Hmmm, interesting. I think my accountant brother is a member of the Inquisition against Necrotax - lessee, he’s a Catholic, heavily involved in parish stuff, very very good at helping relatives lower our taxes and loves games where you get to blow up zombies. Yep. Definitely. Wonder if I can become a member too.
I’ve had interesting times explaining to people that I’m:
an engineer (being female, lots of people assume I’m a “regular chemist” or a biologist, at least in Hispanic countries and Italy)
an RPGr. No, I have never killed anybody outside of a game.
a gamer. Yes, that means I use the computer to play. Yep, in spite of being female, I can use a computer and I do use it for things other than work (why does this surprise so many males, I don’t know - this part hasn’t been only in Latinoland).
someone who’s been using the internet for more than 10 years.
An old coworker of mine is so dumb she’s grown a county-wide reputation for dimness. One day she was babbling about how “musicians always do drugs”, and the EHS manager for the factory, ex-bass player of a band, told her “hey, not all, me an’ the guys never…” “oh yes, all of them, blahblah”. Someone else chimes in, “what, the ones at the Scala too?” “oh YES, of course, blahblah”. It went on for a while, and the EHS manager was starting to look like he was considering throttling her. After all, Spain doesn’t have the death penalty and it would have been a noticeable improvement in the country’s IQ. I told him in an aside “you realize I’m a psycho, right?” “a psycho?” “yep. And I troll for little kids” “oh God - gamer?” “yep. RPGs on the internet”. He looked at her and sighed “right”.
On coming out as a heterosexual sissy, there have been really definitely, really profound improvements over the first time I did it.
In fact, coming out as a hetero sissy made it necessary to come out as an escaped psychotic mental patient. (Yeah, I did a sufficiently poor job of communicating that I ended up locked up).
The hetero-sissy stuff is still difficult to explain to most people. Militant schizzy-libber is easier for folks to get, oddly enough.
Everything else (coming out as a roll-your-own, talk-to-God-myself kind of religious person, coming out as an anarchist, coming out as a male radical feminist, coming out as a Macintosh user) has pretty much been anticlimactic. It’s like once you’ve got people’s eyes bugging and they’re backing away from you and looking for where the doors are, you generally don’t worry much about keeping secrets. (And the ones who aren’t backing for the doors aren’t likely to freak if they haven’t freaked already). So it really is a freeing experience in that sense.
Just had to chime in. Sorry. I’m sitting here at 1:34am, tears streaming down my face, laughing like it’s noon. I’m sure my husband will be out soon, wielding a bat, wondering who is torturing me to death out here.
Awesome, chaoticbear. If ever I find myself in the position that I have to come out and I’m a cashier again, that’s the very phrase I’ll use. Especially if it’s to my mother.
And t-bonham, I think $4.66 is perfect. $4.99 would have been equally good.
And, as for my own “coming out,” I’ve alluded to it here before, but—well, first, it’s not like I go to conventions or write erotic ocelot fanfic* or anything, but…let’s just say I liked The Secret of NIMH. A lot. Ya dig?
i’ve often found it hard to come out as a bisexual, especially to some family & long-time family friends – even though most all of my close friends, and even a largish proportion of my (sometimes precarious) acqaintances know that my orientation is not entirely straight.
but i’ve found it much harder to come out as a victim of sexual abuse (something that happened when i was a child) to even some of my closest friends, even though they already know of pretty much everything else that’s gone on in my life (and even though it’s something known to all my family and close family friends.)
it’s just one thing that i’m entirely incapable of talking about if i don’t have to.
in fact, this post contains more info than i’ve shared with some of my best friends. prolly the anonymity is the major reason.
Interesting comparison between RL and on-line here. RL, still not completely comfortable with telling all and sundry about my homosexuality, but never had anything more than idle curiosity and the occasional appreciative comment about the (work-safe) elements of my art collection that I put up on the walls.
On-line, it sometimes seems that I’d suffer more prejudice if I claimed to be straight rather than gay. But - admitting that I’m… one of them…
I came out to my parents when my girlfriend got me pregnant. That was hard. My husband is sterile. The first time my girlfreind, who had moved in with us a couple years before when we fell in love, and I had sex that could have resulted in pregnancy, I got pregnant. This despite her being on hormones for years. I was thrilled, my husband was thrilled, eventually after my girlfriend recovered from the blow to her self image, she was thrilled, and I had to drive a few hundred miles, with morning sickness, to go to my parents house and tell them this. They were thrilled that I was pregnant, finally, and although stunned, welcomed my girlfriend into the family. My mother now keeps two copies of the family tree, one with what the grandmas and other relatives see and one with the truth.
The thing is since I can’t come out fully without outing my girlfriend, and without putting myself in danger of too much scrutiny by the law, I don’t come out in person much. My closest friends know, dopers know, and that is pretty much it.
I tried this. Told my friends that I couldn’t care less about football.
Now I get invited to go to ALL the parties, so that there’s someone to make the fried turkey, ensure the salsa never disappears, and the beer is always cold.
I’ve discovered that this gets me first dibs on turkey, really fresh salsa, and good cold beer.
Where I live adultery is a crime, as is fornification. There are some who might try to persue a bigamy charge as well, although I never claimed to be married to anyone other than my husband. Also there is the fact that Kelly is the other legal parent of my child. I don’t want DCFS looking at us and deciding that our life of crime (adutery and fornification) or unusual family is reason to take my daughter away. The adultery crime laws require that it be committed openly and notoriously, so staying in the closet for the most part, may actually make it less of a crime.
My daughter is lovely and smart. She will be three soon and is reading some, counting some, and generally outsmarting my husband every single day. She is not the least bit confused by having three parents, which if you think about it is not unusual, it is just unusual to have them in the same house.
She also is not at all confused about being a girl. We have never ever said that girls are girls because they have certain qualities or even body parts, in fact we have never talked much about gender per se, but nevertheless, she announced one day that she was a girl. Shen knows the names for the various bits and knows that not everyone has the same bits.
Coming out to friends, co-workers and family about being bipolar and on meds was pretty hard. Living in the bay area of California, many people here are very anti-meds. There’s a lot of people who believe that taking drugs even for medical reasons is bad and unnnecessary and unhealthy and creates toxins in your body and all that crap. So I actually got some shit for it. To be honest, it kind of pissed me off. Rather than being happy for me that I’m finally getting some treatment, they were bitching about how they thought it was bad for me to take antidepressants and mood stabilizers. One woman at my work told me that I had “lost my edge”, that I used to be sharper and funnier. One of my best friends said I didn’t need to take drugs and that she was worried that I would become a different person. I was pretty surprised that people could be so judgmental and cruel.
I think my parents think they are open minded. They would be fine with me being gay, or wanting to be a man, or even being a stripper.
But once (when I was about 14) I suggested that it’s possible that evolution is just of the many ideas, and that they shouldn’t be telling my little brother that it is the one and only possiblity. Admitedly it seems more likely than some of the other options, but I don’t think they should be telling him off for questioning.
They always talk about science over religion. But the idea of “don’t question, just believe me, you are naive if you think anything else” doesn’t sound like science to me, isn’t science meant to be based on the idea of “question everything”?
Just a note, you wouldn’t “want to be a man”, you would already be a man, and have to take medical steps so your body would match. I’m sure you didn’t mean any harm, and it’s not a big deal. Just following the board motto, ma’am.
It does seem strange that they believe in science, yet they don’t feel comfortable discussing the reasons. They should know how to explain evolution, and why it’s the best available model, not just reject and ridicule you and your brother for having questions about it.
People’s stories as coming out as “mentally ill” are fascinating me. I honestly never really thought about that; I think I assumed that either one’s family would naturally be part of the process of discovery, or just excluded from it. So my ignorance has been fought too.
lee, your story is amazing. (And not at all difficult to follow ;)) I’m so glad they were able to accept your girlfriend, though the thing about the dual family trees has been haunting me, I find it so sad. Yet at the same time, at least there’s not just one which is a lie, so it’s kind of good too. How do you all feel about that?
My coming out process continues. I’m still on the easy ones. It is getting a little better, because I’m remembering that I don’t have to excuse or defend myself, or turn into anybody’s personal FAQ. I can just say what I have to say and move on. Yesterday I told an old friend in five minutes, and then we talked about video games for an hour. That was great. Much better than the one who tried to talk me out of it, for my own good, of course. :rolleyes:
