In OprahMag.com's series Coming Out, LGBTQ change-makers reflect on their journey toward self-acceptance. While it's beautiful to bravely share your identity with the world, choosing to do so is entirely up to you—period.
It's hard not to hoot with laughter while reading Elle.com Senior Staff Writer R. Eric Thomas's humor column, "Eric Reads the News." In it, he hilariously covers buzzy subjects like Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's royal exit, the ridiculousness of 2019's Cats, and the moment Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ripped apart Donald Trump's State of the Union speech.
The same can be said for his debut collection of essays, Here For It, described as "Sedaris-level laugh-out-loud funny" by Lin-Manuel Miranda and "a much-needed story from another gay Black man in America" by I Don't Want to Die Poor author (and OprahMag.com contributor) Michael Arceneaux. We even dubbed it one of the best LGBTQ books to pick up in 2020. In this exclusive essay—structured as a list for reasons we'll let him explain—Thomas explores what it means to come out as gay again and again.
Sometimes I forget that I’m gay. Which is to say I sometimes forget that not everyone is gay and that it is, in some spaces, an experience of otherness that needs explanation. My mind palace is a queer utopia. Like a potluck at a co-op. In some small way, I always knew that I was gay, but it’s also true that I continue to discover new aspects of my queer self every day. So when I think about coming out, I think less of a before and after—a sharp line through my story—and more of an unfinished list: moments of understanding and discovery and remembering and forgetting. For instance, 20 such moments, abridged.
1. Sometimes I forget I’m gay at home, when I am reading next to my husband and the only sound is the whisper of our breathing, sometimes in sync, sometimes out. Neither of us doing anything particularly gay except living and being and, in the ambient quality that defines marriage, loving.
2. Sometimes the forgetting happens in spaces that are implicitly queer, like strolling down the street in Provincetown, an artists colony in Massachusetts that has been a destination of LGBTQ+ vacationers for decades. In P-Town (its nickname), I don’t think twice about holding hands, or what I’m wearing. To arrive there and feel a sense of belonging and to lean into that is a vacation for the body and the soul. In P-Town, my shoulders separate from my ears and I walk down the street in peace.
3. In the series finale of The Good Place, the character Jason Mendoza (Manuel Luis Jacinto) described a feeling of peace as if the air inside his lungs was the same as the air outside. It’s like that. I forget that I am gay like I forget that I am breathing. This is a kind of coming out—when your world is at peace with you and you are at peace with your world.
4. I wonder if the list one day becomes plot points in a bell curve. When I am an old man, swaddled in a caftan and sporting the glowing face of a lifetime of nightly skincare routines, will I sigh one day realizing that my project is done: I am fully out? If so, what then?
5. I’ll update you when it happens. And that, too, will be a coming out. For coming out is a story I tell for myself, which I invite you to listen in on as a way for us to breathe the same air for a moment.
6. Sometimes one gets the question, “When did you know you were gay?” which is an invitation to create an origin story like a character in a fable. I don’t have an answer for this question, which is a disappointment at dinner parties and commencement speeches. I am coming out as fabulous but not fable-lous.
7. That said, there is the experience of sitting on the rust-colored living room carpet my parents had in the 1980s, watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and being thunderstruck by Lady Elaine Fairchilde, who has not yet been given her due as a queer icon. Lady Elaine is partial to cardigans, coined a catchphrase (“Toots!”), sports a royal title, wears a lot of makeup, rocks an “Elaine Stritch asking to speak to the manager” haircut, and knows her way around a bon mot. Put her on a Pride float immediately. And after that a Bravo reality show. When did I know I was gay? I didn’t; Lady Elaine did a twirl on the television screen and told me.
8. At some point my husband and I will have our own child. And I imagine that child might have some questions. Sure, they would have been born with two fathers or been adopted into a family unit that already included a same-sex couple, but I’m not so sure that everything is a given. This child will not have seen Angels in America; they’re bound to wonder. I can already see a 3-year-old, thoughtfully folding their hands across the tray on their high chair and turning to my husband and me. “Okay fellas,” the child will say, “I don’t want this to come across the wrong way, but what exactly is going on here?”
9. I used to practice an Academy Award acceptance speech back when I thought I was going to suddenly become a child star, despite going on exactly zero auditions. Sometimes I still do, if we’re being honest. I am coming out as a person who has a speech prepared but can still be humbly shocked. At one point that speech name-checked a wife (for most of my childhood that wife was Julia Roberts), and then it name-checked no one. And then, eventually a man appeared, hazy at first but coming into focus as my life’s destiny clarified itself. It’s important to come out in your daydreams and fantasies.
10. Oh, I should have mentioned: the inspiration for this piece's structure was the essay “100 Thoughts About Writing A Novel” by Alexander Chee, a novelist and writer who is gay. I learned an immense amount about myself—my writer self, my gay self, my human self—from his book How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. Books were the first points of coming out for me: searching the word “gay” in the library card catalog and peeking into the aisle where the call number directed me, expecting to see, what? A mirrorball casting sparkles across the metal shelves and the industrial carpet? I read The Color Purple and Giovanni’s Room and Fraud by David Rakoff and I saw myself. Other writers telling their stories taught me how to tell my story. Reading is a vocabulary lesson.
11. Small talk is seen as innocuous, but it’s about information-sharing, and when there is an assumption of sameness built on a society that categorizes you as an other, small talk becomes a coming out.
12. The barber, the shopkeeper, the stranger at a networking event, the airplane seat mate, the department store associate, the rideshare driver, the customer service representative on the other end of the phone. All of them asking, “How are you? What have you been up to? How’s your day going? What makes you happy?” which is, in a way, asking “What is the air you’re breathing?”
13. And then the choice on your part, one that gets simpler and more reflexive as time goes on but is not yet, for me, automatic: to include the detail that—for some—makes small talk bigger but only in the way that everything is personal and everything is political and when we are engaging in small talk, it is still talk about our lives and our lives are not small to us.
14. In this way, coming out strolls into small talk. It tucks itself into incidental information: My husband got me this shirt. My ex-partner was in this band. You and I share a common friend because he and I went on one very boring date but for some reason we have followed each other on social media for the last six years.
15. Chances are if I know someone who is queer and you ask me how I know them, the answer is I know them from being queer. This isn’t me being cagey; this is actually a very descriptive answer.
16. I use gay and queer interchangeably to describe myself. To my mind, they don’t mean the same thing but they both tell the truth about me. In my house, there is a large conspiracy board with yarn strings tacked across it that explains the whole thing. Come over; I’ll make brunch and we’ll talk linguistics and ontology and queer theory.
17. There is one type of coming out story that people often want, about family and acceptance and the unintentional litmus test of love. I don’t tell those stories because I’ve come to believe they don’t belong exclusively to me.
18. But I will say that one such story involves a conversation over brunch, which is why I brought it up. I highly recommend coming out at brunch as often as you’d like.
19. Once I tabled at a Pride Day celebration. I was set up next to a woman from Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), about 20 years older than me. She told me about how she’d come to get involved with PFLAG, about the journey she took to get there, about her child whom she loved very much. Offhandedly, she said to me, “LGBTQ people have years to reach a point of acceptance about themselves, but the family is supposed to be accepting in an instant when they come out.” I think about this a lot.
20. On one hand, I think, “Yes. That is correct.” I am just as worthy as I was in the instant before coming out. Everything else is information. On the other hand, I think we are all on a journey together and the air is sometimes different around each of us. But, we are all trying to breathe, deeply, automatically, and freely. Every inhale is a new opportunity. Every exhale is a kind of progress, or pleasant sameness, or becoming, or realization. A peace. In and out. In and out. Forever.
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R. Eric Thomas is a columnist for ELLE.com, where he skewers politics, pop culture, celebrity shade, and schadenfreude. He is also the author of Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America, a memoir-in-essays.