What to tell family

Hello

I’m moving on Saturday. I found an LGBTQ center in my new city. They have coffee every Wednesday morning for people my age. My sister lives in that neighborhood and is doing a lot to help me move. She’s expressed concern about me spending too much time alone. I’m not out to my family at all. I don’t know how to explain that I’ve got social activities planned without coming out. The Center is conveniently located about 10 minutes from where I live.

I have another concern that will probably sound silly. The center has an art charity fundraiser coming up and the date would be convenient. I love art and love the idea of creating it but I’m one of those people who can’t draw a straight line with a ruler and I can only draw stick figures. I have done stuff with computer art and a little bit of photography with just my cell phone. They say all levels of skill are welcome including beginner. I’d love to participate but am worried about producing something really bad.

 

I do have a strong desire to come out to my sister. The problem is that she is a religious Catholic. She’s very liberal but this might be too much. On the other hand she is accepting in another situation keeping it vague to avoid details about other people’s stories.

She is close friends with the landlord’s wife. She and her husband are also Catholic. The lease is renewed on a monthly basis. If I come out to my sister and she tells the landlord who doesn’t like it then I may have to move almost right away.

I’d really appreciate some advice and a backup plan. I could be kind of vague in coming out and say I identify as queer without getting more specific. Then I can tell her about the center and my plans to go there for coffee and other things.

I don’t know how she will react. If she reacts negatively that will be upsetting. I told a priest that I liked girls when I was 12. You would have thought I killed someone from his reaction. He panicked and said homosexuality was very very very bad and wrong and I should never ever tell anyone and pray hard for it to go away but especially never tell my family. My parents were devout Catholics who did a lot for the church and the priest thought it would be bad of me to tell them of my “perverted” desires. And people might think my sisters including the very one I’m considering talking to were perverted also. So it would not be fair to tell them. I seriously thought he was going to have a heart attack.

I have reached a point where I view love between women as beautiful rather than the abomination I was taught it was. I view it as odd that so many Christians are so upset about homosexuality. My therapist says it upsets people who have their own anxieties about sexuality and gender identity that they haven’t dealt with so they are reacting out of fear. As for how Christianity got involved she believes it’s because Christians have a very long habit of taking popular customs or in this case prejudices and appropriating them. Just as they took from pagan customs to celebrate Christmas.

At any rate sorry for the long post. My therapist is away through the end of next week. There is a person I can talk to next week. I have the option of waiting until after that. I got freaked out because when my sister was over there a neighbor just walked in. My sister talked to her and thought she was very nice and invited her over on Saturday which is move in day. As it turns out the woman can’t make it but my therapist thought I’m going to have to set firm boundaries. Such as keeping the doors locked. I can see that the kind of person who would just walk in my house would also pick up my iPad to see what I am looking at and I’m on this forum or picking up a book about WLW and saying wow why are you reading that and then I have to listen to there goes the neighborhood.

I think my fears may be exaggerated based on the priests reaction but I don’t know. If it turns out that I get kicked out of the neighborhood aka lease is not renewed after first month, I’ve got some money just in case. I do love the place and therapists do say face your fears so I’ll try it.

Well if you made it to the end of this saga I appreciate it. Btw it came out many years later that the priest who had such a bizarre reaction including being at least a little abusive was abusing teenage boys. But what he was fired for was embezzling money. That happened not long after my encounter with him.

I think a lot of this is from the past but I don’t know. Thanks for reading.

 

that makes sense. I have a good feeling about the new group.

 

that’s a good question. I don’t know. She loves libraries and as I’m sure you know there are major book banning efforts for any book related to LGBTQ representation. There are also a lot of people fighting these bans. I’m a retired librarian. Censorship really makes us mad. Some people think librarians are very mild and rarely get angry but sometimes that just means that a hot button topic like censorship has not come up. Since it’s not professional to start ranting about it in a library, some readers may not realize how angry censorship makes us.

The American Library Association www.ala.org has a big red banner at the top of the page about fighting censorship with links that describe the problem and what we can do about it. I feel better knowing that people are working on this and it helps me keep calm and not raise my blood pressure too much.

I hope you all know that the ALA is an ally to the LGBTQ community? When you are on the ala website you can search LGBTQ and you get two pages of hits. They are things like librarians partner with HRC and ALA supports civil rights for the LGBTQ community. This stuff gets me just as fired up now as it did when I started library science school in 1999. There are many of us who will not go back to the era of censorship and I hope the queer community knows that and that we have the ALA’s help

I could write for pages but I better stop. Library issues are a way of testing the water but I’d keep it more focused on libraries and LGBTQ rather than a rant against censorship. Or maybe I’d start with a discussion on censorship and resources to fight it and then in another conversation bring up queer issues. Thanks for phrasing things that way because it helped me think it through.

 

I will just add that intellectual freedom and freedom of information are important concepts in the library world and I hope the queer community knows these terms. They are discussed on the website. Librarians are losing their jobs for standing up for intellectual freedom and there are funds to help them.

 

Actually I haven't been yet. I move tomorrow and first event is next Wednesday.