My Reverse Coming Out

Photo courtesy of Verywell Mind

So common in our universal discussion of sexuality is the additional stigma many male-identifying individuals face when existing as something other than straight. While, of course, society has evolved in the past few decades to be far more accepting of all forms of queer life, old beliefs, unfortunately, die hard. This is evident in environments as common as schools where, even in an as progressive and open state like New Jersey, I remain the only guy in my entire grade who publicly identifies as a man that is attracted to other men. This isn’t something I usually have a hard time with socially, and my upbringing as “the gay kid” has been relatively untroubled, but I also gain a new outlook into the trials of coming out when you’re a guy. There is an element of my life at school or with my friends that feels out of place or different, as I have very few, if any, peers that I can truly relate to. If I had a choice in the matter, I most certainly would have decided to forgo this experience altogether and remain attracted to solely women, which is why I imagine those men that are closeted within my school (as statistics reflect there most certainly are) have such a hard time going public with their true selves.

I offer this observation not as the central point of this reflection, however. Instead, this is meant to serve as a contrast, as my experience with coming out has actually been the exact opposite of what you may have expected it to be. While you may have it in your head the image of man struggling to keep up the appearance of being straight and eventually accepting himself as gay, bisexual, or the like, I, in fact, had the exact opposite experience. Growing up in an accepting household, sexuality wasn’t really something I had ever thought of seriously until around the 7th grade. By accepting I mean that I was never taught you had to be straight or that other sexualities were inherently immoral, and by “I was never taught” I mean I was never really taught anything at all. Sexuality was never a conversation in my family, and it still isn’t now that I’ve come out. My being gay isn’t something that’s an issue, but it’s also not something that’s special. My upbringing mimics what I imagine will be normal parents’ behaviour a few decades from now, but our modern setting meant I walked into figuring out my identity with no understanding of what that entailed whatsoever. So, after a childhood of having silly crushes on girls like all of my friends, realizing I was attracted to men wasn’t something I paid much mind to. There was no great moral or personal struggle, no harassment at school, and no arguments with conservative parents. It just was my life, and I had no real grasp of how I might be perceived as different. When I finally did catch on to my relative uniqueness, though, it was again something I had little trouble with. This had always been my life, so me being gay, even if that wasn’t the universal experience I observed in my peers, was completely and utterly normal.

It wasn’t until my sophomore year of highschool, though, that that normalcy began to shift. As I developed the capacity to form deeper connections and friendships, the women I was closest to in life began to make me question if I was entirely gay after all. The thought hit me suddenly one afternoon, and I remained quite baffled by the notion for the better part of three months. I was certainly not a straight man having a sexual crisis mid-puberty, struggling with society’s demands for me to live a heterosexual lifestyle. I had always thought myself totally aware of my sexuality, as I had already braved the hurdle of coming out and swimming against the social tide. So how was it that I could be struggling with a possible change? What confused me most, and what would eventually lead to the greatest shift in my thinking towards sexuality as a whole, was that the fleeting emotions I began experiencing for the women around me was so vastly different from the attraction I felt towards men that I couldn’t say for sure it was attraction at all. However, as time went on, I had to admit that while I saw women differently from how I saw men, there was undoubtedly some form of attraction there.

I began to research bisexuality, and, while I had always known the spectrum element of bisexuality to be a thing, I had never truly considered its relevance. I read about the experiences of all manner of bi and pansexual individuals, specifically their understanding of how their attraction differed per person and, more broadly, per gender. It was as if I had stumbled upon an entire world of understanding and clarity that had been sitting in front of me my entire life. My commitment to and pride in being so naturally open and progressive in the face of male gender norms had in fact been restricting my view of the vast sexuality spectrum, something I had always criticized in toxic heterosexual culture. I had been embodying everything I had thought myself above my entire life. It was through this understanding that I finally realized that I was, in fact, not gay. When discussing my sexuality, however, I do tend to distinguish my homosexuality from my attraction to women because, as stated before, the two are very different. With men I experience both romantic and physical attraction, whereas, with women, I am only capable of building an emotional connection with them. To clarify, this emotional connection can exceed a simple friendship, which is why I consider it to affect my overall sexual label. I do experience a degree of sexual attraction to women, but I find that specific attraction to be both uncommon and inconsistent, an issue I am still struggling with in my personal journey to understanding myself. Most literally, my sexuality as it stands today aligns with the term biromantic, or the romantic attraction to more than one gender with the addition of sexual attraction to potentially multiple but not all genders. However, I find this dynamic a bit hard to explain on a daily basis, which is why I identify publicly as bisexual.

My journey to coming out, while unconventional, has actually taught me a great deal about what it means to be normal in a modern context. In the past, being gay automatically made you different from anyone other than other gay people, but now, being gay doesn’t automatically grant you the benefit of identity-based complacency either. I let the idea of restrictive social norms, ones I thought I was comfortably breaking, hold me back from truly realizing who I was until much later in my life than I would’ve liked. Those restrictive norms have always been there for me as they are for other people, so, while I may have had a very different experience with my sexuality than those that surround me, my journey and my experiences may serve as yet another lens through which you can observe your own sexuality, your own experiences, and your own life through.