Today I came out to my family. I’d always planned to tell them when I was a bit more mature, more established, more well prepared, maybe with a PowerPoint slideshow like I had done with my friends and more importantly, with the one that I wanted to get married to beside. However, the impression that I left my mom was 2 naked men lying on the floor.
Mom called dad and started confronting me on the subject. Dad came home and asked me to tell him to leave or he would kick him out of the house himself. Mom was crying. Dad was closing his eyes in disappointment. All I could remember was I held my straight face leaving the room and went telling him the same thing dad said while bursting into tears. He then held me in his arms. I guessed he was crying too.
The first thing my sister said to me was rather personal. I guessed after all this time, my sister had always felt like the left out child, the less favorable one of our parents, letting me have everything I want and now from her perspective, watching me destroy it. Her feelings turned into a scream, which raised another fear of mine since the nosy neighbors were right outside.
And then the family took turn to lay down their cards in front of me.
- Being gay is a disease, a psychological disease. I could turn “normal” again with help from doctors and pills. I did try to fight against this one by saying it was normal and this was how I’d always been.
- It isn’t that normal since the it went against nature and the number of people who are straight and happily married always outnumbers the corresponding one of the other side, therefore those things are not normal.
- I’m being exposed to too much modern and also Western influence. What is considered normal across the ocean might not be suitable to our culture and family tradition. And definitely this is not. All of the night outs, foreign friends, going to the bars and clubs, have brought about bad influences.
- My mom asked me to think about my future political career, of what others think if this slips out. It will certainly hurt my position.
- My sister said she would rather see me stay alone for life than be with a man. I had no idea where this one came from.
- Family duty was mentioned, especially I’m the only son. “Don’t you want to get married and have kids?” my mom raised the question. Of course, I would love to be a dad someday but with the one that I love. Dad seemed much more disdained about this one since I know he wants me to continue the seed of the family. And the practice of carrying another one’s baby isn’t widely accepted here yet.
- And also there came along my past girlfriends. They thought I just haven’t spent enough time with girls nor met the right girl yet.
- What I’ve developed with Florian might just be mutual infatuation due to same hobbies and interests. I might have mistakened it for love.
- Florian is too old for me and they had no idea where he was from, what was on his background, whether he carries any diseases or not and whether he is really in love with me cuz he’s from another culture where having sex with different people is usually portrayed as a custom on the media.
- Gay sex equals higher HIV and STDs risks.
- The family has been too easy on me, letting me backpack everywhere, go out late at night and host my friends all the time. Things come so easily for me so I don’t treasure and take my family for granted. And now I’m being very selfish not thinking about them but just myself demanding them to accept me like that.
- I’ve been too lazy and living in such enclosed place. They want to rearrange my room, open all the window so that the light comes in. They want me to focus more on work and social activities (or positive forces) so that I wouldn’t go on going astray.
- My sister said she had seen examples of people sucessfully going straight again. When I asked her how she knew they were actually happy, she was silent.
- She said it was just a phrase that I’m going through. The problem is in my mind since under the influence, I think it is OK and has allowed myself to think it is OK. She said I needed time to readjust my ideology and concept.
- And the last card that I could only remember out of what my family said is also the one that hurt me. Mom retold me the story of how she almost lost her life delivering me under very poor conditions. And my sister reminded me of how she dropped me as a kid and how I got my scar, how she hold me in her arms that night crying before I passed out, and how she promised herself to take care of me better ever since and never do anything to hurt me further in anyway. After all, all they want for me is the best and all they have been giving me is also the best and it just hurt them so much to see the outcome turns out to be this way.
- And mom said she loved me so much and she believed that with time, with love, with strength, with the help from the family, I would turn normal again.
That’s everything I could recall now and had to take it down cuz I know if I ever want to talk to my parents and convince them, I will need the counter argument.
And on the sideline, the fear of not being allowed to see Florian again, of being apart when everything has just started to blossom, the fear of losing him, is growing. If he ever leaves, it will just give my family extra leverage to concrete their thinking.
All I could do is praying for the best, with my parents being happy for me instead of suffering.
BULBATALKS 
In fact, I hadn’t cried. I was to shocked to.My brain shut down at the horrible realisation that I, with a single thoughtless movement, had wreaked havoc to your and your family’s lives.
And that list is really long and depressing. We’lll work on answers to help your family. There are some “classics” in there (a disease; a phase; against nature; going straight again), these are probably easier. But what you told in number 15 touches on their deep-felt emotions. What can you reply to someone who almost died for you?
Coming out is so hard, especially when your family isn’t accepting of your sexuality. I hope things look up and I wish you the best.
Thank you! It means so much to see support from another side of the world. All the best for you as well.
Number 2 is both so simple and so hard. It’s hard because using the words “natural” and “normal” shows some deeply ingrained feelings and convictions, and these are hard to overcome. In fact, it has been observed that trying to argue against people’s opinions – even if completely rational and evident – strengthens them more firmly. It’s less about convincing, but about making them feel and believe. Still, without arguments it’s difficult to get this change started. That may work here, because if one thinks bit deeper about “natural” and “normal”, it becomes almost silly.
What is normal? It is what conforms to “the norm”, that means what the majority does or is. Of course, the majority of people in the world is heterosexual. It also is right-handed, not blonde or red-headed, brown-eyed, has blood group O or A, two arms and two legs, ten fingers and ten toes.
Not too long ago, left-handedness was an evil. (The right hand is called “right” for a reason; in German, words related to “left” denote negative things; in Latin, “sinister” means both left and evil.) But superstition has been overcome in this regard, and your parents didn’t love you less, were not horrified (I hope) when they found out that you prefered to do many things with the “other“ hand.
Does your blood group matter to them, even if it were the rare AB? Would they try a therapy to change it. (Of course, there is no therapy, because it obviously wouldn’t work.)
Blonde and red hair is going to die out in the long term because these colours genetically lose against brown and black hair. Should we dye them brown or black, because nature wants it so? Should we prescribe dark contact lenses to these strange blue, green and grey eyed mishaps of nature?
And so on. The point, of course, is that if something is “normal” in a statistic sense, it does not mean that it is the rule that everybody must follow. People are different.
A lot of things are natural. Being eaten by tigers, dying of cholera, malaria, smallpox, living unsheltered in the open. A lot of things are not natural. Living in houses, eradicating smallpox, going to the hospital, cooking food over a fire, growing animals to eat them, wearing clothes.
Homosexual acts have been observed in a wide range of animals. So is homosexuality not “natural”, i.e. “happening in nature”? However I would use this argument less as an argument for homosexuality being natural but more as an example for the whole “natural” arguments being flawed. Humans are not only natural but also, and mainly, cultural.
Sorry that this is still a rather incoherent ramble. But I hope there are some ideas in there.
Regarding 13, “therapy”.Today, this is mainly proposed by extreme Christians. Conversion therapy is based on crude psychology and lots of praying. The most likely result is that you would return to your family embracing Jesus as your Saviour…
But so far no therapy to turn someone gay has been shown to work. The religious approach leads to people feeling guilty, and this guilt may keep them from acting on their being gay, may force them to try to engage in heterosexual relationships. But the feelings never change. This is indicated by the fact that a lot of “ex-gays”, even high-profile members of these therapy organisations, fell in love with men. Alan Chambers, the founder of “Exodus International” admitted that conversion doesn’t work, apologised to the LGBT community and now even supports gay marrige. He has also said (scroll down to “Myth 10” in this quite good article with more links to conversion and other myths and fake arguments) that “99.9% have not experienced a change in their orientation”.
A writer for The Independent tried conversion therapy undercover, and it’s really strange.
Medication and aversion therapy (electroshocks etc.) had been used in the past. They work in so far as the person is broken enough to no longer dare to feel love and desire. That often affected their will to live (see Alan Turing).