I wouldn’t have made the connection myself, but I was reminded that today is National Coming Out Day, which this year marks 20 years that I’ve been out.1Almost to the day, even, since the first time I told any friends was in October. It feels like much longer. And I wish it were longer, since I highly recommend coming out in your teens or twenties if at all possible.
Earlier this week, I was trying to find digital photos of an old project I’d worked on, for a presentation at work. I was horrified to discover that for some unknown reason, my iCloud photo library seems to have stopped keeping any pictures older than 2011 or so. My backup hard drive failed a couple of years ago. I believe that I have photo backups on a CD-ROM or DVD somewhere, but haven’t been able to find them. And I no longer even have an optical drive that could read them.
It felt as if there’s been an enormous wall of entropy that’s been relentlessly following me ever since I was born, and if it ever caught up with me it would wipe me out of existence, and I just looked back and discovered it had jumped forward 15 years.
In any case, I resolved to dig through all of the old prints I had stuffed away in my closet, and I ended up finding a lot of photos from the late 90s and early 2000s, when I’d just moved to California and was perpetually overwhelmed by just about everything. Several of them I’d forgotten even existed; for years, I’ve been thinking that I had almost no photos of myself from my 20s. The truth was that I’d hidden them away because I hated how I looked — like a combination of young John Flansburgh and Skippy from Family Ties, but completely lacking the charisma of either.
Looking through them made me sad for that guy, who lived so long ago that he’s basically a stranger. He was smiling in most of the photos, but in others, it seems more like a grimace. I remember he was just a shuffling jumble of insecurities, and I wish I could go back and tell him that it’d be difficult, but he’d make it through, and eventually settle down with a mostly different set of insecurities.
As if the universe were trying to drive the idea home, later in the week, there was a meme going around of posting the oldest photo you have of yourself, next to a current picture.2No doubt to train LLMs on, because hooray for the future. Unsurprisingly, this prompted quite a few gay men online to get introspective about everything they had to go through to change from the kid in one photo to the man that exists today.
What’s standing out to me is everything that happened to the four- or five-year-old kid, sitting shirtless on his front lawn smiling and chewing on flowers, that changed him into the stubbly, sad-looking guy in his 20s, taking a picture of himself in a mirror as if to prove he still exists.
It makes me think about everything he learned in the years between those two photos. He learned to keep his mouth closed in photos, because his teeth are embarrassing. He learned to be embarrassed about being seen with no shirt on. He learned that a photo like this was kind of gay, and that was bad for some reason. He learned not to go around hugging people because it made them uncomfortable. He learned that by several different standards, he was a weirdo, and he needed to keep that shit under wraps and try to be normal.
Comparing sexual orientation and gender identity to just being a weirdo can trivialize the issue, especially when religious beliefs get involved. And it can be just plain offensive as well: obviously, plenty of LGBT people are stultifyingly normal, and plenty of straight people are flamboyant freaks. But for me at least, it helps explain why “coming out” still feels like an ongoing thing, 20 years on, after the traumatic and difficult parts are long past.
That’s the part that makes a “national coming out day” worth observing and celebrating: encouraging people to take that difficult first step. Not because it’ll suddenly fix everything, but because it’s the only thing that will make fixing everything possible.
At the moment, it feels like I’m still trying to unlearn all the things that weren’t an inevitable part of getting older and wiser — as I kept telling myself — and were actually all about keeping that weird, overly emotional, overly earnest, undeniably gay kid stuffed away in a closet and out of sight.
It’s been nice rejecting all the excuses I had for hating myself throughout my twenties. Not because I got better glasses and a better haircut and realized that I’ve been cool and impossibly attractive this whole time, but just because I stopped giving a damn about any of that.
Or I guess I should say almost any of that. The best conclusion to this blog post would be 53-year-old me recreating that photo, sitting shirtless and smiling on my front lawn while chewing on some flowers. But I’m not eager to share that with the world just yet. Maybe in another 20 years or so.