Pulled From The Closet

My Personal Story of Being Outed

Everyone in the LGBTQ community has a unique story about their inaugural coming out. It is a hard thing to forget, the moment that you finally speak the words aloud that have likely been dormant in your mind since you first thought you might be gay. Some people’s stories are of freedom, some of rejection. Others are of confusion. Coming out for the first time comes with an array of emotions. It is incredibly difficult to share a part of you that you worry will bring judgment, or discrimination, or the worst of them: hate. But what types of emotions would be brought on if someone pulled you out of the closet without your permission? What would it feel like if someone crossed every privacy boundary imaginable and shared something about you that you yourself aren’t even sure of yet? No one can prepare you for what it takes to navigate the fear that accompanies such exposure. However, a large number of us in the LGBTQ+ community are forced to experience this type of vulnerability, whether we were ready or not.

I was outed in college. In case you are unaware of the term, outing is the act of sharing an LGBTQ person’s sexual orientation or gender identity without said person’s permission. Let me start by saying, I never intended to write about this. Mostly because the experience was full of so much pain that it is not a subject I willingly dive into. But I recently saw an article shared on Facebook about a high school boy who took his own life due to being outed by his peers. And my heart sank knowing that this boy’s story is not the only of its kind. In fact, it is one of many just like it. So right then and there, as I have done before and am sure I will continue to do, I decided that it was important to share my story with the same hopes that I have for so many of the pieces that I write on this blog; that my experience could open the eyes of just one family. Or one friend group. Or positively affect one struggling LGBTQ+ member.

From first hand experience, I can assure you that outing is one of the most scarring things that a person can do to someone of the gay community. The anxiety that I felt was crippling. The betrayal was crumbling. And the fear was paralyzing. I was 19 years old and in a relationship with the first girl that I would ever love. It was equal parts electrifying and terrifying. Prior to this relationship, I had only ever dated men, so I was treading new waters. And the sailing was not always calm. During that first year of this new relationship, those waters ranged from smooth, to wavy, to severely choppy, depending on the week. It was incredibly hard to navigate these new euphoric feelings while keeping those feelings a complete secret. You know when you meet someone new who you really like, and you just can’t help but word vomit about them ALL THE TIME? And your friends and family want to stuff a sock in your mouth? Now imagine that feeling, but not being able to exercise that word vomit. Not being able to gush and brag over your new found interest. I wanted to scream from the rooftops about my new relationship while I simultaneously wanted no one to know. It was horrendous. To say it was confusing wouldn’t even scratch the surface.

Although confusing and messy, it was the first relationship that I had ever been in that felt completely right. It was the first time that I had ever experienced all of the cliche sayings about love that you hear your entire life. All sense was out of the window; I was blinded by this love. So the secrecy was not due to uncertainty about it all, it was simply due to fear. Fear of what people would think of me. Fear of what those next steps would look like. Fear of how my family would react. And fear of having to really admit to myself that this could actually be a part of who I am.

So I kept it to myself. I spent my days going about my normal life and my nights were spent with her. It was like living a double life. Everyone assumed we were best friends. We studied together, we met on campus for lunch, and we went out to bars together. We hung in the same friend group, so spending time together was easy. However, that time was spent as friends. As best gal pals, if you will. No holding hands, no kissing. No flirting. Torturous conversations in which friends would ask us about boys and our latest crushes, all while having no idea we were romantically involved. Something that we were both so excited about, but not ready to share with the world. That was hard. I would have said that was one of the hardest parts of our relationship, attempting to keep this secret on a daily basis. I would have said that, except we had to face something much worse. On top of all of our struggles as a closeted couple, being outed would be the hardest thing we would have to endure.

We were outed by friends of mine. Friends that I thought loved both of us. Friends that I thought would come to us first and talk to us like adults before sharing our deepest secret with others. These friends somehow got into my Facebook, an incredible invasion of privacy. And they found messages between my girlfriend and I that were sent over Christmas break when we were apart. We were from different states, so, we were both with our families for the holidays. But like any new and exciting relationship, we needed to be talking constantly. There were lots of phone calls, but it didn’t take long before my family was making comments about how I was “always on the phone with that girl.” I didn’t want to blow our cover. So we turned to Facebook messaging, staying up talking in to the middle of the night. We sent lengthy notes back and forth that felt like secret love letters. Messages that were meant for just her and I. And in the spring of 2009, those private messages were being sent to a large group of people, none of whom were myself or her. Our intimate words to each other were copy and pasted and shared with others with a subject line that read this: “LESBIANS, 100% CONFIRMED.” I could never forget that title if I tried.

Some of those in the thread were people that we knew well, some that we didn’t know at all. The message trail included athletes at our college, friends of my ex-boyfriend, and people that I was truly close to. It was such a random group of people, which felt even more hurtful. It proved that the people responsible for sending these messages did so out of pure entertainment for themselves. Half the people on that thread did not even know us, much less care about what we were doing with our love lives. So why share something so intimate? Because for the senders, it was interesting gossip. Something to talk about. Classic 101 bullying. Our feelings and emotions were cast aside for the satisfaction that comes from being the person at the party with a good story. It was heartbreaking to say the least. But the worst part, the part that still makes my stomach turn to this day, is the chain of comments that followed after people opened the message and read its contents. I had only been in a same-sex relationship for around 7 months, and as if that wasn’t terrifying enough, here I was, at the ripe age of 19, reading comments that looked something like this:

“hahahahaha, gross!”

“Omg I knew it! Ewwwwwwwww”

“Cannot stop laughing, siiiiick”

It was devastating. It took everything in me to not have a full blown anxiety attack right then and there. I felt more emotions in that one second than I think I have ever felt in my life. My stomach dropped like a rock, there was a planet sized lump in my throat. I wanted to scream and I wanted to cry. I wanted to hide in my room for the rest of my life. I felt betrayed beyond what is measurable. After actually doing some screaming and crying, I called my girlfriend to tell her she needed to come over, barely being able to get the words out through the sheer panic in my voice.

When she got to me, she immediately suggested we confront my friends. We HAVE to, she insisted. But confronting them would mean facing the relationship that I was in. Calling them out meant I had to talk about it. And I was NOT ready. I was not even sure what the status of my sexual preference was at that moment and therefore was not remotely equipped to have a conversation about it just yet. So, we fought. We fought for hours about how to handle the situation. She was much braver than me, insisting that we needed to stick up for ourselves. Demanding that we do not allow these people to get away with such an invasion of privacy. I, on the other hand, was acting out of fear. I was scared and overwhelmed with anxiety. I remember being so envious of her strength, wishing I could be so courageous. I could not bring myself to confront our outers. To this day, it is one of my life’s deepest regrets.

In a roundabout way, this outing would eventually lead to the crumbling of my first relationship with a woman. This brought light to just how closeted I really was, and she was uncomfortable with that. And I do not blame her. She was ready to make moves towards sharing this part of our lives with others, and I just wasn’t. Being it the first same-sex relationship I was in, our fate was doomed anyway. However, it feels unfair that the beginning of the end was directly correlated to the emotional turmoil that we were forced to face due to our so-called friends sharing our deepest secret.

Although it should not need to be said, allow me to remind anyone reading this: someone else’s relationship, or how they identify, is no one’s business but their own. Suspecting that one of your friends might be gay is not the problem. I do not blame these people from my past for their curiosity about this girl that was suddenly the center of my universe. However, I fully blame them for all of the actions that ensued when they decided that they were going to out our secret. That they were going to go to all lengths to expose this relationship that they knew was ours, and only ours, to share. There were plenty of opportunities for them to stop and consider our feelings. To stop and weigh right from wrong. Like when they somehow got my Facebook password and decided to go ahead and log in. Or when they decided to read through our private messages. Or when they were utilizing the copy/paste feature to highlight our personal notes. Or when they were selecting the number of people to include in the recipient line.

I wish I had housed the strength to be able to confront my outers when this happened to me. I wish I’d had the bravery that I do now. I yearn to go back to that time and find these words that I now have the courage to so freely share. However, through all of the trials and tribulations that came with being outed, I consider myself among the lucky. Lucky for the minimal strength that I did have to handle the torturous feelings that I experienced; strength that aided me in moving past the incident. I feel incredibly fortunate that I did not allow such betrayal to tackle my spirit.

That is the most important lesson here. If you listen to just one thing I’ve written in this essay, make it this. What may seem like a small bit of gossip to you, something new and exciting to share with friends, is the same thing that could crumble someone’s emotional stability. Young LGBTQ have taken their own lives for less. What I went through could easily have taken me on a downward spiral, one that is hard to fight your way out of. Being outed, just as I was, is a primary cause for a number of suicides within the LGBTQ community. I can assure you that these people, the ones who chose to cross all boundaries and share a deeply personal part of my life without my permission, never stopped to think about what this could do to my girlfriend or I. They never stopped to wonder if their reckless actions could have a horrifying effect, one much deeper than a piece of gossip to giggle about over lunch with friends. Please stop to wonder. Please stop to consider how you will feel if your actions caused someone to break. Please stop to think about how the subject of your gossip will feel or how hurtful your pettiness could be. Please remember that if someone is in the beginning of their journey to self-discovery, they are in a tortuous state as it is. They are navigating feelings and emotions that are terrifying for anyone to bare. I remember all of these feelings like it was yesterday; wondering who I could share my new secret with. I wanted to tell friends, but I was too afraid. I wanted to share it with my sister, but I didn’t know how she would feel. I was desperate to tell my mama, but too scared of how she would perceive me. These thoughts kept me up many of nights.

But you know what I never worried about? What NEVER kept me up at night? The consideration that someone, or worse, that friends of mine, may share my secret before I ever got the chance. There is nothing worse than being robbed of your right to take your time. Whether you are in the LGBTQ community or not, we are all on our own schedule. Life is certainly not a race, and all of us are navigating our identities as we change and grow. Imagine someone stripping you of the time that you desperately need to take, the time that you are entitled to.

This type of harassment has to end. This type of bullying cannot continue. With the internet being an intricate part of our lives, this type of behavior becomes easier and easier to carry out. We need to send a strong message out to our youth that harassment behind a computer screen is no less an act of bullying than being hateful to someone in person. I am grateful beyond belief that I can sit here and write about this subject. While in the same breath, I am heartbroken that so many cannot say the same. So many suffer in silence or no longer have a voice at all.

Today and everyday, I encourage you to take the time to always remember that we are more alike than we are unalike. We have to find our way back to commonalities rather than magnifying our differences. Outing someone of the LGBTQ+ community only perpetuates homophobia, furthering us from a world that is graceful and kind. I hope that we can one day live in a world where someone being gay, or lesbian, or trans, is not a topic of gossip or chatter. I desperately believe that we can cultivate an existence in which we celebrate people for being exactly who they are, not break their spirits because of it. But it must start with us. And that means all of us.