The First Time I Came Out

I started volunteering at The Center when I was in my undergraduate program at UCF. I frequented local LGBTQIA+ bars and clubs even before I had really come out. One of my first “real” dates with a girl was at Pulse. It was the first time I had ever danced at a club with another woman and not felt ogled and sexualized by straight men for just having fun. That night, dancing at Pulse, was the first time I ever really felt safe in public as a bisexual woman, which was how I identified at the time.

I came out in stages, first to people I dated, then to friends, then slowly to some co-workers. But not to family. I love my family. They’re wonderful. But for the most part, they are more conservative than I am, and while I have never really heard them say anything against the LGBTQ community, I was scared. My family is very close, and the thought that I could lose them because of my sexuality, or that they would think less of me because of it, terrified me. I couldn’t handle it. So when I dated men, I brought them home and introduced them. When I dated women, I didn’t bring them home at all, or I introduced them as friends. Then I married a man, and I thought, “Well, I guess the fact that I’m attracted to women doesn’t matter now.”

And then the Pulse massacre happened.

Never have I felt more ashamed of hiding my sexuality than I did that day. I never lied about it, but there were times when I didn’t correct people when they assumed I was straight. When my mom referred to me as a “straight ally,” I didn’t jump in to tell her that I was more than that. How could I sit in my office and encourage people to be themselves, not to hide, not to live in fear, while hiding and living in fear myself? I felt like a hypocrite. That day, when members of my community lost their lives or were horrifically injured because of that hateful act, I just couldn’t do it anymore. My mom had been texting me to see if I was okay because she knows how much this community matters to me, and to see if there was any way she could help. And I just did it. I came out. It didn’t go badly. She didn’t berate me or outwardly judge me. It was a little awkward, but again, I was married to a man. I had accepted that my sexuality mattered regardless of who I was married to, but I think that for her, it was a non-issue because of that. Then I came out on Facebook. Most people knew, but there were some who didn’t, and the support was overwhelming. One week after Pulse, on Father’s Day, I came out to the rest of my family. Again, no one was really surprised given the work I was doing as an LGBTQIA+ therapist, and there were lots of hugs and affirmations, not a word of disgust or discontent.

A few weeks after Pulse, I was talking with my mom, and she referred to me as her “rainbow child.” I laughed, and she said she was serious. She said that the rainbow that had appeared over Lake Eola the night of the vigil, one week after the shootings, looked exactly like the one that had appeared over Orlando the day I was born, and that she didn’t think that was a coincidence. She even told me to go look in my baby book because she had written about that rainbow. She was right: there it was, in a letter written more than thirty years ago by my mother: “The Lord gave me rainbows while we were waiting for you.” That made me think that maybe I was always meant to do what I do as an LGBTQIA+ therapist. Maybe that rainbow was an announcement of some sort. Or maybe it was just a random rainbow in a city where it rains a lot. I don’t know. But that’s okay.

The Second Time I Came Out

What happened over the next eight years wasn’t anything I could have predicted. I left the nonprofit where I was working to start my private practice, and it was hard. I had amazing support from my family, and although I missed my co-workers, I didn’t miss the pressure, the unreasonable expectations, the hours, or the unfair pay. My private practice became the dream I never knew I had, and within two years, I was successful enough to know I was ready to focus on the next step: I wanted to have a baby. That was a dream I’d always had. After an early miscarriage, I finally got pregnant. Then the pandemic happened three months into my pregnancy, only a few weeks after I’d announced it to the world. For the next year, I only left my house to go to my doctors’ appointments. I didn’t see my family, I didn’t see my friends, and I didn’t even get to have a real baby shower. But then I had my son, and nothing else mattered; he was the realization of my lifelong dream of becoming a mother.

In August of 2022, my father passed away unexpectedly due to a tragic accident. This upended my whole world. Emotionally, I was a wreck, but I was also now responsible for so much more. In addition to managing my practice, raising my two-year-old, and navigating my increasingly unhappy marriage, I spent the next nine months cleaning out my dad’s house to get it ready to sell. I spent six months running his insurance agency in addition to my practice until I could sell the agency. When it was all done and I finally had room to breathe, my health was really bad. I had gained a lot of weight, was pre-diabetic, and was terribly unhappy in my marriage. Years of sweeping things under the rug to preserve the temporary peace I thought was more important than my feelings, of being verbally and emotionally abused on a nearly daily basis, and of being isolated from my friends and family due to someone else’s insecurities that had nothing to do with me led me to two decisions. The first was that I was going to use the money from my inheritance to have weight loss surgery. The second was that if my marriage didn’t improve by the time I was healthier and fully recovered from surgery, I was going to leave. And that’s exactly what happened.

I had jokingly told my ex-husband about halfway through our marriage that if we ever separated, I was done with men. Turns out I wasn’t joking. By the time I walked away, I had been done with our marriage for a long time. I had already grieved the loss of what I thought we had months, if not years, before it ended. I certainly wasn’t in love with him anymore. When I was ready to start dating again (in a whole new world of dating apps that hadn’t existed the last time I was single), I was only seeking women. I wanted nothing to do with men. I’d been hurt, cheated on, lied to, and used, all by men. I’d always been more attracted to women, but I’d had my heart broken by women a few times in my early twenties, and with the pressure of compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity, being with men felt like the safer thing to do, and what was expected of me.

The women I dated after my divorce opened a whole new world for me. I realized through my experiences with them that I am definitely gay. I can recognize an attractive man, but I have absolutely zero desire to be intimate or have a romantic or emotional connection with one. I had spent years believing that my own value came from whether men found me sexy and attractive, regardless of whether I was actually attracted to them in return. I never really considered that my own physical response to men might be a product of feeling attractive or desired in general; I thought it meant that I was definitely attracted to men. But the women I dated created an entirely different response in me. I was always so self-conscious and insecure around men. Society bred me to think that because I was overweight or curvy, I had to compensate in other ways in order for anyone to be attracted to me. But the women I dated after my divorce showed me something else entirely. I’d had a baby and, two and a half years later, lost over 100 pounds pretty quickly. Things didn’t sit where they used to, and I was pushing 40. But none of those women cared about that. They thought I was sexy and attractive, but they were also attracted to my intelligence, ambition, and drive. That was new for me. Our conversations went deeper than movies and reality TV; they were about life, love, loss, and the things that really matter. And my body? They saw my scars, my jiggles, and my excess skin as marks of a powerful woman who had birthed a baby, gone through hell, and come out the other side to find herself. I felt safer and more seen than I ever had before.

So I came out again, this time as a lesbian. I’m not going to lie, that label was still a little difficult for me, not because I didn’t believe that I was a lesbian, but because I had spent almost four decades believing and telling the world I was something else. I experienced an element of imposter syndrome as a “later in life” lesbian. Was I gay enough? Would my history with men make people think I was flaky or indecisive, or that I’d come to that label not because I was genuinely gay, but because I was bored with men or had been hurt by too many of them?

But that wasn’t the case at all. I can’t tell you how many people were not at all surprised. Years ago, before I met my ex-husband, a friend who is also a lesbian said to me, “I know you think you’re bisexual, and that’s fine. But honestly? You’re going to wind up with a woman.” Ten years later, her prophecy became reality. I met Janna, who I’m engaged to marry in just a few short months. In her, I found what I had been looking for all along: a true partner, someone who sees me for exactly who I am and not who they want me to be, a best friend, and an amazing stepmother to my son. I found someone who my family loves, who has worked hard to develop relationships with the people who are important to me, and whose family has welcomed me with open arms. Now, I can’t imagine a life or future without her by my side.

In realizing and accepting my sexuality, I was also able to rid myself of some things I’d been carrying that weren’t really about me, how I felt, or what I wanted. Now, I no longer live my life according to what I think is expected of me or what others think I’m “supposed” to do. I no longer live my life and make decisions based on my fear of judgment from others. I do what I want, what falls in line with my personal sense of ethics and values, what makes me happy. I don’t fear judgment or condemnation from others. I reject the idea that there is any single “right” way to do anything, and I spend a lot of time inwardly and outwardly questioning convention and expectations that I believe are outdated or unfair. When someone says something like, “What will people think?” I respond with, “I don’t really care.” I know I’m a good person. I know I’m a good fiancée, friend, daughter, sister, and mother. I invest my time, energy, and love into the people who reciprocate those things. I have a job I love, working for myself in a company I built from the ground up almost ten years ago. I love the clothes I wear, how I do my makeup, and how I present myself to the world. I am not here for anyone else’s pleasure; I am here for my own, because the only life I have to live is my own. And that feels better than any approval or acceptance from men or society ever did.