Coming out fucking sucks.

There is absolutely no way to rose tint that experience, I would go as far to say it was the most stressful thing I endured, and on my list of stressful moments includes watching my father die of cancer when I was 22.

I’m not trying to say that being gay is bad, I love being a gay man, but the actual process of coming out is to me, and a lot of my peers, a categorical ordeal….. and I had to do it twice.

See I also had to come out as mentally ill. I was a depression sufferer who was struggling to keep his life afloat whilst realizing I was back in the god damn closet.

I’m not alone in this scenario, just a single glance at suicide statistics among the LGBTQ+ community and it’s very obvious that it’s not a spurious correlation.

For the uninitiated coming out involves four key phases.

First you must figure yourself out. This, for me, was the longest phase — both times. It took four years to figure out I was gay, two to accept that I was depressed and would be the rest of my life. The internal fight you have with yourself is exhausting. I grew up in a town where I only knew of one gay peer and everything around me told me I did not want to be like him. I was already a victim of heavy bullying, I nearly died twice, so why would I add being gay onto that pile? For a while it made me homophobic an almost necessary survival instinct, the thing that was going to keep me ‘straight’ and not add something new to be bullied about.

Then there was the years of experimenting, back then there were no apps, just websites and I must have made a dating profile only to delete it out of shame and fear a few days later no fewer than fifty times. The thing to understand here is that you are at war with yourself. Same with depression. I was in denial, refused to take my meds, refused to look after my body, refused to accept any of it until I realized one day that I had not been to university in two months, leaving the house only to attend my part time job. In both accounts I hated myself. I didn't want to be me and on a few occasions I tried to permanently put myself out of my misery.

The second stage is acceptance. For my sexuality, through exposure to my peers and university life / moving out, I was able to move past seeing gay as being bad and I started to like it. I still had plenty of hang ups but come my 21st birthday my party was fifty percent gay friends an absolute night and day difference to who I was when I was 16. I slowly became more comfortable in my new skin and once I had a a boyfriend for a few months, I was ready to come out to my parents. Depression traveled a different path. Depression taught me to accept it or continue to fail. If I didn't eat properly, exercise regularly, practice healthy sleeping and pursue my goals with seriousness it would all fall down around me. It took a phone call with my mother to realize that I would fail university and no one in the world would accept “I was depressed” as an excuse. I was up shit creek without a paddle and it was time to Andy Dufresne myself out of this mess.

Now that you have finished battling yourself its time to go to war with your environment. Fundamentally society understands neither sexuality or mental illness. It’s slowly getting better but the fact that the status quo is straight and mentally well is the core reason coming out is do or die for many people. My process of publicly coming out was in retrospect a good one but the knowledge of the horror stories had me fiercely guarded until the very end. I initially came out to friends as bi. Dipping my toes into bisexuality allowed me to back pedal should the backlash be too bad, a common tactic for gay men and women and a large contributing factor to bi erasure. When their was no backlash amongst my closest friends I told more people until the only people who didn't know where my family. Coming out to my family taught me the biggest lesson in seeing what you want to see. Every time I thought about coming out to them I remembered the horror stories of the kids killed by their parents and those exiled from their families. On more than one occasion I entered the living room shoes on and a packed bag by the front door.

See my dad was ex-navy, ex-prison(officer), an occasional dick for no reason and an all around hard man. He exuded masculinity and his life was filled with extremely manly stories of his past. When I eventually did come out I told my mother first, despite her warm reception I still couldn’t tell my father and made her tell him. He accepted me in the same warm manner my mother did and my vision cleared. Of course my dad would be fine with a gay son, he had gay friends, his favorite movie was Mama Mia and at the end of the day my Mother told me it would be all right. This selective analysis of ones environment is fundamentally why people suffer through coming out. While their are a plethora of real world examples of horrible things happening to those who come out as mentally ill or gay the majority of my monsters were inside my own mind.

Luckily for me, I didn’t need to tell my parents I was depressed. My dad’s death was clearly a contributing factor and my mother was front row to my disastrous decline. Those around me however, did need to know and fundamentally no one understood. A friend I recently spoke to about mental illness pointed out that people can inherently understand sexuality as it involves attraction which is theoretically a human constant. While a father may not approve a gay son it’s not like he can’t wrap his head around liking men, he just needs to look at his wife. Mental illness and to the same extent transitioning ones gender identify flummox people. They can’t put themselves in your shoes and so they simply refuse. Sometimes I preferred it when people outright saw me as less of a human being for being depressed as at least I knew where I stood with them. Those who feigned care or outright ignored my depressions existence all together did the most damage.

Once you are out, its sadly not quite run and done. You are now in a constant state of selectively coming out. While my CV does proudly outline my role in organizing my country’s implementation of marriage equality, it doesn't say any where that my battle with depression has taught my valuable lessons about myself and I’m a better worker for it. And that will be my entire life. I will selectively come out or stay closeted about my sexuality or mental health as I constantly gauge the pros and cons of doing so.

And while my story ends there, their exists more to contemplate. Coming out fucking sucked for me and I live in one of the most liberal places in the world, New Zealand, the scenario is worsened in other, less liberal countries.

At least in my country being gay or mentally ill isn’t illegal and neither can be prayed away.

Not to mention coming out as gay probably contributed to my depression. I was stressed out of my brain for years, afraid of people finding out that I was something that I didn't want to be for years. Remember that some people don’t survive their first coming out.

And it is all society’s fault. Very anarchic of me to say I know, but as good as my childhood was, as great as my parents are, they couldn't shield me from the blackness that is coming out, because if society didn't suck I wouldn't have to come out. No one has to come out as having the cold, or liking blond women (obvious exception are interracial relationships.) I can’t even look back and wish my parents had done X differently or my school did Y, fundamentally I was born a the wrong time, which is a sick thing to say out loud when you think about what being gay or mentally ill was like prior to 1990.