Coming Out Twice: What My Mother Taught Me About Being Myself
I Had to Come Out Twice. Maybe We All Do.
"transformative - Personal Growth"
I came out twice.
You’d think once would have been enough.
The first time, my mother did most of the work for me.
She outed me.
And instead of standing there and saying, Yes. I’m gay. This is who I am, I wasn’t completely honest with her.
I wish I had been.
That’s easy for the man I am today to say about the young man I was then. I understand why he was frightened. I understand why he wanted to manage the situation. I understand why telling the complete truth to your parents can feel like you’re standing on the edge of a building waiting to see whether there’s pavement or a trampoline below.
But I also know something now that I didn’t fully understand then:
If I had loved myself more, I would have told the truth.
That may be one of the most important things I learned from an old friend named Rob Eichberg.
Coming Out: An Act of Love
Rob wrote a book called Coming Out: An Act of Love.
It’s no longer in print, which is a shame, because the idea behind that title has stayed with me for decades.
Rob wasn’t just an author. He was a psychotherapist and the creator of a personal-growth program called The Experience. I took The Experience. I knew Rob. And I was there when he announced what would become National Coming Out Day.
Rob and activist Jean O’Leary founded National Coming Out Day in 1988, choosing October 11, the anniversary of the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Rob believed visibility mattered—that when gay people allowed the people around them to actually know who they were, stereotypes had to compete with a real human being.
That idea was enormously powerful then.
I think it’s still powerful now.
But it took me a while to live it.
A Journey Through Personal and Universal Struggles
My Mother Was Embarrassed
There’s no reason to rewrite history.
My mother had difficulty with my being gay.
At one point, she didn’t want me visiting the family because she was embarrassed.
So I visited anyway.
That was one of those moments when my actions were considerably more evolved than some of the things going on inside my head.
I showed up.
You can be embarrassed if you want, Mom.
I’m still your son.
I’m still part of this family.
I’m not disappearing to make everybody else more comfortable.
Looking back, I think that was one of my real coming-out moments.
Not the announcement.
The decision to stop cooperating with shame.
More Than Just a Coming Out Story
DIRECTED BY A MOTHER’S SPIRIT
That’s Why I Had to Come Out Again
Eventually my mother and I got through it.
In fact, our relationship became wonderful.
But that didn’t happen because I learned how to be a more acceptable gay son.
It happened when I became more completely myself.
When I stopped apologizing.
When I stopped negotiating.
When being gay wasn’t something Mom and I needed to solve.
It was simply one of the facts of my life.
My eyes are a certain color.
I’m a hairdresser.
I’m gay.
I have questionable taste in men.
Moving on.
And something extraordinary happens when you stop asking another person for permission to be yourself:
They finally get the opportunity to have a relationship with the real you.
My mother couldn’t truly know me while I was editing myself for her.
And I couldn’t really know her while I was constantly measuring her reactions to me.
Coming out changed that.
Rob Taught Me That Visibility Matters
Rob’s work wasn’t only about telling Mom and Dad.
His larger idea was that living openly could change the world around you.
The Experience encouraged gay men and lesbians to accept themselves and become more honest with the people in their lives. His book took that idea further, describing coming out as both a deeply personal process and something with consequences beyond the individual.
Rob died from complications of AIDS in 1995.
That matters to me when I remember what he was asking us to do.
This was not some Instagram affirmation telling us to “live authentically.”
People were dying.
People were terrified.
Families were rejecting their children.
Gay men were being reduced to stereotypes while an epidemic was devastating our community.
And Rob was saying:
Be visible.
Let people know us.
Give them a human being to attach to the word gay.
I witnessed the beginning of National Coming Out Day, but it took years for me to completely understand what I’d witnessed.
There Will Always Be Someone Who Doesn’t Like You
This is something age has made much easier for me.
There will always be somebody who doesn’t like you.
Maybe because you’re gay.
Maybe because of your religion.
Your politics.
Your clothes.
Your voice.
Your hair.
Your eye color.
The way you laugh.
The fact that you put pineapple on pizza.
Human beings are extraordinarily inventive when looking for reasons not to like one another.
You cannot build your identity around preventing other people’s disapproval.
It’s impossible.
And exhausting.
Eventually you have to decide:
Whose life is this?
But Coming Out Is Personal
I should say something here that the older me understands better too.
Coming out isn’t a competition.
Nobody gets a trophy for doing it first.
And nobody owes the world information that could put them in danger.
There are people whose families may reject them, whose housing or financial security may be threatened, or who live in places where being open about their sexuality or gender identity can carry very real consequences.
Safety matters.
Every person’s circumstances are different.
But there’s another kind of coming out that can begin even when public disclosure isn’t possible.
It’s the moment when you stop lying to yourself.
That may be where all coming out actually begins.
I Think Everybody Has a Closet
Not necessarily a gay one.
Some closets are enormous.
We hide failures.
Addictions.
Ambitions.
Relationships.
Regrets.
Money problems.
Family secrets.
Things we’ve done.
Things that have been done to us.
We create versions of ourselves for our parents, our partners, our employers, our friends, our social media followers—and eventually we can become so good at playing those characters that we forget there’s somebody underneath them.
That’s why I don’t think coming out belongs exclusively to gay people.
I wish coming out for everybody.
Coming out as who you actually are.
Coming out from whatever you’ve been hiding behind.
Coming out from the story about yourself that stopped being true twenty years ago.
Coming out from shame.
How I Killed My Mother Was Another Coming Out
I didn’t realize this until I wrote it.
How I Killed My Mother is a coming-out story.
Not because I announce that I’m gay.
Good God, that ship sailed a long time ago.
It’s because I tell the truth about myself in ways I hadn’t before.
I wrote about my mother.
My father.
My lovers.
My ego.
My confidence.
My mistakes.
My anger.
My grief.
My spirituality.
My belief that my dead mother may still be interfering with my life—which is possibly the most Mom thing she could do.
I wrote about versions of Jon-David that weren’t always flattering.
That was new.
Readers of Mafia Hairdresser and The Glow Stick Gods knew me through fiction.
People who followed me online knew the Mafia Hairdresser persona.
Podcast listeners knew the storyteller.
Clients knew the hairdresser.
Friends knew other versions.
But How I Killed My Mother required something different.
I had to come out as myself.
Mom and I Finally Got There
That’s one of the gifts hidden inside my story with my mother.
We didn’t remain frozen in that terrible first moment.
She changed.
I changed.
Our relationship changed.
Eventually, being gay wasn’t the crisis between us.
We got to have a relationship on the other side of it.
And I am profoundly grateful for that.
Maybe that’s why I keep returning to Rob’s idea of coming out as an act of love.
Because telling someone who you really are gives them a choice.
They can love the real you.
They can struggle with the real you.
They can reject the real you.
You cannot control their choice.
But hiding guarantees something worse:
They never get to know you at all.
And you never get to experience what it feels like to be loved without wondering whether the love depends upon the disguise.
I learned that lesson first as a gay man.
I learned it again as a son.
And decades later, writing How I Killed My Mother, I learned it one more time as a writer.
I came out twice.
Maybe more than twice.
Come to think of it, maybe coming out isn’t something we finish.
Maybe every time we become brave enough to tell another truth about ourselves, we open another door.
And walk through it.
Keep Climbing!
My mom says, hello.
Listen to How I Killed My Mother
How I Killed My Mother is a memoir podcast about mothers and sons, depression and hope, family and forgiveness, caregiving, spirituality, humor, death, and the uncomfortable business of discovering who we really are.
This isn’t a story about having all the answers.
It’s about what happened when I finally started asking myself the questions.
If you’re standing at the bottom of something right now, I can’t tell you how long your climb will be.
I can only tell you that I’ve stood at the bottom, too.
Climb with me.— Jon-David
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