[Coming Home to America cover]

Coming Home to Ourselves

From Chapter One of Coming Home to America by Torie Osborn

It was a freezing cold January night in 1973. I was twenty-two years old, attending a women's conference in Vermont that I'd helped organize, and this was the final event at the huge old Victorian inn -- a Saturday night dance featuring the feisty New England feminist rock band the Deadly Nightshade. Pushing open the door to the packed ballroom, I felt a rush of erotic energy that seemed to bounce off the walls. I suddenly felt embraced by that room, totally at home in that open lesbian environment.

That night I knew I couldn't pretend any longer. Despite several years of heterosexual dating (punctuated by some surreptitious lesbian affairs), I knew that I could no longer maintain the denial and internal conflict of passing as straight. Driving away from the dance on that icy night, alone in my car, I said out loud, for the first time, "I'm a lesbian." I remember that as I spoke those fateful words, I could see my breath swirling like white smoke in the cold air, and my voice seemed gigantic and booming. All of a sudden, I began to laugh wildly, with release and joy. Even today, I chuckle at the memory; that night is still utterly vivid, caught forever in time.

For me, walking into that lesbian dance meant finally stepping out of my own closet; it meant waking up inside, coming alive in some fundamental way, and connecting with something deeply, instinctively comfortable. For me, coming out meant setting off down a new path that altered the course of my life.

Coming Out Takes Personal Courage

Coming out is a journey. If we have begun that journey, we have experienced personal growth and satisfaction. We know the startling strength gained by telling others the truth about our lives, our desires, our love, and our pain. We know the struggle and the joy of triumphing over the invisibility, isolation, and exile that remain facts of life for too many gay people. We know the joy of friendships and family founded on real love and on the truth, not on hiding and hoped-for intimacy.

Society force-feeds us the poison of shame, and we grow our own closets, develop our own internalized homophobia. Coming out is the only antidote, the way to claim, or reclaim, our true selves and develop pride and confidence. Coming out to ourselves is the first step in our journey out of lonely exile; it frees our voices, our energies, and ultimately our most creative and empowered selves. Coming out is coming home to ourselves.

Coming out always takes a measure of personal courage. Every single time. In stark contrast to the lie that we are weak and immoral -- the lie perpetrated by those who despise and fear us -- the daily lives of gay men and lesbians brim over with strength of character, responsibility-taking, and personal courage. As my friend the lesbian rabbi Denise Eger says: "What is the first foundation of true morality, of ethical conviction, if not personal honesty and courage?"

Coming out demands those strengths. I often think of Paul, a young man whose story seems a paradigm of the everyday bravery exhibited by gay men and lesbians in taking the critical, bold first step in coming out.

For over an hour Paul sat motionless in his father's battered old blue Buick, hands tensed on the steering wheel. For the third Friday in a row, he had borrowed the car to "go study at the library" and instead had driven fifty miles to Los Angeles from his suburban home, only to sit here in the car, frozen with fear. His eyes remained fixed on the sign at the front of the building before him: "The Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center" were words he was too afraid to say out loud.
A seventeen-year-old high-school senior in Calabasas, a conservative Southern California bedroom community, Paul read in a local alternative paper about the gay youth support group meeting Friday nights at the Center. This Friday he was determined to finally make it inside. Noting some laughing young people walking in the door who looked very much like kids at his own school, he found the strength to pry his hands from the wheel and get out of the car. He walked slowly toward the door, heart drumming wildly. The Center's door felt heavy, leaden, but as he pulled it open and entered the warmly lit lobby, Paul felt a rush of relief. Then, with an unexpected surge of pride, he felt like Rocky, triumphant on top of those museum steps.

His soft green eyes flickering with remembered pride, Paul told me that story when I was the newly appointed director of the Center. By then he was a twenty-four-year-old high-school math teacher, a confident and proudly open gay man. His story illustrates the kind of real-life triumph over fear demanded of every gay person who makes the decision to open the closet door and walk out.

Given the current level of social intolerance and ignorance of gay and lesbian life, coming out is still an incredibly brave act. In the course of the coming-out journey, gay people quell self-loathing to discover self-love, and face down contempt to find community and group affirmation against monumental odds. Even in our own community, we do not seem to name correctly, or honor sufficiently, this daily life bravery. Perhaps the marginalization of the gay world and the intensely individual nature of the coming-out experience have combined to block adequate recognition of the colossal courage displayed by lesbian and gay Americans every day. Are we too close to the struggle and the old pain to see how amazing we are? It's not an exaggeration to say that so-called average gay men and lesbians are unsung contemporary heroes and heroines in their own lives, and in a world where true personal courage and honesty are all too rare.

Our Coming-Out Stories: Queer Cultural Ritual

Most of us are somewhere along the journey of coming out. We know, to the marrow of our souls, that coming out is probably the experience most central to our lives because it is about our core identity. To acknowledge who we are, it is imperative for us to come out, because we are born invisible even to ourselves. We are born with a hidden identity and then raised and nurtured by people who deny -- and sometimes express hostility to -- our very existence. In no other minority do the members have this particular and peculiar experience of invisibility within their own birth families. When we discover and reveal who we are, these families may even reject us. The greatest punishment a culture can inflict on its members -- the punishment of ostracism, of banishment from the tribe -- is reserved for us alone. When we come out of the closet and acknowledge who we are, we risk becoming exiles from our own homes, banished in our own homeland.

Carrying with it both the exhilaration of newfound freedom and the fear of ostracism, the coming-out experience is weighted with enormous meaning to gay people. It is, in fact, a central and unifying event that bridges even great differences among us. Telling our coming-out stories -- the funny stories of sudden and amazed self-recognition, the stories of apprehension and tough decisions, the joys of finding intimacy and love beyond words, the sweet and sour reactions of those we care about -- is a unique bonding experience, a cultural folk ritual that transcends class, culture, age, race, and gender differences. The following happens every day in a hundred cities: two gay people of whatever cultural background run into each other at the laundry, the library, or the post office. One recognizes that the other is gay and strikes up a conversation. The first most likely question? "When did you come out?" The subsequent conversation, told in brief, coded paragraphs, may extend to coffee or lunch, creating a unique connection, often a memorable moment, and sometimes even a lifelong friendship.

On a first date, at dinner parties, in college dorm rooms, at rap groups, in virtually every social situation where gay people find each other or get to know each other, our coming-out story is the ice-breaker, the common experience that unites us. We even celebrate National Coming Out Day every October 11 (commemorating our second March on Washington, in 1987) as an annual grassroots event, a ritualized remembrance of this most central aspect of our lives. On NCOD, I have attended "coming-out-speak-outs" at which I was mesmerized for hours by the coming-out stories of gays and lesbians from every corner of life.

A trip to a gay bookstore anywhere in America will attest to the centrality of the coming-out experience. The shelves are lined with handbooks and how-tos galore on coming out to ourselves, our friends, our families, along with multiple volumes of first-person testimonies. My local gay and lesbian bookstore, Lambda Rising, in Washington, D.C. carries a line of greeting cards to congratulate friends on the occasion of their coming out to parents or co-workers. We seem never to tire of the staggering varieties on this common theme; it is a staple of our growing body of fiction, film, and art. There is even an unauthorized but commonly used Anglican ceremonial blessing specifically designed to celebrate coming out.

Coming out, however, is not a single fixed act. It is a dynamic, recurrent and complex process: a personal, psychological, and inevitably, political process that continues throughout our lifetimes. There may be months or years between steps, but once we begin the process of coming out to ourselves, we begin a brave journey of continuous unfoldings. And none of us is ever alone in the process. New generations are constantly coming out to themselves and to others for the first time. Others are moving on to their next steps in the process.

And it all begins with each individual's brave first step of self-awareness and self-acknowledgment.

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