Mom was already about 60% sure, and my brother was around 90%. So when I actually said it to her, she took it as well as anyone could – she said, “All I want is for you to be happy, no matter what.” And she meant it. I told her years later how much that meant to me, and how lucky I was to be her son.
The close friends I had weren’t too shocked, and none of them really cared anyway.
[quote=“scifisam2009, post:4, topic:543775”]
My family have had pretty much no reaction. TBF, pretty much any piece of news in my family passes without comment. I could tell them I was getting a civil partnership with Sarah Palin and they’d just nod and make some comment about the weather. /QUOTE]
That’s just so fantastically… British 
I think my mother was probably surprised that I didn’t come out. Given my extremely tomboyish personality, my preference for boys’ clothes and toys, and my general lack of any discernible feminine qualities, I think she was expecting that I’d be gay. It probably surprised the heck out of her when I told her I was getting married…to a guy. 
As far as family members…a young cousin came out to my spouse and me, and we were very supportive of him (especially since the rest of his family was of the extremely religious variety). I don’t think he told them for quite awhile after that, and I think his mom kicked him out of the house. I lost touch with him, but I think they’re back on good terms again now.
None of my friends have described particularly painful experiences of coming out - most were children of very liberal families. The occasional oddball cousin or distant aunt/uncle was always mocked as having hilariously backward view of it not being just peachy. I have one friend whose a first generation Indian immigrant, so his parents don’t exactly believe that he’s gay. We’ll see how that pans out, but there’s not a whole lot of actual tension with the subject.
The first time I met my SO’s extended group of friends (all roughly 19-20), one of the guys started making out with an almost 30 year old guy in front of us. I assumed they had recently started dating. My SO swallowed hard and asked how they were, etc, and so on.
After we part ways, I said “Man, that age difference was…weird”.
He nonchalantly replied “What was weirder was that that was how he chose to come out to us” :eek:. Turns out that was his friends’ way of telling everyone that he was out. And nobody had ANY clue beforehand.
That last sentence is about the sweetest I’ve ever read! I hope someone thinks that of me someday!
Well, with my friend, it actually was surprising, in the sense that I’d never guessed. (Of course, I was also about 15 at the time and my gaydar was even worse than it is now back then. You need to have like, a rainbow tattooed on your forehead for me to realize that you’re gay, basically.) So we were surprised, but…no one made a fuss or anything. I grew up in a liberal area, so I’d like to think that’s it, but I don’t know. Another gay friend I had in high school committed suicide a couple years after we graduated, so it couldn’t have been all hunky dory. 
When one of my former classmates got married to another guy, the mothers of every girl in our class were shocked, shocked! I don’t think a single actual classmate was, though. I mean, the mothers liked him because he was so attentive, polite, quiet, nicely-dressed, always perfectly combed, noticed and complimented home décor… and this was when we were 13, way too young to be in theater. I sort of make a point of Not Giving A Shit about people’s personal lives unless they wish to inform me of them, but it was evident this guy was built on a different model than the other boys even before I was able to spell “homosexual”.
We outed a coworker to his Dad, who was also a coworker; the son was so gay that if he’d been any gayer he’d have gone straight. The Dad took a bit of spelling things out (we had to go through the whole list of synonims of “gay dude” we could think of before he got it), but once he got it his next question was “do you know if he’s got a boyfriend?” “yeah, that little pretty blode friend of his? if that ain’t his boyfriend I’m the Statue of Liberty” “oh! Oh. Good” The reason for the outing had been that Dad was worried Sonnyboy might be left alone when his parents died; finding out there was a Someone in Sonnyboy’s life made Dad very happy. When someone asked “you don’t mind at all?” his response was “I did my military service in the Legion, you learn some unexpected things there… his Mom will kill us both if she ever does find out, though.”
I have no idea whether the Mom ever did find out, but I understand Sonnyboy and LittleBlonde are still very much an item, 8 years later.
Sorry, but I couldn’t help but laugh at this line:
In England, ‘batty’ is slang (particularly among teenagers) for ‘gay.’ 
I accidently came out to my aunt in college. She was visiting from San Francisco, so she was well aware of the significance of my freedom ring necklace. She asked if I knew what it meant and I said yeah. She said something to the effect of that she was cool with it, but didn’t feel she should acknowledge it until my Mom (her sister) knew.
Coming out to my Mom was very difficult. She had made some comment once to the effect of gayness and death being next to each other on the list of things she didn’t want for her son. During one argument in which I was talking about how it was difficult in general to feel comfortable telling her about my life, and I outed myself as bisexual. Her first response was “no you’re not”. LOL! Then she started grasping at religious notions and then finally gave up. She eventually got over it.
However she still didn’t my brother to know (17 years younger than I), or my stepfather, partially for fear that this knowledge would cause some kind of fatherly protectiveness to kick in and cause a major family divide. She picked an arbitrary age of 16 before he could know. I didn’t like it, but didn’t fight it either. It did cause me to feel a bit estranged from him. Of course he figured it out before he hit 16 and asked my Mom and she admitted it. Not having this barrier any more (and a little bit of teenage annoyance at parents), of course my relationship with him bloomed.
There was still my step-father. It took one of her close friends who was gay admonishing her about it, and then dying to guilt her into finally telling him. He’s OK with it, though he admits he might have been overly phobic about it previously.
My Dad’s side of the family I told via third party, a visiting cousin. I told her, and let her know it was OK to tell the rest. They were all fine with it. My one aunt was delighted, and I took her on a mini gay tour of NYC that involved stops at LIPS, the drag restaurant, a lesbian bar I had gone to once, and the Naked Boys Singing stage show.
I don’t think anyone was terribly surprised except for perhaps my stepfather, a genuine surprise, and my Mother, whose surprise was probably equal parts denial.
I was kind of surprised to find out my ex-girlfriend was a lesbian… but I guess it explains why she broke up with me.
I’m a lesbian and transsexual. My mother was rather surprised and tried to convince me that I wasn’t really a girl. My dad still doesn’t know, and he’s rather intolerant and goes on these psycho rages sometimes over my life decisions (like what kind of job I want), so I fear him in this regard.
My mum died when I was 16 and Dad died when I was 11, they probably already knew.
On the other hand I was always so left wing when I was a kid. I would actually read “The Daily Worker.” I would be defending every minority and left wing cause in school and to my parents. Imagine a little 9 year old in school, speaking up about oppressed working classes and that was me.
So any support I had for gay rights may have been viewed as “more of Mark’s leftist crap.”
I am no longer that left wing
I find it funny as a gay man, so many gay people can fool people. I keep thinking, how couild your parents not know.
I worked with one guy who was about as masculine as Richard Simmons, and he says “I remember how tough it was when I had to tell my parents and friends I was gay.” I just looked at him and remember thinking “You actually had to TELL someone”?
It was much tougher being gay in the 80s when AIDS was first coming into the scene as you got outright hostility to being gay. GAY = AIDS back then.
Maybe she wasn’t gay before she met you
Sorry I was kidding, but c’mon you have to admit that set up was just BEGGING for that response.
I was only fooling to make a joke.
I’ll let you all know how surprising it is if and when it ever happens. As it appears that I might have just acquired a girlfriend-type-person, the whole coming out thing might become an issue.
Not much in the surprise department here. Sis was happy and supportive. It didn’t phase younger brother. Mom was accepting, after a while. The rest of the family? I just let word get out, because I was not generally close to any of them, due to other circumstances.
Of course I did this when I was living on my own and ready to accept whatever life had in store for me.
Talking to my parents years after, they claim that it wasn’t a surprise - no girlfriend in high school (to which I replied, yea but did you see what I looked like?? An unborn embryo chick!). What was surprised me was who was the most accepting of my family - my dad. He is pretty much your typical silent, strong type. Not exactly known for his liberal views.
But in our first conversation after That Event, he said, “I don’t understand it, but you’re my son and that’s good enough for me. If you have any trouble, you can always rely on us, and come home whenever you want.” Right after that phone conversation, I gently dissolved into a blubbering mess. As you do.
Mum took longer to get around to it. However, she left no doubt where her loyalty lay. My uncle got wind of it and proceeded to spread malicious gossip among our extended clan. In a display of the rule, Small Asian Women Smite With A Surprising Amount of Force Considering Their Size, she ripped into them with the force of a typhoon, and to this date none have dared to bring it up again in front of us.
My brother didn’t seem fazed, which is surprising since he’s a lot like my dad in having conservative views. My sister, a church-goer (and the only one in my family) was uncomfortable but more less accepted it to a certain degree.
I prefer to think her thought process was "Gee, if even tim314 can’t turn me on . . . " 
My parents weren’t fazed. I don’t think they expected it, though. My mom at least thought it was kind of an experimentation thing (this would be when I was a senior in high school coming out as bisexual). I don’t know if she still does, but I doubt she’d have a problem with it anyway. I expect I could come out as as a full-blown (so to speak) lesbian and she’d be fine.
My younger siblings, whom I expected would be fine with it (I expected everyone to be fine with it, heh) kind of reacted the opposite way and withdrew from me. I don’t know why I was so surprised by that - I told them because this was when “faggot” was becoming a popular insult (2001-ish, among teenagers at my school, at least) and I had tried just generally talking to them about it being insensitive and whatnot and when that failed, figured “well they’re okay with me, so when they find out I’ve got gay leanings, they’ll magically be okay with homosexuality in general!” It didn’t really work out that way.
I’m unusually inexperienced for my age in general for various reasons and have never dated anyone, male or female, so I don’t know if they still feel that way or if they thought it was just a passing thing, too. Guess I’ll find out when I finally bring home a girl, heh.
Hey, congratulations!
My parents, if they were surprised, didn’t show it, and were simply accepting. My brothers just didn’t care. I’m actually not sure when I told my youngest brother, but at one point he asked me “you’re bisexual, right?” and I was like, “oh, yeah”, so you can kind of see it’s not a big deal.
Most of my GLBT friends, by the time they actually came out, I was getting the feeling that it was a possibility. (One was constantly asking me questions about my sexuality, another had said things like ‘if I liked girls, I would have a huge crush on x person’, that sort of thing.) Only one was a big surprise, because for the first year I knew him, I knew him as a very conservative kid with an encyclopedic knowledge of weapons and the military, who looked and sounded about 10 years old. Then puberty hit and he came out, and kind of went through a personality 180º (and I should say, we’ve been much better friends since said 180º; I think part of it was leaving his parents’ shadow and coming into his own).