Big Gay Closet

The Real L word

Rose Garcia, 35

“My coming out story was a great one,” says Rose Garcia, a real estate broker. “When I was 19 I confided in my best friend. She told me she always knew. I wanted to tell my mother but feared my Puerto Rican Catholic family would disown me.”

“My friend called my mother to ‘out’ me, she says.” To my surprise my mother said she had a feeling (that I was a lesbian). She said I had her full support and that if anyone in the family didn’t, it was their loss.”

via Rose Garcia, 35 Pictures – CBS News.

YESTERDAY, as our daughter left to spend 10 days with my sister, she announced to me that she is gay. As we literally only had minutes before she had to go, I hugged her, told her that I loved her, and said we would talk about it when she got home.

She’s due back shortly and I’m scared about how to handle the situation, what to say. She is 15, but has led a very sheltered life. My husband and I were both quite young when she was born, and we fear she is still suffering the consequences of our early immature parenting.

I feel she is too young to make such a radical decision. She doesn’t even know any boys her own age, let alone know that she isn’t attracted to them. Recently, she has been spending a lot of time alone in her room with her computer. I’m worried she has made this decision based on things she has found on the internet.

I would like to tell her that she can make an informed decision when she is older, and that we will support and love her no matter what. But for the next few years, I’d like to say, she should just mix with girls and boys, enjoy life, and not worry about her sexual orientation. Is that a good way to go?

I don’t want my daughter to make a decision now that could rule out things she may decide, too late, that she wants — like a husband and children.

She is a quiet and nervous girl, and very shy with people she doesn’t know. I feel she needs to socialise more. How do I encourage her? She isn’t sporty, has no interest in clothes or shopping. I’m worried.

via Our daughter, 15, has just told me that she is gay – Health, Frontpage — Irish Independent

Wow. I can’t tell you how annoyed I’d be if my mom wrote into the paper with that story.

And I get that she’s having trouble accepting it, and she sounds like her first instincts are good, but “she needs to get out more”? Come on!

Sexuality and love can be different things. I can be attracted to a woman sexually, but it doesn’t mean I want to be in love with a woman. If I’m going to be with a woman sexually, it doesn’t mean I’m a lesbian.
Cameron Diaz in Playboy

Let’s skip over the fact that she ignores the possibility of being bisexual in her reasoning and think about whether it’s desire or emotion that makes us queer.

A while back, OttoKitty talked about coming out as bisexual and noted that,

To be perfectly, brutally honest – I might have a lot of fun with a straight man for a few weeks.  But odds are he’s going to be too steeped in gender crap to put up with for longer than that.

In her case, bisexual men or enlightened straight men are still an option, and she mentions her less promising crushes on gay men too.

But does desire alone dictate our sexual identity? Is it enough that I have been attracted to both men and women to say that I am bisexual? Or must there be the possibility of love with the object of my desire for it to count?

Obviously we use the terms “homosexual”, “bisexual” and “sexual orientation”. Sexual desire does seem to get the emphasis in our terminology, but is it the sex that matters, or the feelings?

Cybil Shepherd’s youngest daughter, Ariel Shepherd-Oppenheim, attended the GLAAD awards last week with her girlfriend, Carmen Chambers.

This brings us to a total of two non-straight daughters.

When other daughter, Clementine Ford, came out (kind of) in the March 2009 issue of Diva, she said:

For me, there’s never been a distinction about anything to do with sexuality, so there was no declaration to be made. My siblings and I would bring home men and women, and as long as they were human it wasn’t a big thing.

So I guess we should have known?

It took me a while to actually come to terms with it. To accept it myself. It was depressing. I couldn’t deal with it, I couldn’t be myself. It was really hard.

I took a break from music because I was in a bad place. I was really reclusive. I lost contact with my friends. The light at the end of the tunnel was the coming out. It’s not that I’ve never wanted to come out of the closet – I wish it wasn’t an issue. But it’s a difficult thing to do. A lot of people will have a different perception of you after you do come out.

I felt like I was missing out on the social aspect of the college life. All my friends had gone straight to college from school and I didn’t. I was depressed and isolated because I wasn’t around people my own age and I was just playing gigs.

I had to go back to college and get my head grounded again. I felt immature. I hadn’t experienced all these things that everybody else had experienced.’

via Irish rock singer Leanne Harte reveals: ‘I’m gay… but I kept it hidden because I’m Catholic’ | Mail Online.

Howard Selekman knew he had been attracted to men since he was 8, but in his 20s he still planned to marry a woman and have children with her. When he brought his fiancee to see his psychiatrist, the young woman was optimistic, even though she knew Selekman was gay.

“My wife-to-be said, ‘I think love will overcome the obstacles,’ ” he said. “And I will never forget my psychiatrist saying, ‘No, it will not overcome all of the obstacles.’ ”

The next 36 years would prove his psychiatrist right — Selekman never overcame his feelings that indicated he was gay. This year, at age 61, he finally divulged his sexual identity to his brothers, and “went public” through sharing his story on CNN’s iReport.

from CNN

Does it matter more if he comes out, or if you do?

“There’s the assumption among gay people that if only this famous person came out, things would be better — and that’s never been the case,” said Eric Marcus, a chronicler of gay social issues, whose books on the subject include “Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945-1990.”

“The most significant effort any of us can make in moving the ball forward in terms of promoting awareness and acceptance of this issue is for those of us who are gay to come out to those closest to us,” he said. “It isn’t ultimately the celebrity that changes people’s minds, or the politician. It’s the individual, one on one.”

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation conducted a survey in late 2008 that looked at the reasons behind society’s evolving tolerance for gay people. It found that the reason cited most frequently by people who reported having more favorable views — by far — was knowing someone who is gay.

Seventy-nine percent of the survey’s respondents said that knowing someone who is gay contributed to their more positive opinions, compared with 34 percent who said seeing gay characters on television was a factor.
from the New York Times

Crowley has been teaching for 33 years and she decided to come out five years ago. “I felt that I had to come out for the sake of younger teachers. We need to be more public,” she says. “After 33 years in the job, I don’t have a fear now that I’ll lose my job, but younger teachers do. They’re afraid they wouldn’t get promoted. They don’t want to risk anything at the beginning of their teaching career.”

Hugh (32) teaches in a village school in rural Co Cork. He changed careers recently, and is still on a temporary contract while he gains experience. Nobody in his staffroom knows he is gay. He speaks from the privacy of his car before he starts the school day.

“I have to be so careful all the time what I say in the staffroom,” he says. “I can never talk openly about my weekend on Monday; about going to a gay club, for instance. I’m very much aware that, under law, I could be fired.”

from The Irish Times

Normally I dispense with colours in the images used on Big Gay Closet. It’s a conscious decision, in order to keep the attention on the wonderful stories that you all have been so good to share with us.

Today, we have colour and lots of it.

A Facebook friend recently posted these images to her profile. I told her I had to share them and she graciously gave me permission. Thank you Jennifer.

I’m relatively lucky to live where I live. I may not be able to marry my partner, but we have our freedom to be who we are. We can safely march in a Pride parade. Hell, I once made out on the train during morning rush hour. Ireland may not be the most forward-thinking country in the world when it comes to all things queer, but it’s not a place where we have very many safety issues either.

So today it’s worth sparing a thought for those in countries where things aren’t quite so peaceful.

Take for instance Uganda. On other blogs, I’ve written a lot about Uganda and their proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill.  Kaj Hasselriis took that a big step further and visited Uganda to report on the community and how they coped. It was a very powerful series of stories he published from that trip. The big thing to remember however, is even if the Anti-Homosexuality Bill falls away (as many are now predicting), Uganda’s queer community are still considered criminals and have zero expectation of personal safety. Spare a thought for Ugandan queers.

In Minsk, brave activists managed a rally before 8 people were violently arrested by the Belarusian police.

Think back to 2007, when Russian police stopped harassing Pride marchers long enough for about 200 neo Nazis to jump in and beat up the queers for them. Britain’s Peter Tatchell was in the parade that year, and has told the story:

‘The whole area was swamped with riot police and then suddenly, as if on some signal, they dispersed to allow around 200 Neo Nazis to storm in and attack the marchers at random,’ he recalls.

In the ensuing melee, Tatchell was dragged to the ground. ‘I was kicked and punched in the head and body by half-a-dozen thugs while the police stood and watched. My vision was blurred. I was worried I might lose the sight in one eye. Then when the police thought I’d had enough of a thrashing, they moved in to arrest me and allowed the heavies to walk away. It was as if the whole attack had been orchestrated.

‘One policeman demanded to know if I was gay. I hesitated before saying yes. Then he started thwacking his truncheon in the palm of his hand and said: “Just wait until I get you back to the station.”

‘For two-and-a-half hours I sat in the police van with a group of ugly looking Neo Nazis. Clearly, the intention was to scare me witless.’

However, thanks to the intervention of an English- speaking protester, who alerted the police to Tatchell’s identity – and the probability that his wrongful arrest would have repercussions internationally – he was taken to hospital, then freed.

‘When I came back home, the symptoms in my right eye worsened,’ he recalls. ‘My co-ordination, balance and concentration deteriorated. But I carried on campaigning. That was my coping mechanism.’

There is a much longer list of bad and scary things that happen around the world to people who simply defy gender norms or fall in love with a person of the same sex.

However, homophobia isn’t just beatings and neo Nazis. Homophobia can be in us homos too. When we believe that a member of our community is less able to perform the same job as a straight person, we are homophobes. When we believe that thinking someone is one of us can be called a “smear” or accusation, we’re homophobes too.

The battle against homophobia is two-fold. We must fight homophobia externally and internally. We must call out ourselves (and our community) when we start to limit our fellow queers because of who they are. We must also call out the wider, international community to treat gay rights issues the same as they treat religion discrimination and sex discrimination.

Happy International Day Against Homophobia. If it’s safe for you to make out on a train somewhere, take advantage of it.