chavisory:

carnivalseb:

softheartedbutch:

it worries me so much that there’s been this (mostly unintentional) culture built up around coming out, to where young lgbt kids are putting themselves in danger at school and at home because they don’t want to “live a lie.” i just want to say, i came out when i was 15 and it created a lot of difficulties in my life that i could have avoided by waiting until i was older. it isolated me socially, it exposed me to homophobia from my parents, my family, my teachers, and my classmates at the most important developmental stages of my own confidence and sense of self… closeted people are not living a lie. closeted people are surviving. don’t let anyone pressure you to come out before you’re ready. don’t put yourself at risk when you don’t have to.

Historically, the importance of coming out was put forward by Harvey Milk as a tactic for normalization through representation; if your librarian, your postal worker and seven of the people in your local sports fanclub are all gay & you’ve been friends for years with no disasters, the rhetoric of queers as a monstrous unknown Other collapses.
The thing is, Milk was mainly talking to other adults who had their own means of survival; their own incomes, their own houses.

Yes, homophobia has been used & is being used to eject people from their apartments & that is monstrous, & yes there are vulnerabilities which can cause you terrible harm as an adult, but when you are so much more vulnerable, your job is surviving.
The closet is a survival tactic, & that’s all it’s ever been.
It is not your job right now to be on the front lines of queer representation. Ellen DeGeneres & Laverne Cox are taking care of that so that you can be safe, & we’re going to need you to still be with us in ten years, ok?

You can find people who are safe to be fully open with, and you deserve to be able to do that but you do not owe the intimate details of the way you fall in love to people who would not treat you with basic human dignity.

People who will put you in danger have no right to your privacy, and no right to honesty from you, if that’s the way you want to frame it.

Also, you don’t owe this information to anyone. Even if you’re not in danger. Even if you just don’t feel ready, or just don’t want to.

Nobody is entitled to this information and if you don’t know what you want to do with it yet, you don’t have to do anything.

Gay generational differences

I feel like I’m in a weird middle ground between gay generations and there are differences, specifically surrounding the issue of being out, that make it difficult to relate to or even spend time with gays from other generations.

For example, I have a friend in her 70s who came out to herself during her 40s or 50s, but who despite having long term gay relationships since, has never, and never hopes to, come out to her family.

I have friends in their 30s and 40s who are out to their families and happily married to the loves of their lives.

I have friends in their teens who have (thankfully) never had to worry about their coming out, they’ve just been gay and known as such and had chance to live their identities and their truths for as long as they can remember.

I can’t abide the idea of living my life closeted in the same way my older friend has.

I can barely spend an hour with my married gay friends sometimes because of how insanely envious I am of their happiness and how goddamn lonely I am.

I am equally envious of my younger gay friends who I am just so damn happy for and wish with every part of my being that younger me could have lived her truth so easily like they do.

It’s just like, where do I fit in?

I’m not meaning to bash on older and younger LGBTs, it’s just being a lonely lesbian who’s never had a relationship and is in her early 20s feels so isolating. I want to be out to my family, to my grandparents even, but their age and religious beliefs means that is going to be super difficult and painful for me before it becomes something I can enjoy being free in. And I won’t have a partner to support and comfort me during it, nor to ‘prove my gayness’ to those who doubt.

I get other people’s situations are different and I really do not intend to dismiss the struggles of older and younger LGBTs who haven’t fit the same generalised idea that my friends demonstrate. I just want to put my words of loneliness and isolation specifically perceived as due to generational difference into the void on the internet and hopefully share in solidarity and comfort with others in our community.

disabledbyculture:

“Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in an environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the tasks of early adulthood–establishing independence and intimacy–burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.”

— Judith Herman