I'm told that it's Coming Out Day. I grew up in a homophobic world. My father had the wrong sort of scoutmaster growing up, and later trained as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst under the Freudian paradigm of homosexuality as a disorder arising from family pathology. It took me a while to deal with that. Looking back, the change, in myself and the world, has been astonishing, for all the fact that it isn't nearly finished yet.
Coming out, like most acts of being genuinely true to oneself, is an act of social as well as individual courage. Rather than threaten my straight life and marriage, coming out confirms them. It's all about love in the end, and a challenge to love in return, and to make room for love in a world that so often doesn't. There are many ways to come out. Not all of them revolve around sexual identity.
When a gay person comes out, he/she comes out not just for him/herself, but for me. If I can, in any way at all, brothers and sisters, I've got your back. And thank you.
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