What to Do When Your Friend Comes Out to You - A Gay Man's Perspective

A Gay Man's Hope for What to Do When a Friend Comes Out

Coming out is no easy feat. For starters, accepting your sexuality is one of the most personal things you can go through, let alone when you begin to share this newfound embracement with others. And despite that initial emergence from the closet, with each new person you tell, you’ll be coming out over, and over, and over again.

While it certainly can become easier to tell as you grow more comfortable, it’s understandable that one might hesitate when coming out to others in fear of not knowing what their reaction will be. Even though society has made such significant strides in understanding the plight of the LGBT community, there is still some stigma in different parts of the world about being openly gay.

Taylor Phillips knows a little bit about that. A 20-something from southern Indiana, he came out while at an SEC school in the deep South surrounded by men who knew next to nothing about being gay. “The biggest thing for me when I came out, no one knew, including myself, other gay people. No one knew what gay culture was or about gay people.”

RELATED: Don’t Allow a Homophobic Partner to Belittle You for Being Bisexual

To be surrounded by no one who understands you during one of the most vulnerable moments of your life is undoubtedly petrifying. To the people around Phillips, he didn’t fit the “gay mold,” claiming he didn’t look or act like their depiction of a gay man, so there’s no way he was gay. Instead of accepting what he had to say, they denied him, refusing to accept that despite once knowing him as straight, he was in fact a gay man ready to embrace that part of himself. The kind of reaction Phillips received is an example of one that you’d never want to experience during the coming out process, especially from people who you consider close.

While there’s no exact way to respond to someone coming out, here are a few things inspired by Phillips experience that you can be aware of for the future as you prepare what to say or do if someone were to come out to you. He hopes that through sharing what he went through over the last few years since coming to terms with his sexuality, he’ll help to open the mind of even just one more person who doesn’t know as much as they could about the rainbow-colored community outside of their own. That way, if or when someone should come out to you, you’re ready to react accordingly, accept them as they are, and listen to what they have to say.

1. Start to Familiarize Yourself With LGBT Culture

Phillips says that after finding out one of his close friends is transgender, he got to learning. As it’s a friendship he values and cares for, he immediately took it upon himself to do his research, learning the proper things to say or not say, how to properly approach topics, and how to step up if or when they’re ever in need of defending. He did this without poking and prodding with inappropriate of questions, something Phillips wished people did for him once they learned about his sexuality.

“My two best friends, who are still very good friends of mine today, handled it just fine, but I wish everyone else would’ve,” he says. “I wish I had friends that were more accepting to learn about what I liked, who I was, and about what interests I had. When I came out, a lot of them just didn’t know what gay was. You can’t expect anyone to familiarize with it if they have no reason to, but you can hope they will if it’s in their life.”

When someone comes out of the closet, a huge weight is lifted. It means they can be who they want, immersing themself in a culture that they hadn’t been able to truly experience before. As Phillips notes, he was just beginning to learn about gay culture and what people were talking about and doing. He wanted his friends to be there for him along the way, taking this as an opportunity for them to learn just as he was. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.

“I’m not asking my straight friends to be gay, but I’m asking them to learn with me, and learn about things I like or that I’m interested in,” he says. “When you’re friends with someone, you want to have those commonalities, and I had regular things, or more ‘straight’ normalities to talk about, but I never felt that reciprocated. This put a bit of a wedge between my friends and I after I came out because there was this new side of me that I wanted to experience, and learn about and I didn’t feel like that was reciprocated.”

If a friend comes out to you, that doesn’t mean you’re required to binge through seasons of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” to stay in the know. Instead, all it takes is a quick Google search to tell you that 4 out of 10 LGBT youth say the community in which they live is not accepting of LGBT people, or that LGBT youth are twice as likely as their peers to experience physical assaults, according to the Human Rights Campaign. You’ll also learn that 75 percent of LGBT youth say most of their peers don’t have a problem with them identifying as LGBT. With a little bit of research, you can help make sure you fall in that majority.

2. Don’t Make Assumptions About Who They Are Now or Will Become

Even with so much acceptance and progression of gay culture in society, there are still common misconceptions out there. Early representation in media have left some people stuck on the idea that a gay man is overtly flamboyant with over-the-top sass. Sure, that rings true for some who embrace their femininity, and there is nothing wrong with that whatsoever, but if the person coming out to you happens to be attractive, masculine-looking or athletic, that doesn't necessarily mean his coming out is the precursor to a transition into something that you've conceptualized as a stereotype. Their life up until this point was not a lie, despite what you may initially think. You can’t assume the person you know has been pretending to be someone they’re not just because it took them until this point to come to reveal their sexuality.

“It’s not fair to assume that everyone’s journey is the same,” says Phillips. “After two years, I’ve decided I’m comfortable enough to put on a wig and heels with my friends and dance around and enjoy myself, but that doesn’t mean every gay person is going to have that milestone. People are made to feel that because they look or fit into a certain mold, they can’t explore themselves outside of that mold.”

Phillips explains that a quick glance at his exterior may leave people assuming he wouldn’t do those things, but that’s not the case, and frankly, it’s not fair that those assumptions are even made.

“Those things are fun, it’s a creative outlet that I get to do with my friends that I feel comfortable with,” he continues. “Am I walking down the street doing that? Not right now. WilI I maybe one day? I don’t know, maybe. If it’s what I want to do, I’m going to do it. It becomes this level of comfortability with yourself where you feel like you can do whatever you want. You can explore whatever you want to because you know who you are, you know yourself. You know what you like. Being where I’m at now, no one could’ve told me what to do to get to where I am, I had to experience it and feel it myself. I think that’s where representation comes into play. You see people who you identify with and see yourself in, it makes it easier to explore yourself.”

This person, your friend, is just like anyone else. Remember that. We’re at a point in our world where people are afraid to step on each other’s toes and ask the important questions, but sometimes, if you want to know something, all you need to do is speak up and educate yourself.

“Be the representation of what you want people to know us as,” adds Phillips. “If someone wants to ask me something that’s not inappropriate because they don’t understand, I want to help, I’m all ears. It’s hard because people are scared to ask things now. There’s a difference between being a dick and asking something honest.”

3. Let Them Tell Other People When They’re Ready

Last, but certainly not least, is the idea of respecting your friend’s privacy with what they’ve disclosed. Unless they say that they’re comfortable with you sharing the news, as it may alleviate the pressure of them needing to re-tell their coming out story repeatedly, keep it to yourself. Revealing this intimate detail without their knowledge or consent will have emotional repercussions that you can’t take back. Phillips found himself presented with an ultimatum by someone he’d been seeing at school while still in the closet: If they wanted to be together, he had to tell people he was gay.

“At that time, I’m in this world where this is the only guy who will ever understand me, and I didn’t want to lose that. I had to start coming out,” he says. “Before I did that, he had taken upon himself to tell his friends, and then it became the topic of a small Southern town. Even my girlfriend that I had dated in college found out before I could tell her.”

He goes on to explain that after zero communication for about two and a half years, he was surprised when a DM from her made its way into his box after he posted something to Instagram around the time of NYC Pride.

“I knew how she had to have felt,” he says. “She probably thought it was her fault. She probably thought our whole relationship wasn’t real, or was a lie. I told her it was real. All I can ever hope of anyone, whether you tell me or not, is that you understand, you grow and you come to understand me. It took her two years, but she did and it wasn’t about her. It was about me. Even my friends in college who stopped talking to me, are they going to be nice to the next gay person they meet? Because of this experience, I hope so. That’s all I can hope for.”

You Might Also Dig: