I came out to my family and friends when I was 17 and by my early 20s had begun to assume that I was so gay that everyone would just know. That belief, along with much of what I thought I knew about life at the time, has been discarded, (some of it more quickly than others). We never know when the next moment will come, but it always does. Maybe it’s a phone call, an encounter while shopping, or a family reunion but suddenly we are faced with the choice of allowing someone to continue to assume something about us or speaking up and telling the truth.

A lot of people, even in this day and age, would be just as happy if we all adopted the military’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy for our everyday lives—and many do. Or we pick and choose our situation—telling in one, and remaining silent the next, sometimes because it just takes too much energy.

Even when the (cursed) telemarketer calls asking for our partner...or our partners husband (or wife in my case) and we say, "there is no wife" instead of "I’m all the wife/partner you’ll find here." Subtle differences really, but one that says much about the conditioning our culture places on all of us, both gay and straight. Though the world has changed much in our lifetimes, we still live in a society that tries to equate straight with normal.

Coming out is not just something we do as individuals. Families with gay members have to make much the same choices as the gay person about when and where to speak up and how much to tell. Last week I was talking to my mother in Alabama about a family reunion my parents attended in Georgia. She related how in the course of a conversation with two cousins she hadn’t seen in a while, she spoke about Steve and me, and explained that we were gay. So there it was, another coming out moment, but for my mother. As it turned out, the cousins warmed up considerably to my mother, and though they didn’t say he was gay, they spent a lot of time talking about an unmarried designer son who lives in New York.

Coming out can extend beyond the family as well. Let me use my church as an example. Epworth Methodist Church is just down Baltimore Avenue from CAMP Rehoboth. Many years ago the church debated the gay issue and made the choice to welcome the GLBT community. Recently, the minister from the conservative Eagles Nest congregation on Route 1, chose to bash Epworth, its pastor Jack Abel, and lay speaker Thom Pemberton on air, during its Sunday morning radio broadcast. Thus it is that all the members of Epworth become a kind of gay family, experiencing what each one of us goes through from time to time.

I find it an interesting thing that many (if not most) spiritual paths use images of rebirth, which is, you could say, "coming out again." Over and over, day by day, the process of coming out again and again, has helped to keep me on my toes, so to speak. It has forced me to continually think about who I am and my relationship to the world. Some of that comes from being an artist, I know, from wanting to understand more in order to communicate more through my art, but some of it comes from the "rebirthing," from the continual coming out that is a part of being gay. It is in that continual transformation that I find my greatest connection to God, to my soul, to my creative nature, and to who I am. Though I see myself as a "human being," and not a "gay human being," it is my gay experience that sometimes helps to set me free to move outside the box of "normal" thinking. I don’t think that gay people are more creative than straight people. We are all human beings with the same potential. I do, however, see the coming out process, like most of life’s more powerful experiences, as a tool that can be used for transformation. On the other hand, when we deny who we are the process can mutate into something more destructive than creative.

A couple of years ago, Steve and I were attending a big fundraising event for a local hospital. The woman seated next to me and I began the evening with the usual chitchat that takes place at such functions. At some point the conversation turned to CAMP Rehoboth and she seemed to be aware of the organization and, even to some extent, of who I was. For some reason she felt compelled to tell me about her gay neighbors who while perfectly "nice" people, insisted upon flying a rainbow flag over their home, and how she thought it was alright to be gay, just not to flaunt it so blatantly. About five minutes later, after her eyes had begun to glaze over and she was squirming in her seat from my detailed and somewhat passionate explanation, I think she fervently wished she had chosen to express this opinion to someone else. I don’t remember all that I said to her that night. I wasn’t rude, but I went on for a very long time about what it means to be gay and why we have to tell people we are gay.

Transformation—of both the individual and society—will not happen if we remain invisible to ourselves or to the world around us. As human beings our lives are caught up in the great mystery of life, and there is no single "answer" for the many questions we all face. We all, both gay and straight, need to take good hard looks at who we are. We must be honest about who we are, and we must be prepared to come out again and again and again—about all aspects of our lives, from spirit to sexuality.

COMING OUT AGAIN

suddenly born
coming out head first      naked
cold and screaming
wrinkled and wet red
with blood

(is it any wonder the mind
does not try to remember
the abrupt separation
parting of flesh and blood
and constant heartbeat’s rhythm?)

so later when suddenly born
again coming out headfirst     naked
into the harsh light
cold and screaming
wrinkled and red wet
with blood

(is it any wonder we cannot
at first find a balance
and so stand teetering
with much flailing of arms
about the head and shoulders
upon the brink of an abyss     naked
and exposed
in the bright sun
light of the first day?)