A talk given by Andy, the son of PFLAG Lincoln-Cornhusker members, at the "All About Love" gay/lesbian church service at the Lincoln Unitarian Church on February 16, 1997. Andy's talk has been condensed.

I am honored to be in Lincoln this Valentine weekend with my life-partner and members of my family, to share with you some thoughts on coming out, and on the meanings of this congregation's coming out as a Welcoming Congregation within the Lincoln community and the Unitarian Universalist Association. A Welcoming Congregation is a religious community that openly values the contributions, participation, and needs of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals, at every level. Your coming out as a church of individuals who support the inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and the transgendered is controversial and a deeply personal challenge. Let us pay respect to the courage which is gathered here.
I have been a Unitarian my whole life. This church helped to grow me. It tried to hear me, it is the church in which I saw my family as a family join itself with other individuals and families who shared an affinity for inclusiveness. My life, like yours, is written upon this church. As this church becomes - comes out as - a Welcoming Congregation, I feel uniquely welcome here.

COMING OUT
"Coming Out" is a phrase coined in connection with the "closet" which homosexuals and the transgendered were said to inhabit when they kept their sexual realities invisible within their communities. In this sense, "coming out" is a misnomer; when someone "comes out," they are really "coming in," contributing and naming the character of their perspectives, experiences, and actions.

This being said, I'm choosing to use the phrase "coming out," because I like the feeling it gives me of an escape from stuffiness, constraint, and self-suppression. In coming out I break forth upon the populace.

One of the things I love about coming out is that it's so unilateral. Though this church is coming out today in culmination of a long community process, coming out is not about consensus. Coming out, by its nature, disrupts the assumption that the people in our families and personal communities do not deviate from social norms. Because the person coming out is saying, "That's not my truth... and I'm still here."

To be in the world as one's self, to claim space, to come out, is an act of survival. When "outing" of homosexuals by other homosexuals became prominent in the public dialog several years ago, a man named John Gunther of Wilkes-Barre, PA, wrote to Newsweek, "As an openly gay man, I often roar with laughter when I hear gays argue that outing is "unconscionable - a form of fratricide." What life is there to destroy for a "closeted" homosexual? One based on deceit and lies: A life of vodka, self-loathing, and suicide notes? Life in a "closet" is life in a coffin."

CHURCH SUPPORT
I first came out to another person in 1972, a few years after I realized I was gay, at a Unitarian-Universalist summer camp in Wisconsin. Although in 9th grade, I somehow was with the high school program which included two men named Henry and Clark coming to sit with us one evening and talk about their lives as gay men. It was the first time I ever saw someone acknowledge himself as homosexual.

What I remember is after the presentation, when I somehow had managed to ask for a walk with Henry. I remember so vividly the night, the air, the leaves, my clenched jaw, the halting shortness of my breath, my erotic, nascent yearning for this incredibly rare and precious confirmed homosexual, and the thrilling and frightening individuation I enacted as I told him my secret, that I also was a homosexual. I won't go into the somewhat excruciating crush I developed - a thing more procedural than substantive - or how the support I wanted from him and from other humanly imperfect role models was not something they always wanted or were able to give. Let me instead acknowledge that I changed my life that night when I accepted the invitation of Henry's example and began to emerge. I will always be grateful for the night when my journey commenced, because that man was brave enough to say "I am" and because those Unitarian Universalists had the vision to host his voice so that I might hear it.

I've come out so many times since then. Family. Friends. Employers. Doctors. Gay. HIV. Drug slave. Ego. Fear. Anger. Unitarian. God believer. Each coming out is doubly creative: when we come out, we develop ourselves into more fully individual and real being; and we create a place in the world for those who cannot yet come out, who cannot yet claim the voice of their real experience. Our example will tell them there is room in the world for their humanity, unedited and unmuted.

Coming out is powerful. Coming out is compassionate. Coming out builds families and community. Coming out inspires the passion to pursue truth in relationship with self, with others, and with God.

Rumi, an Afghan teacher, wrote these words 800 years ago:

Put what salve you have on yourself. Point out to everyone the disease you are. That's part of getting well. When you lance yourself that way, you become more merciful and wiser. Even if you don't have some particular fault at the moment, you may soon become the one who makes that very act not notorious.

Source: From PFLAG Lincoln-Cornhusker Newsletter
Original Publication Date: April 1997
Used with permission.