{"id":61,"date":"2017-03-29T00:38:44","date_gmt":"2017-03-29T00:38:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/commons\/?p=61"},"modified":"2017-05-15T15:41:39","modified_gmt":"2017-05-15T15:41:39","slug":"p-s-struggling-with-coming-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/commons\/2017\/03\/29\/p-s-struggling-with-coming-out\/","title":{"rendered":"P.S.: STRUGGLING WITH COMING OUT"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Agger, ’17,<\/strong>
\nSchool of Engineering<\/p>\n

When I finally came out to my parents, I was relieved. \u201cFinally, I\u2019m done with this\u201d I thought to myself. I had started writing them a very generic camp letter. I don\u2019t know who came up with the idea that kids and parents would both rejoice at the exchange of meaningless letters, and looking back, I\u2019m pretty mad the whole shebang exists.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s often nothing good to say. \u201cHey mom! Today we had a dairy meal, instead of a meat meal!\u201d (par for the course at a Jewish summer camp). Or \u201cThe six year olds that I\u2019m a counselor-in-training for are jerks! Who would have thought?!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"TomThis letter was more of the same. Its one distinguishing feature was a slightly abnormal flamboyancy. Flamboyant because I had borrowed someone\u2019s glitter pens to scrawl each line of the letter in a different color.<\/p>\n

I had been stressing about coming out that whole year. The year had progressed slowly, with all my friends finding out through a grab bag of different media (gchat, in-person confessions, more gchat). At this moment in the summer, however, the only thing troubling me was the uncomfortably small bed I had to sleep in. Until Deborah Secular entered the scene.<\/p>\n

Deborah was my first fling. Two years prior, her contagious laugh and tendency to blurt out nonsensical phrases in inappropriate situations caught my eyes, ears and heart. We swiftly began a \u201ccamp relationship\u201d, which ended on relatively good terms with the end of our summer camp. Deborah was the only thing that reminded me of my newfound sexuality.<\/p>\n

Seeing her face again at camp led me to spontaneously write what I thought was a seemingly innocent phrase at the bottom of my letter: \u201cP.S. I\u2019m gay.\u201d<\/p>\n

I thought this plan was fool-proof. I had eliminated the stress and awkwardness of an in-person sit down with my family. I had run the hypothetical situation through my mind hundreds of times, and this seemed the easiest way. No one would be upset, right?<\/p>\n

Wrong. So wrong. I came home two weeks later to my mom crying hysterically. Her face was puffy like a tomato, letting me know that the crying had been long-term.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t a sad story, though. My family is all the good stuff: accepting, short, loud. After two awkward weeks of explaining my situation, and explaining it again, everything slowly began to morph back into a sort of normalcy. My mom started smiling again, but she still seemed a little uneasy whenever I would talk about my guy friends. We have continued to work towards complete normalcy (aka, me complaining to my mom about dates gone wrong), but we still haven\u2019t quite reached that point.<\/p>\n

The sad part was, I thought my \u201ccoming out\u201d was over.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve learned since is that, even in these years of inspiring gay rights victories, I still feel I have to \u201ccome out\u201d to everyone new I meet, especially on campus. Even as I keep ignorantly thinking \u2018this time will be the last.\u2019<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve tried all the different approaches ranging from subtle and deliberate, to overt and dramatic.<\/p>\n

Recently, while on study abroad, many of my classmates and I flooded the same restaurant and were received warmly with handshakes and greetings from Frenchman. I proposed we play two truths and a lie to get to know each other. The other students asked me to go first, and I had it all planned out: \u201cI\u2019ve hooked up with a monk. I\u2019ve never ridden a roller coaster. I once sold avocados to Julia Stiles.\u201d A couple of poorly phrased questions later and everyone had deduced that female monks don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

This influx of new people in my life, namely more than 150 Georgia Tech students in France, forced me to revisit the discomfort of coming out. The two truths and a lie method worked, but it definitely didn\u2019t eliminate the probing questions (\u201cHow long have you been gay for? So do girls, like, gross you out?\u201d) I so desperately try to avoid.<\/p>\n

Of all the environments in which I have come out, Vanderbilt was one of the more comfortable. In a place where differences are celebrated and quirks are cause for curiosity instead of rejection, I felt almost welcomed to come out. Even within Vanderbilt, however, new situations are cause for new awkwardness. Coming out to my first year floor wasn\u2019t the end of it. Afterwards, there was coming out to my Visions group, then to the Visions group that I led, to the radio show I host, and so on.<\/p>\n

In short, I\u2019m still looking for the right way to tell people how gay I am. It sucks that I still feel the need to make these grand announcements, but I do. But maybe next time I can just let them read this updated version of my terribly blunt camp letter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Agger, ’17, School of Engineering When I finally came out to my parents, I was relieved. \u201cFinally, I\u2019m done with this\u201d I thought to myself. I had started writing them a very generic camp letter. I don\u2019t know who came up with the idea that kids and parents would both rejoice at the exchange…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":132,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[32,18,14,27],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-personal-wellbeing","tag-mvov17","tag-school-of-engineering","tag-vu2020","tag-vu2021"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/commons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/commons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/commons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/commons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/commons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/commons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":283,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/commons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/283"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/commons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/commons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/commons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/commons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}