Yearning for acceptance
What an unexpected phone call taught me about the nature of coming out.
I was fumbling around with a package of Tylenol a couple of days ago, trying to soothe a headache, when my phone started ringing. I wasn’t expecting a call, and the New Jersey area code made me think it was spam. But I picked up anyway.
The voice on the other end did not begin to tell me about an ‘urgent message regarding my car’s warranty,’ as they so often do. It was my old scoutmaster from my days as a teenager in the Boy Scouts.
“Oh, wow! Long time, no … speak!” I uttered. It’s probably been two or three years since I’ve heard from him, and I always find it jarring when folks reappear in my life like that. He thought to call after hearing I was involved a recent revamp of the Wood Badge program.
A brief conversation about that project quickly gave way to the real reason he was calling: How have I been?
My mind immediately went to the elephant in the room: I’ve been great, but I’ve also been … very queer. That’s not the Mike my scoutmaster knows or remembers. He remembers the straight high school student who played by all the rules. And I’ve never felt the need to tell him otherwise. Although I’ve come out in some very public ways (which, for all I know, he may have seen), I never directly came out to him.
But then I also thought: What the hell? The stakes here are so low, why not just be honest with him?
“Well, I’ve had a great year,” I said. “This summer I moved into a new apartment with my boyfriend.”
I could feel the shake in my voice as I shared that piece of information. Would it shatter his image of me, the scout he mentored and was so proud of? Or at the very least, render our relationship cold and awkward?
None of that happened. In fact, he didn’t even flinch.
“That’s great, it’s sound like you’re doing really well. You sound really happy,” he said.
Something about the nonchalance — it being a total non-issue — was actually really comforting to me. I had no idea how he would react, but the fact that he basically didn’t, was kind of refreshing.
It made me think more about the very concept of coming out. Why is it anyway that everyone assumes straightness, and puts the burden on queer folks to advise them otherwise? It’s exhausting. On a daily basis, queer people need to make decisions about how much of ourselves we share, and depending on the depth of each interaction, whether it’s worth the risk. For me, there’s always the question lingering in the back of my mind: Would this person be the same around me if they really knew?
I truly hope for a world where people don’t make those assumptions, and queer folks feel more free to simply be themselves. My conversation with my scoutmaster this week felt like a small preview of what that could feel like: Utterly normal, banal even.
Maybe I’m reading too much into this. Maybe he simply didn’t know what else to say. Maybe it would have been nice to hear him acknowledge it more directly. But at the same time, the fact that I didn’t have to explain anything was a relief.
It also surprised me how much his opinion still mattered to me. We had a close relationship when I was younger, probably closer than most other scouts in my troop. His approval meant a lot to me back then — not only because he held the keys to my rank advancement, but also because I wanted to be like him. He was generous, kind, inspiring and whip smart.
But now, all these years later, I can’t say I ever really think about him. So why did I care so much about whether he would accept me as a queer person?
Well, I think there’s something really fundamental about the mentors we have in our youth. And for many queer people, there’s a dissonance between who we were back then and who we’ve become as adults. It leaves us unsure of our past relationships, and whether they’ll become a casualty of our personal growth.
So there was a real delight in knowing that my old scoutmaster has not been trapped in amber this whole time. That just as I’ve changed, maybe he has, too. Or maybe he was ready to accept me all long. I wish I would have ventured to find out sooner.
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