Coming Out To Online Friends

[Brandon]

Well yeah it doesn't mean a lot when you come out to online friends, but it does mean a lot when they start treating you different. I can try to make this a long story, but I won't go into details. I will talk about two people, one of them which pretty much didn't give a damn, and the other that really messed my life up.

Well through the years of making friends online, I really haven't told the ones I had talked with online, I was friends with them for at least 7 years now. Never met them, but I had this one friend, his name was Kevin. He was pretty much homophobic, he would tell me stories about him living near a gay bar in Burbank, California. He's told me so many stories about how he would look out the window seeing gay people walking down his street. Then at one point he went off saying that Gay people will go to hell, then he went into other bad things, making me feel so bad. I told him it's not like it's the end of the world.

I went through a period of time feeling bad, I guess it was giving me major guilt about keeping it hidden from my friends, so then I had came out of the closet to my Internet friends, some knew, some took it with a grain of salt. Kevin took it okay, he wasn't gonna end my friendship with him, but I told him that I didn't have a choice, I was born with this, it wasn't my fault. He told me that he was sorry for expressing his thoughts and anger on gay people. But I never really told him the entire truth, I told him that I was bisexual, but now that I look through my entire life, I was gay, from age 7 to now, I still have the gay part of me inside. But I came out of the closet to him, I've known him the most, and I was glad he didn't put me down or call me offensive names.

Then came to the real hard part on Yahoo. I had friends on there, I came out to females more better than males. Then there was this one guy, he was straight, sometimes I felt he was homophobic. After telling my female friends on Yahoo about me being bisexual, then talking to them for two hours about my life, and how I finally realized I was gay, it finally came time to telling my male friend, he's been a bad friend I can tell you that, but it's hard having a friend like him, a person that's bipolar, has the tendcy to yell a lot. Well I was crying so much one night, I told him I needed to talk to him.

I was crying so hard telling him, when I told him he was confused, then he told me why he would be mad at me if I told him about this. Well after a couple of months, he found out from somebody that I had a thing for him, from there he blackmailed me, used me to do things he wanted me to do, if I didn't he would send mail to my parents about me being gay and what I've been doing on the Internet. He made me so depressed. I felt if I never told him about my sexuality, then he would of never done this to me. I no longer talk to him, he told me through the last e-mail I had with him that he deleted those e-mails about me being gay.

I guess the moral of what's happened to me is, you tell some friends, and some will react in good ways, some will react in bad ways. Some will just let it slide and no harm done, some will take advantage of it and blackmail you within a second. Just need to be careful with who you come out of the closet to I guess.

I'm scared to death of coming out to my parents. And I will never tell them nor my brother's. Only one family member knows I'm gay and that is my Grandma, but she's gone now. It's like if I was taken this Internet away from me, I'll be completely alone, no friends, nobody. I'm glad I have friends that will be there to support me on this thing. And that's the end of my story.

[Paul_UK]

It's interesting in that you can't always guess how people would react. From reading your message I was thinking that Kevin would have a big problem with the news (in fact I was surprised you told him at all from his previous reactions), yet he seems to be reasonably OK with it.

As for the guy on Yahoo, you haven't said so much about him but it sounds like he would be very difficult to predict, and as it turned out he reacted badly.

Don't let him blackmail you though. Just block him in your Yahoo and delete any emails he sends without opening them. It may seem harsh but if people are treating you like sh*t, I think it's best to just block all communication, which is much easier online than in person.

Even if he emails your parents (which is unlikely), would they really believe him? How much do they know about him already? If it's very little, then you tell them that he is some wierdo that you are having nothing to do with. Don't confirm or deny what he said (if you can avoid it), just make them believe that he is not to be trusted. But only if they get an email from him and start asking, there's no need to say anything otherwise. ;)

I'm pleased your female friends are OK with it. You can probably join in their gossip about male celebrities etc now! :icon_bigg

[Brandon]

To clear things up. He wasn't sending e-mails to my parents, he was printing out the PM conversations and then telling me he was gonna send them to my house through the mail, not e-mail the mail. Thus me not really knowing what day they come in, it would be addressed to my parents, they opening it up with all the e-mails he got from people.

Let me tell you something about myself and maybe some about Arden. I'm 19 years old, I'll be 20 years old next week. I'm very closeted at home, I finally came to terms that I'm gay not bisexual, though there is a small straight part to me that is giving me guilt, and is making me hurt even more with being gay. I'm in College now, and since there really isn't a openly gay group or person in the College I just walk around wondering if they are. My city is very closed minded, (closet cases) I haven't seen an openly gay student in my school at all. It's very hard to go through day by doing wondering if it's showing or not. Though I'm not pretending to be gay or pretending to be straight, I'm acting myself. But if I happen to make my first friend in the College and they are my age I'll be really open minded if they come out to me telling me that they're gay.

When people look at me they think I'm straight, because I look like a straight person. And friends are really hard to make these days, it sucks completely. I've talked to a few people who say that finding a gay group is hard, since a lot of people are afraid of coming out to the school and being judged or harassed by people who dislike gays and bisexuals. Maybe that's why everybody in this town is so closeted.

Now time to talk about Arden. Well he's basically a 39 year old man who seems that his normal life is really boring, so he uses the Internet for his Entertainment, I've seen him in a room before talking really bad smack to another gay guy, maybe about 16 to 17 years old, very open about his sexuality. Arden goes into the room calls him all the very offensive words, it hurts me. But through the two years he's been making my life a living hell, finding any new information about me. Well he found out about my sexuality, then found out what I do on the Internet, and used that to blackmail me into doing anything he told me to do. Ignoring him didn't work because it would of only pissed him off into sending the blackmail letters to my parents.

It took me about two to three years to finally open him up, it took years of crying, depression, but I finally did, he opened up, he was mad, but I knew that wasn't really him because I've seen his sensitive side before, he's cried to me before. That's what I found out what I'm good at, being there for somebody, supporting them even if they don't want to be supported by anyone, trying to open a depressed person in life. Even though I don't help myself, I found helping others makes me happy, that I made a difference in someone else's life.

But now all I see are people hurting, me trying to be there for them, to tell them I'm there for them, for support, to listen, to give advice. I'm probably the nicest, sweetest person, a lot of people who talk to me say that I'm very open minded, that I do actually care about people when the things are bad for them.

I know I'm totally going out of subject of this thread, but oh well that's just a little about me, so I for anybody really afraid of coming out, I'm here to talk to anybody if they need help.

[hakeem_uk]

i liked your story i think i will wait before telling any of my friend what i am

p.s. i loved your story