I hope it encourages people to try and understand more and judge less. I didn’t realize the impact the stories would have on me when I began this project. Each story serves as a motivational piece. Some are better than others but at the end of the day, we survived to retell our tale. That is brave.Īlthough the LGBT community is vastly diverse in every facet, the one thing that binds us together are our coming out experiences. Brave describes teenagers who are kicked out the house by their parents and are forced to find refuge with a friend or shelter or stranger. Brave is a word I associate with gay and queer youth who are pushed out of the closet by one of their loved ones, forcing them to defend an identity they are unsure of. They aren’t brave.īrave is a word I reserve for the gay and queer youth around the world who come out as kids and endure their suffering alone. For them, coming out is a stepping stone. People like Aaron Carter and ILoveMakonnen and Tyler the Creator have hundreds of thousands of fans willing to support their every bad decision. However, if gay youth had to choose between coming out confused, broke, and alone or in front of the media with all of your fans’ love and support, I guarantee you we’d take our chances with the media. Sure, it takes confidence to admit something like that when your career is on the line. Just like it isn’t “woke” just because Becky likes Beyonce and listens to Kendrick Lamar. I get a little annoyed when the media call celebrities brave for coming out. Children are disowned by their families, kicked out, and shunned by their friends because they are gay. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the horror stories are true.
However, it does not mean all of our stories are good. Sure, coming out is liberating and it can be very fulfilling. Coming out shows the world that in spite of the obstacles purposely placed in our way, we don’t give a fuck.Ĭoming out is the fuck you story of our lives. What I do know is that coming out can be the most transformative and liberating moments in your life. I didn’t necessarily want people to hide being gay. If you’re gay, I love you and I’m here for you, but there’s no need to broadcast it to the world. For a long time, I honestly thought that coming out is a personal decision, a personal conversation, and a personal experience. I didn’t quite understand the power behind coming out until I was a little bit older. As a kid, I always associated being gay with something bad because of how television and how adults depicted us. Coming out as gay automatically makes you the “other” in every definition of the word. If everyone is presumably straight, then coming out would be redundant. People don’t come out as straight because being straight is the status quo. I’m sure some of you rolled your eyes or even scoffed at my equivalency, but you know that I’m right. Never in my life have I heard or seen somebody come out as straight. For me, the concept alone was rather weird and unnecessary. I’ve always had mixed feelings about the idea of “coming out,” especially when I was younger.