Ok, so this post is pretty much why I decided to join this forum. I knew that sooner or later I'd pluck up the courage to come out to someone properly for the first time, and that then I'd immediately want to tell someone else about it! As briefly as possible, a little bit of background: The best way of describing my 'coming to terms with being gay' story is basically this: In my experience, some straight people really do go through a 'gay phase', in which they experience genuine feelings and perhaps have genuine relationships with people of the same gender, but which passes and which never meant that they were going to be gay forever. In the same way, I'm pretty confident that before I ever really started to realise that I might be gay, I went through a 'straight phase'. I rarely discuss this, even here and in the couple of other places online where I am 'out', because I anticipate a lot of responses amounting to a knowing smile and the insistence that 'you were just so closeted that you didn't even have a clue you were gay yet'. But I feel like by now I know myself pretty well, and I know for certain that this isn't true. I was exclusively attracted to girls, I was having genuine feelings for girls, and the various encounters and relationships I had back then were just as real as the feelings which I now have exclusively for men. Go figure. Anyway, long story short, I had a short but very intense relationship with this girl at uni, for about a year. My parents went abroad for a the summer, and she moved in for the entire holiday. Safe to say we barely set foot outside the house or laid eyes on another human being all summer. When we broke up some way into the next term, it was very complicated and pretty tough. We both got quite badly hurt but also, somehow, managed to remain close friends. And for me, the period after that is fairly obviously when I started to lose interest in girls and gain interest in guys. I think she's started to suspect that something about me was changing/changed. As I say, we're very close. I wouldn't say that she's my best mate exactly - I don't see her often enough for that - but I talk about things with her that I wouldn't discuss with anyone else, and vice-versa. Once you've been as close with someone as we were, I guess it never really goes away. Also we were part of a fairly diverse group in Cambridge, with lots of people of all sexualities, beliefs etc. We'd all talked quite a lot about that sort of thing in lots of half-drunken moments. And as of twenty minutes ago, I sent her this text: 'So my new year's resolution was that I would say this to someone before my birthday was over. I'm half an hour late (nothing changes!) but here goes: I'm gay. Completely, and with absolute certainty. I think you might have sensed that something like this was coming. I know you'll know that this has nothing to do with what happened with us. It's a fairly recent thing, but it's also something that I expect is for good now. It's been weird having a secret from you - it's pretty much the only one I've ever had to. I hope it's ok that I did this over text - you know what i'm like with deep meaningful phone calls! Thanks again for the birthday wishes. xxx' No idea what I'm feeling now. A bit shell-shocked, maybe. I've spent the last six months actively trying to make myself tell someone, and now I've done it and there's no way to take it back. She hasn't replied, and she probably won't until tomorrow - she's not a night owl like me. Sorry to go on such a long ramble about such a small step. It must seem a lot of fuss over nothing to people who have to come out in homophobic environments or to people who they expect won't be ok with it. But I just had to tell someone what I'd just done.
Thanks everyone! She was absolutely brilliant about it, as I'd hoped she would be. She said she'd started to expect something like this, and that she's so happy for me. She seems more pleased about it than I am! If anticlimax can be an amazing sensation, then that's what I'm feeling now! No massive cataclysm, just a sense of 'why was I so worried, that was easy!' Very positive feeling. There's other tricky stuff going on in my life at the moment, but every time I need a lift I just remind myself that I've finally started coming out and that it's going well, and I feel happy again. Time to tell some more people, methinks!
