Coming Out
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I would have told you with complete certainty and utter sincerity that I was straight, right up until the first time I was seriously attracted to a woman. I was 40, and this was new for me. I was perplexed by the idea that I could be raised in a Unitarian Universalist family, and still only discover this significant fact about myself at that age. What reason, I wondered, would I have had to hide this from myself?
I did what I do whenever confronted with something unfamiliar: I researched it. After finding online articles about women coming out as lesbian or bisexual later in life, I discovered the book Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire by Lisa M. Diamond, a professor of psychology and gender studies. She conducted research with 100 women over the course of a decade. On the Kinsey Scale, which places people on a spectrum from “exclusively heterosexual” to “exclusively homosexual,” most of the women chose a point somewhere between those extremes, and the location shifted for many of them during the study.
I recognized that it was possible that I had not deceived myself, but instead had changed—had shifted my location on the Kinsey scale, for lack of a more poetic way to put it. My newfound attraction to women didn’t mean that I’d secretly always been a lesbian and that my past relationships with men were fake or deceptive. It wasn’t about past relationships. It was a recognition that my next partner could be of any gender.
I kept quiet about that realization for a while. Not exactly in the closet—I came out to my parents and some trusted friends—but under the radar. My “Midwestern Modest” upbringing meant that I was inclined to think that because I was happily unpartnered, there was no need for anyone other than my closest circle to know who I was attracted to.
I let it slide when a coworker said: “Well, since you were married, at least we know if we’re going to set you up, it should be with a man.” My response was something about not wanting to be set up at all. That was true, but avoided the issue.
After a few years of that strategy, I realized that if I kept it up, I faced a couple of potentially challenging possibilities.
Waiting to come out until I was in a relationship with a woman or non-binary person would put a lot of pressure on that partner. People who had only ever seen me as straight might assume the new partner caused the change in me, thinking (incorrectly) that someone can be “converted” to a different sexual orientation. That’s hardly a fair thing to do to someone you love.
While any such partner was then purely hypothetical, my calling to ministry was not. When I began to struggle with the decision to come out (or not), I was in the process of applying to theology school. I hoped that in a few years I would be searching for a congregation to serve as their ordained minister. Unless my sexual orientation came up during the interview process, it was likely that members of the church would just assume I’m straight, as so many people do. If I later revealed a serious relationship with a woman or non-binary person, I worried that there could be some shock, some anxiety about what this means for the church, and possibly some anger at being deceived—even though I wouldn’t have intentionally deceived anyone.
The first time I felt really uncomfortable with my choice to remain silent was the first time my religious leadership felt compromised by that silence. For many years, Unitarian Universalist congregations in the Boulder-Denver area had held a worship service on the steps of the capitol building in Denver focused on LGBTQ+ rights, including marriage equality and gender identity and expression.
The first time I attended that service I had to make an unexpected choice. In the service, those who identify as LGBTQ+ were invited to stand and receive a blessing. I wasn’t out and wasn’t ready to make that decision in that moment, so I remained seated. It made me uncomfortable. It made me feel ashamed…not of who I was, but of not being willing to literally stand up and be seen as who I was.
I did have one good reason not to be visibly “out” that day. I was with my son, who was ten years old at the time, and I wasn’t out to him yet. When we got home that day, we talked about it, and I explained that I had wanted to stand up, wanted to be brave enough to do that, but couldn’t because that wasn’t how I wanted him to learn that about me.
He said he would have been surprised but otherwise fine with me standing up, but I realized that day that unless I was fully out, every time I was in a situation like that I would have to think about who was there, who might see me, who might learn in that moment that their assumptions about me were incorrect, and what negative ramifications that choice might have.
I also thought about the positive ramifications coming out might have. What difference might it make in my ministry if, instead of people assuming I’m a straight ally to the LGBTQ+ community, they understood that I’m a member of it?
Who might see me, and know that there are people like them serving as clergy in a faith tradition that honors the inherent worth and dignity of all people? That there are people like them raising happy, healthy children? Who might learn that their assumptions about me were incorrect, and take from that a broader lesson about assuming who people are?
If I remain silent, I wondered, what does that do to the people I minister to? It doesn’t silence them, because they don’t know the choice I’m making. But it doesn’t help them find their voices, either. It doesn’t allow me to be among those who say, “It’s okay. I’ve been there. Look at me—I’m out, and I’m glad, and my life is good.”
These were all important considerations. But neither a theoretical future relationship nor my career in ministry were the most important reason for writing my “coming out” blog post. The most important reason was that continuing to be silent felt, for the first time, like I was actively hiding part of who I am. Unlike the moment of remaining seated at the public worship service, this was an ongoing act of hiding, and the internal pressure I felt about it was increasing. The metaphor of “the closet” was making sense in a visceral way it didn’t before.
In February 2015, when many of my fellow Unitarian Universalist bloggers participated in a #SexUUality blog project, my desire to come out publicly grew. The explanatory paragraph we all put into our #SexUUality blog posts included this statement: “Unitarian Universalists have a long history of courage in tackling issues around human sexuality—from campaigning for human rights to the pioneering innovative work in the Our Whole Lives sexuality curriculum.”
I wanted so much to have the courage to publish my coming out post that February. I did write it then, but after reflection, I knew that I wasn’t ready yet. I had to do a lot of thinking before I could publish the coming out post: thinking about who needed to hear from me personally before it was in public space; thinking about how much to say, and what to leave out, or leave for another time.
In anxious moments, I’d revert back to my old thought patterns: It’s no one’s business. It’s too private to put on a blog. It’s not the kind of thing I should be talking about publicly. All of that was a defense mechanism, as thinking so often is. But after a few months, alongside all that thinking, there was a feeling. That feeling might best be described as a yearning to be seen. To be seen for myself, and not for some more societally acceptable version of who that might be—who I might be.
Waiting a bit longer was the right decision, just as not standing up at the worship service until I’d talked to my son was the right decision. Still, it bothered me in February, and continued to bother me as time went on—not just because I missed out on my coming out post being part of the #SexUUality project, though I did have a pang of regret about that. It bothered me because I felt invisible, even inauthentic. I felt “in the closet” instead of “under the radar.”
People who are claustrophobic know what it is to be uncomfortable in an enclosed space. Being closeted induces a kind of emotional claustrophobia, which stifles and silences the soul just as a physical closet traps the body.
Eventually I came out, but that was not the end of my struggle with both self-definition and how others defined my identity. In the coming out blog post I finally published in April 2015, I specifically rejected a few labels for myself, but I didn’t give my readers a new label to apply to me. Maybe that was because I was still letting go of the old one—straight—and maybe it was because there wasn’t a choice that felt quite like me to me. It took me a few more years to settle fairly comfortably on “queer” as a way to describe my identity.
A lot has shifted in the four years since I published that blog post. I’m uncomfortable now with the ableism in the use of standing both as a metaphor and as the way people were invited to identify themselves as LGBTQIA to receive a blessing.
I’m now an ordained minister serving a congregation in Peterborough, New Hampshire. I was open about my identity during the search that brought me here in 2016, and about the fact that I was happily single at that time. By the next spring, I began dating a woman who is also a Unitarian Universalist minister, and we are now in a committed partnership. The congregation I serve seems to have had no negative reaction to that change. It’s impossible to know how much of that is because I was already out.
Now that I’ve been out for a few years, I understand that “coming out” is a lifelong process, not something that was done in 2015. I don’t visually
present to a lot of people as “queer” (whatever they think that’s supposed to look like), and so I still encounter frequent assumptions that I am straight. Even my beloved, when I first began flirting with her, thought I was straight (and thus, clearly not
flirting) until one of her close friends did a quick search online and told her otherwise.
Despite those continued incorrect assumptions and the awkwardness they sometimes lead to, I’m proud to be among those who can, indeed, say:
“It’s okay. I’ve been there. Look at me—I’m out, and I’m glad, and my life is good.”
- Being Superheroes - February 1, 2020
- Coming Out - June 1, 2019
