you sat there and took it for the next hour or so. That's at least fifty-nine minutes more than you had to. You can simply say "Look, I'm gay. This isn't some snap decision I made in the shower this morning. I've given it a lot of thought, and I've done a lot of soul searching, and I've finally come to the conclusion that this is the way I am. There's nothing you can throw at me that I haven't considered, thought about, and agonized over the last several months. I've been through this all before, and I'm telling you my findings - I'm gay. And I appreciate your concern for my wellbeing, but I don't need to go back over that ground anymore." Lex
