Navigating Coming Out
Find your pride among queer stories of self-discovery, acceptance, and overcoming fear.
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[Film Rolling] I was with a guy for seven years. Never even really thought about being queer. And then I fell in love with my best friend who's a woman. I was very scared about what my family would think what my friends would think, that had built up over years and years and years. I always remember this phrase going around in my head, "if not now, when?" Very few people knew I'd say it was a really confusing time because there was so much negativity about being gay. I think it probably made a lot of people go back into the closet if anything else. I was quite young as 13 and I was like "I think I'm a lesbian." I would lived in Bali and it wasn't really accepted there. You can't really be openly gay. I didn't know many gay people. So I was like, "is this kind of wrong?" It would've made it easier at the time to get through, you know, that kind of struggle knowing that there were gonna be people waiting on the other side to accept me, to embrace me. The 80's was a great time to be young not always such a great time to be LGBTQ. The first time I told them that I was gay. The next question is, "have you got aids?" If my parents were gonna be really negative about being gay I was just gonna be, I would be disowning them. Not them disowning me. My mom was super dramatic. "Oh my God. Oh my God." You know, like not hysterical but just like really kind of over the top. It took a long time for her to be less negative about it. But then I don't blame her. I don't really blame a lot of people for being homophobic because the information that they had was always negative anyway. So it, it never surprised me. I wasn't really supported. It was just kind of like, "oh, you're a lesbian." "Like, what are you sure?" Like, "what if you're just gay for attention?" I grew up around a lot of homophobia. So I wasn't really surprised to like hear these kinds of things. I was talking to this girl and my mom found out that I was gay through my messages and it didn't go well at all. She just thought that it was like unnatural and that it was just not meant to be. And that it would change in the future. When I told my mom my heart was racing. " Mom, me and Nat are like more than just friends." "Yeah. I know. I've been waiting for you to tell me." "What do you mean? You knew this whole time? I was like, "you probably knew before I even knew. Like why couldn't you have just told me that I was queer?" Coming to terms with being a transgender man, I think it was such a gradual realization that when it finally...
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