Not long ago, Chris talked (here ) about internalized homophobia. I struggle with this too, although in my case the problem is not so much in my relationship with my parents but with my former LDS friends.
I am a convert, and none of my family followed me into the LDS church, so if anything they were never too thrilled about my church membership. On the other hand, one of my brothers is gay and has been out for nearly 20 years, and my family have had a long time to get over what homophobia it had. So when I came out to my parents, while they were surprised, they were totally supportive (at the time, I thought too supportive, since I really didn't want to be gay). My relationship with my parents has probably gotten better since then, and I feel generally more open with them.
On the other hand, with my LDS friends I have slowly just shut down. The LDS church was my life, particularly my social life, so when I began coming out and stopped going to church, I essentially cut myself off from my social network. But friends who live elsewhere than where I live now continued to keep in contact, but as I found it increasingly awkward to avoid telling them I was gay and to deal with telling them that I was no longer active, I have tended to slowly withdraw from these friends too, to essentially ignore their e-mails or phone calls.
I am at a point now where this is becoming really painful for me. I hate cutting people off from my life, especially people I cared a lot about and for many years. On the other hand, I am terrified of the reaction if I come out to them. I guess it is partly a control issue; I want to be the one who burns the bridges, who does the rejecting, not the other way around. Although I don't think of myself as rejecting them, but rather protecting them from an apostate and a homosexual too boot.
Further exacerbating the problem I think is that I have been slow to make new friends. I do have other, non-LDS friends, mostly from my school days or from work, but many of my closest non-LDS friends live at great distances from me. And I have moved so many times in my adult life that I have gone through this process of having to make new friends so often that I think I am a bit burned out on doing it yet again at a time in my life when I feel like I should be settled. But I realize that this failure to build new friendships has had some negative effects in preventing me from dealing better with how to relate now to my LDS friends.
I was also reading through former governor Jim McGreevey's memoirs and noticed him talk about dealing with "carried shame" and how it affected him. I realize that I have a lot of that, too, although not all of it is from being gay...in my family context, being Mormon was difficult at times (though I had it easy compared to many) and so I tended to compartmentalize to protect my religious life from my family. All of this hiding different parts of myself from different people has been tiring and destructive.
Anyway, this post is a bit of a ramble, but I just wanted to get these thoughts down while they are preoccupying my mind.
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3 comments:
I wish you were my neighbor. We could be great friends. :-)
I'm actually feeling a lot of the same things... sorta. I've moved a lot and had a hard time finding friends locally to replace the really good ones I've left behind. Add to that my reluctance to discuss the sexuality issues with people from my past and you get me burning bridges, so to speak, when it's entirely unnecessary. I've never been very good at keeping in touch, and I think it might be because I've never been really good at opening up in general. It may not be entirely because of keeping my sexual issues private, but I think that may have contributed.
But then, I guess I've got a wife and a little boy to defeat any loneliness that comes along. And that works beautifully, so I can't claim to be too parallel.
But, I'm glad you've been able to sort some of those feelings out for yourself and encourage you to get back in touch with those old friends.
It would be very fun to have you as a neighbour...I agree that we would be great friends, but I wouldn't want to be too much of a temptation for you, either (haha)...actually, as telecommunications get better and better, I figure that we are all moving toward a true global village where physical distances will become less important and where these nascent virtual communities on the Internet will become far more real and substantial.
Still, it would be fun to have you, Chris, Scot, David, and a bunch of other very interesting guys as my neighbours in the real physical sense.
I was going to email you, but no email...so I hope you forgive this not-on-topic digression:
Thanks for your kind words on my blog. It's nice to know that people are reading.
Um, that's all. But, now, having read your blog, I can also add that you seem like a pretty cool guy.
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