2011 National Coming Out Day

I came out nearly 4 years ago.  I knew that I was attracted to women all of my life.  I remember having a crush on a friend of my mom's.  I picked flowers for her and left them on her doorstep, rand the doorbell and ran away.  When she didn't see them, I rearranged them, rang the doorbell and ran again.  Soon, I heard my mom calling and told me that the woman had seen me ring her doorbell and run away.  Not only was I embarrassed that I got caught, but she never got my flowers..Growing up, I heard gay jokes in my home and heard about gay people in the lives of my family members.  Most of it was negative.  Some was positive but there were always jokes about them.  When I was 11 and we moved next door to some lesbians, I heard my mom refer to them as "the lesbians" instead of "our neighbors".  I asked, "How do you know that they are lesbians?" and she replied, "You can just tell."  This put the fear of God into me because I couldn't tell and what if my gayness was as plain to everyone else as the nose on my face?  So I started to show an interest in boys (which I did not have).  This was the first time that I remember faking my sexuality..The more I was around to observe how gay people were treated, the more I realized that I did not want to have a part in that.  I also heard that Jesus could cure me of my sin of being attracted to women.  I was strongly drawn to the idea that there was a cure.  I just continued to behave as a heterosexual to keep up appearances until Jesus would make me a man-lovin' girl.  .No matter what I tried, nothing was working.  I got married to someone that I really loved, had 2 kids, joined a church and became a Christian.  I worked in the church library, volunteered as a hospice worker, was a foster mom, home schooled my kids and taught Bible study and Biblical parenting classes.  I took 2 years of Biblical counseling training to find out what a counselor would tell me to do to fix myself.  I continuously prayed and confessed sin after sin and then felt like a failure each time I looked at a woman and felt an attraction.  It was just a depressing cycle of failure after failure.  I was disappointed in me and I was disappointed in God's ability (or lack thereof) to change me..After 17 years, I came to the end of myself.  I was so depressed and felt lonely in a house full of people.  I realized that, as a matter of routine, I was thinking about how my children would fare if I was gone.  I spent time each day mentally planning my funeral and thinking about what I could do to prepare my children for a life without me.  I knew I would have to end it soon because I wasn't changing and I was miserable.  .I was reading the Bible one morning and I came across a passage in Psalm 139:14 where the scriptures say, "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made."  .What?.Yes, God made me this way.  The reason that He didn't fix me wasn't because my prayers weren't sincere enough, but because I wasn't broken.  By praying to be straight, I was showing a spirit of ungratefulness in how He chose to make me and was not happy with who I was.  My sin wasn't that I was gay, but that I was lying about it..It took months for me to work up the courage because I knew that the church (cult) that I was a member of would announce my "sin" in a public worship service and then throw me out.  (which they did, in addition to praying for my death)  But I had fallen under conviction and decided to just own it and trust that God would walk with me.  My greatest fear was that I might never hear from God again.  How silly!.I called my dad and asked him to come over.  He is the safest person in my life.  I have never, at any time, felt judgment from my father.  Only love, only pride and only my best interests come from him.  I felt that if I could tell him who I was and he still loved me, I would survive anyone else who wouldn't.  If he had rejected me, I don't think I would have survived the night..I can't honestly tell you what I said because most of it was a blur.  I remember telling him how I knew that he knew I wasn't happy (he had told me so months before) and I sort of beat around the bush before I came out with it.  "Dad, I'm gay."  The words just hung in the air and before I let him respond, I kept talking to keep his rejection from coming.  I don't remember what else I said but I do remember that when he finally spoke, he was sorry that I had lived all of my adult life for other people and not for myself.  He loved me and this didn't change anything and whatever I had to face, he was with me 110%.  .Sweet relief.  I felt so good when he left because I knew that if everyone else in my life rejected me,  I knew that Dad still loved me.  When he left and armed with new confidence, I called my best friend since childhood and told her my truth.  It wasn't really news to her as she long-suspected that I might be gay and had seen me struggle through my marriage.  I think she was relieved, too.  Her only concern was that I might have lied to her about thinking that Jon Bon Jovi was attractive.  I assured her that I would still do him in a heartbeat and all was right with the world again..The shit totally hit the fan in every single aspect of my life.  It was completely destroyed and I had to start all over.  I lost 90% of my friends and 75% of my family.  But I don't really want to focus on that because my story has a happy ending.  Everything that I lost has been replaced with something better and the people who matter to me don't mind and the people who do mind don't matter to me..Today is National Coming Out Day.  I am telling my story because I would have never had to go through the self-doubt and self-loathing since childhood believing that something was really wrong with me if people had just recognized that some people are born this way and that it's fine.  They are still good people, they are not perverts, do not "recruit" and should be treated equally.  The more people that come out and speak their truth, the more the world will realize that we are everywhere and we are the people that you know and love.  .If you get nothing else from reading this, please get that my dad and his wife, Gail, are parental heroes.  They are the examples for other parents to follow.  If you have children, realize that your child may be gay, even if he/she doesn't fit the traditional stereotypes.  Please never let them hear you say anything derogatory about the LGBT community because you might be talking about them.  Thanks for reading today...

lesbian film lesbian television lesbian books