In preparation for my 15 minutes of fame on LesBiGay Radio, I worked up this little tidbit about coming out over Christmas. It never came up on the show and I never got around to finishing it, although I will if there's interest.
Ah, the holidays. A time for joy, laughter, magic, and serious family trauma. No statistics have yet been compiled, but anecdotal evidence suggests that more comings-out happen during the holiday season than at any other time of year. Of course, you say. Christmas is a time of forgiveness, of generosity, of opening one’s heart to one’s fellow-man. What Scrooge could be so uncharitable as to respond to a coming-out with derision, with scorn, with “Bah! Humbug!” Naturally, the best time for breaking the news to the family is when they are all gathered around the warm glow of the family fireside, basking in the love and contentment that comes only to those who understand the true holiday spirit.
Bzzt! Thank you for playing. If you live on this planet, you know know that the harder the military-entertainment complex crams the Norman Rockwell Christmas myth down the open gullet of the American consumer, the more psychotic we all become as we kill ourselves trying to beat our wretched, messy, unphotogenic lives into Hallmark shape. The holiday season is a time when the crushing weight of family obligation hangs around the neck like a millstone, and the dread of knowing that it will never be like it is in the Martha Stewart catalogue chills the blood in our warm basking veins. So knowing all this, why do America’s queer children continue, with the stoicism and fatalism of lemmings en route to the cliff’s edge, to take that simmering cauldron of familial guilt and resentment and kick it up a notch?
The answer is very simple, really. Most gay children, once they come out to themselves, have the sense to put as much distance between themselves and their families as possible. If they are lucky, they will already be in college and therefore able to pursue their amours with as much abandon as their roommates and the drinking age will allow. The less fortunate will, from the moment that light bulb goes on in the soul, spend most of their waking moments pondering the fastest and cheapest way to get their own place. But no matter how far you’ve run, no matter how cunningly you’ve hidden, once a year at Christmas time you are hauled screaming back into the hot pulsating core of that nuclear family, and that’s how meltdowns happen.
Inevitable? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But if you, my friend, are heading home for the holidays and you feel that Big Secret sitting in your gut like a lump of unbaked cookie dough, there’s a good chance that by the time you’re scraping those turkey remnants into the garbage can, you’ll be doing it accompanied by your parents’ wails of anguish and dismay. But just as, as Martha says, presentation is half the battle in holiday entertaining, you can minimize the damage somewhat by planning ahead. That’s why we’ve put together a few tips to help you make yours a holly jolly coming-out.
The ideal scenario, really, would be one where your family was able to comprehend, assimilate, and embrace the reality of your queerness long before you have to actually discuss it with them. Unfortunately, this rarely ever happens, despite valiant and often very creative efforts. Your family may have enough of a clue to recognize the signs--they may have remarked wonderingly before upon your owning multiple copies of every Indigo Girls album, upon your progressively outrageous haircuts, upon your interlocking-Mars-symbols tattoo--but it’s an amazing thing to be a rational creature, and it is perfectly possible for your family to both realize that you seem to be presenting many of the symptoms of queerness and at the same time believe that you are straight. You may be thinking, “I mean...they’ve gotta know;” but trust us, they don’t know until you tell them.
Still, the mind works on many levels, and even if all your hints are going straight to the bottom of De Nile, they can help prepare the way for you even if they must work subliminally. Thus, you can help your family get started by doing a few simple preparatory things:
* working discussions of gay rights issues into all conversations, even when they’re only calling to find out what your flight number is
* answering the question “what do you want for Christmas?” with, “A pair of pink triangle earrings, and Jesse Helms’s head on a platter”
* giving your parents a free subscription to Out and complementary membership in PFLAG
* putting a picture of you, your lover, and the cats on your Christmas card
However, as we have said, no amount of preparation can get out of what is perhaps the stickiest aspect of this predicament, which is:
As always, the first step is acceptance. In coming out as in international diplomacy, there just is no right time to drop the bomb. Nevertheless, there are good and bad times and places to introduce the topic. For instance, don’t choose the moment when your mother is taking the turkey out of the oven; your family will be even more upset at the loss of the bird than they will be when they find out how it came to be lying face down under your mother’s unconcsious form. And, unless you have either a serious exhibitionist streak or steel-reinforced concrete gonads, you don’t want to be coming out to the entire extended family at once, so you don’t want to leave things to the last minute. Otherwise you could end up deciding that the only avenue left to you is to begin saying grace with the words, “Thank you, God, for the gift of lesbianism.”
Your first step is to identify your initial target audience. It may be a brother, a sister, a kindly and kooky aunt, or one or more of your parents. Whoever it is and however you pick ‘em, try to engineer a situation in which you will have some time alone with them. Once you have, it’s then up to you to get started. Now, it can be awkward to introduce this topic into the middle of a conversation about wrapping paper. Sometimes, you have to bite the bullet. It is possible to make this less awkward by guiding your intaker toward the subject. However, responding to “Help me with this curling ribbon” with “So, what do you think of Bill Bradley’s policy on ENDA?” can be just as awkward as responding with, “That reminds me--I’m gay!”
The more classy maneuver is to get your intaker, himself, to bring it up. This is a tricky thing to pull off, but it can be managed. The easiest way is to get your intaker to ask you a question to which “I’m gay” can become part of the answer. Samples include:
* “Why aren’t you coming with us to midnight mass this year?”
* “I know why you’re moving to Texas, but why is your roommate moving there with you?”
* “What were you and that elf doing while little Timmy was talking to Santa?”
* “Is this your copy of Hot Buns?”
But basically, all of these are finer points--gravy, if you will. Putting gravy on a tasty turkey dinner enhances the pleasure of eating it; putting gravy on a pile of sawdust and steel shavings doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. If your initial audience lives up to the spirit of the season, then you can break out the Yuletide cheer and invite the boys from CBS around to film your mirth and merriment for the close of their next made for TV movie. If their reaction gives you the chance to find out what Ebenezer Scrooge would have been like with PMS, then you need to move on to
A hostile response is necessarily painful. However, there are ways to dull that pain even without resorting to extra-huge helpings of eggnog. Here are a few suggestions:
* Try coming out shortly before the big extended-family get together. Once your parents know, they will be on your back 24/7 trying to make you feel their pain.
However, they cannot bring the subject up in front of Grandma, Grandpa, and Aunt Tammy Fae. For one thing, the elderly are frail and must be protected from agitation;
for another, your father doesn’t want Tammy Fae gloating over her baby brother’s most recent debacle. Cosy up to your elderly relatives and use them as human shields.
* If you plan to come out to a hostile audience, also come out to a sympathetic audience. Often, for example, you can productively play your siblings off against your parents.
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