This weekend, I went to a GLBT wine tasting. While there, a woman said she recognized me from high school. I recognized her name but not her face (had not seen her in ~25 years), and she seemed a little disappointed I didn't remember her. She also let me know she'd seen me at a mostly-gay church (she hadn't reintroduced herself then). I carried on a superficial conversation for a few minutes but then said goodbye to my friends (it was the end of the evening) and headed out. The whole thing felt awkward to me because I wasn't prepared to 'out' myself to someone who knew me from my "pre-gay" days (I came out to myself at the age of 23). My strategy for coming out was NOT to come out. To avoid having to go tell people who thought I was straight that I am in fact gay, I decided to just drift away from the people I grew up around, and moved to another city for 10 years. A job change forced me to return to the area where I grew up ... and these kinds of situations are what I feared the most. Of course, there was no drama since then - but in a way, I was almost disappointed. For years, I've been bracing myself for the inevitable time that my secret gay life gets exposed, and I get shamed and ostracized. Though those kinds of stories apply mainly to hypocritical conservatives who are anti-gay but secretly gay themselves... at least I've not been anti-gay. Any thoughts on how to improve the situation and make myself feel better about what happened?
Unless there is some reason you are still embarrassed about being gay, there isn't any reason not to be gay to your old acquaintances, just as you were to your new ones. If anybody has confusion about your changing status, just tell them that you did not realize you were gay until sometime after you left the older setting, but you do now. I wouldn't be too concerned about someone you met at an GLBT wine tasting, and at a "gay church" anyway; odds are she is just as gay as you are, and cool with it. If you get ostracized (which is always better than being Osterized in a blender), you would not want to have those kind of jerks in your life anyway.
I would think she was gay too if she was at this event so I wouldn't worry too much about the whole situation. Just enjoy yourself
A few more thoughts on this... The acquaintance from high school is definitely a lesbian. She was at the wine tasting with her (female) partner. But interestingly, I think *she* may have felt some of the same awkwardness about the situation as I did, because she didn't reintroduce herself at the church (where she had seen me even before the wine tasting, unbeknownst to me until last weekend). I guess I do have some residual shame / stigma to deal with. Yossarian makes a good point about this - there isn't a legitimate reason I should feel as if being gay is this "deep dark secret" that has to be hidden from everyone who knew me before. My worries weren't about *her* opinion, but rather "losing control" of who knows about me. So what to do to overcome this residual shame that I really shouldn't still have?
The best way is to contact a few of your better friends from this time period, come out to them, and see that you don't have to be concerned about what they think about you being gay, because they weren't thinking about it or you at all. They will have moved on in their lives, just as you have. I went to my 50th high school reunion a couple of years ago. This was a HS in homophobic Birmingham, Alabama. One of the guys in my class had been married, had a couple of kids, divorced, and partnered up with another man 10 or so years back. He was bringing his partner to the reunion for the first time ever. Rather than making him feel awkward, we were all running around spreading the word to reach out to him and the partner to make sure they both felt welcome and not awkward. You probably can't imagine how different this would be from how someone would have been treated if they came out as gay in the 1960s in Alabama, much less showed up with another gay man in tow. Things are changing so rapidly, even in some of the bastions of conservatism, much faster than you would expect from hearing what their politicians and redneck preachers are saying on Fox News. You might be minor gossip for a few days, but people have better things to worry about than whether you were or are gay or not. The problem is mostly between your ears, being manufactured as a concern that other people are just not going to bother to be bothered about. The "logical" you knows that there is nothing to be ashamed about; it is the "monsters from the id" that are jerking your emotions around. You have to tell yourself that sometimes you just have to say "What the fuck" and jump in with both feet and act like what your logical brain knows to be the truth, that there really is nothing to be ashamed about, and when people see that you are casual and NOT ashamed about it, they will take their cue from your own behavior and make no big deal about it. They all have better things to do.
