Coming Out - Part One

I have a sense of trepidation. I am planning to do it, but I can’t believe that I will do it. I’m slightly scared, as I am about to challenge my status-quo. It’s a long time coming, and I have stalled for long enough. I want to do it, I must do it, it’s inevitable, and will probably help me towards living my life authentically.

I’m planning to come out to my sister tomorrow.

At this point it’s really a formality. How can she not know? She calls me her “brother-sister”, asks me for fashion advice, and no-doubt has seen the gay porn which my computer is riddled with. I don’t not act differently with her, I don’t put up a front, I just simply haven’t told her. And she has never asked. In this fashion we are model South Asians, maintaining a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy; I might as well join the U.S. Navy.

I began my coming out process about eight years ago. First taking the crucial step of admitting to myself I was gay, which I had denied till I was twenty. Till then I had not even permitted myself to think in my head that I liked cock, even though it was a constant fixture in my fantasies. Thinking that I was evil and my orientation was akin to a terminal illness, I told a few of my closest friends. There reaction and taking a course in Queer Theory around the same time, helped me come to terms with my sexuality. I had initially been afraid that they would see me differently and reject me. I felt it was almost profound that after fretting so much over telling them, that after the fact, our relationships continued as normal. The Queer Theory, which I became slightly obsessed with reading, helped me see that homophobia was bullshit, and see the complex ways in which our society organized sexual desire. By the time I graduated from University all my friends knew. I had a low-tolerance for homophobic bullshit and would be quick to read anyone who talked any of that crap around me.

My family has been my final frontier. I am of Pakistani and Muslim background, being out to my family (my parents mostly) would make my life a perpetual torment. When I told my mother I had a girlfriend and that I was going to move in with her (yes, I had a girlfriend while I was gay, an exceptional circumstance which I may reminisce about in a future post) she fainted and pretended to have a heart-attack, while really she was only hyperventilating and I ended up having to take her to the hospital. My father and I don’t have much of a relationship, but I am sure that he would take a confession of my sexuality as further proof as to how much of a horrible person I am, and remind me in not so kind words how much of a disappointment I am to him. And, my brother, well we haven’t really spoken for more than five minutes for the past six years. Once upon a time, we had been close, but he decided that he was going to be a big macho man and that translated into meaning that he was going to be aloof to everyone else in the family.

My little-dear-cute sister, whom I love to death, is the only person in my family whom I feel close with and have a mostly functional relationship with. I have wanted to tell her for years, I feel that it would take our relationship the next level. And, it would be a burden lifted from me, that finally I will have been honest with one person at least in my family.

I am not afraid that she will lash out at me. She is progressive enough to also see homophobia as bullshit. But where she might be progressive, she is also quite simple and likes her world to fit into simple boxes, boxes that are usually shaped from celluloid images from Bollywood and Hollywood movies. She finds challenges to the norm to be hard to digest, and I think on a default impulse wrinkles her nose at them. I remember when I sent her to my hair stylist in the village, she remarked, “he was very funny, but kinda weird. He had a bull-nose piercing.” At the piercing comment she wrinkled up her nose.

At the thought of having this conversation with her tomorrow I feel uncomfortable. And I am sure it may be uncomfortable for a little bit. Hopefully it will go well. Hopefully I will be able to do it, and I won’t put it off, as I have so many other times.

I’m twenty-eight and I can’t believe I am scared of coming out to my twenty-one year old sister.