I was on a television set once when one of my straight friends asked his gay co-star, 'How long have you known you were gay?' His reply was, 'How long have you known you were straight?' It was always just a part of him, just as being straight was always just a part of my friend. I don't think any straight person can honestly know what it's like to go through the process of realizing your sexual preference is different and garnering the courage to come out to the people you love. It's devastating to see stories in the year 2010 about kids and young adults killing themselves because they're ridiculed about being gay. I can't imagine how it must feel to believe you're better off dead than to show the world your true self. And it has to be especially crushing if your family is super religious or traditional and you know that there's no way they ever could accept you for who you are. Like most sane people, I am a firm believer that you are born with whatever sexual orientation you were meant to have. To me, saying that someone chooses to be gay is like saying they can choose their race, which is obviously not possible. Being in the entertainment industry, I have no shortage of gay friends and some of them are still not out of the closet because they know their families would disown them if they knew.
I have a friend I met in Kindergarten, whom I've known was gay since...well, since before either of us knew what the word 'gay' meant. All throughout our school years (Kinder through HS), I knew something was different about him, nothing I can really explain but he was often teased about his eccentricities. We grew apart after we graduated high school but still e-mail back and forth and we made plans to meet up a few years ago on one of my trips home. One day he sent an e-mail confirming our plans and at the end he wrote, 'P.S. - Oh yeah, I'm gay (in case you didn't know).' I told him I already knew and he asked why I hadn't said something about it. I said it didn't matter to me if he was gay or straight, either way he was still my friend. We've rarely spoken about it since and it hasn't changed our friendship in any way.
It was a similar situation about everyone knowing before it was made official with my cousin, who came out before Thanksgiving dinner four years ago. He was a total stud in high school; jock, girls lined up around the block to date him, and he dated a few of them but none seriously. He didn't date much during his first years of college but began sorta seriously dating a friend of his sisters when he was 23. Their relationship ended, loudly, at the family house one summer night and he didn't bring anyone around for a very long time after that. Everyone suspected he was gay but we knew he had to come out on his own and that it might not be for awhile since he needed to make peace with it first so we all just went about our lives and subtly let him know we were there if he needed to talk. Flash forward to a year later, a beautiful, warm Thanksgiving day at the family house. It was the usual hanging out and playing games, watching football kinda day until twenty minutes before we were gonna sit down for dinner. Some of us, including his mother and father (dad was whining about having to wait so long for dinner), were in the kitchen helping set stuff out when my cousin comes in all nervous and quietly sits at the counter. I asked him if something was wrong and he said, 'I'm gay'. Just like that. And then this look of like terror came over his face because he knew the genie was outta the lamp. I went to hug him but he brushed me off because he said he'd changed his mind and wasn't gonna come out that day and he didn't want anyone to think something was up. So everyone starts picking up stuff to take out to the table and he stands just inside the doorway and stares at everyone. So we stare back, all the while holding hot plates and serving dishes. Then he says, 'I'm gay' and, without missing a single beat, his dad says, 'Fine. Can we eat now?', waits for his son to shake his head 'yes' and goes out to the table. Once everyone sat at the table, there was a weird silence for a few minutes and then my great grandmother (who had such a mouth on her and did not censor herself, God rest her soul) said something I'd rather not repeat here and that oddly got the discussion going. Everybody pretty much knew and everybody was fine about it, including his somewhat traditional Mexican-American father whom he really thought would have a problem with it.
Even having been raised in a very tolerant environment with the most open, loving bunch of people you could ever hope to know, he was still terrified of coming out which tells you how difficult it must be. And how impossible it must seem for those who do not have families that are as loving and accepting. It's such a shame that so many people think the only option they have is death. There should be more access to education about homosexuality and even counseling, especially for young kids, about how to come to terms with your sexuality and how to be okay with being different. Projects like this are great and hopefully will help a lot of people but I get the feeling some kids who don't want to be gay won't even seek this stuff out.
But it's not just about being gay or straight, it's also about being bullied in general which seems to lead more and more kids to thinking suicide is their only option. Everybody can relate to being bullied on some level, I was bullied heavily throughout elementary school. I was raised around a bunch of women so by the time I started school I had a lot of girl friends and female cousins who I hung around with. I was also harassed about my eye color (green) which made me stand out amongst my mostly brown-eyed Hispanic classmates, despite my being Hispanic myself. It was rough stuff to deal with but you deal with it and you believe there's something better on the other side of it all. And there is. But you can't run away from who you are and if you don't deal with that you'll never know who you're meant to become. Suicide is a permanent answer to a temporary problem and being gay or different should never be considered a problem.
