Things have just been getting worse with my family since I came home from college. I feel trapped in my own house and I can't afford to leave. My mom makes homophobic comments all the time. She's also emotionally manipulative and controlling. Meanwhile, my girlfriend and I keep talking about marriage--although not completely seriously. I know that I could never marry her in secret but the idea of coming out to my family makes me physically sick. I was just wondering if anyone has any positive stories about homophobic families. Whether that means they came around and were accepting, or cutting off all ties with them for the better.
Sorry to hear that life with your family has been rough - are you just home for the summer, or are you graduate and living at home more or less indefinitely? As far as you and your girlfriend, I don't think that your conversations about marriage, or your relationship in general, need to be tied to your being out (or not) to your family. Let your relationship with your gf be what it is, on its own. It's not up to your family to make it work in the end, out or not, after all. Your family - well, it's hard to say. Sometimes people can surprise you when they come out. Generally, it's not worlds different from what you might expect (in my experience at least), but it's not always as bad as you might fear. And progress can happen over time. Of course, you know your family better than anyone here, so your guess is probably better than anyone's. If you could come out when not living with them anymore, and thus having a lot more "safe space" at hand, on both sides, that might help - but that ties into the question of how long you're living at home currently.
I graduated and am here indefinitely. I had high hopes for moving out by August. My mom keeps pushing back the date she promises to get me a car by and at the beginning of the summer she "borrowed" most of my savings to make the house payment and has yet to pay it back. I live in the country; I could walk five miles and not get anywhere. Our conversations about marriage aren't tied around my family. The big reason we aren't talking about it seriously is because my girlfriend is going to teach English overseas for a couple years. I have a pretty good idea how my dad's side of the family is going to react based on the fact that I already have a lesbian cousin. My mom's side I have no basis to go on other than their extremely homophobic reactions. Actual words my mom said to me last week, as a joke: "Someday you’ll have a man in your life…or a woman if you’re that way which you better not be because I’ll have to shoot you right now." I'm definitely not coming out until I'm financially independent and moved out.
I came out to my Mormon family over twenty years ago. They are very religious and before I came out I would have described them as homophobic. Everyone came around in pretty short order. As far as stories, I can think of two. About a week after I came out my Father came to me all torn up and asking for my forgiveness. You see, about a week before I came out I had been in a store with my parents. They were buying me a new winter jacket. Well, ahead of us in line there was a gay couple. This was not something you really saw back then in Utah and my Father made some sort of disparaging remark. I honestly do not know it was. It wasn't vicious it was just sort of casually negative. I honestly didn't really think much about it. But apparently for the week since I came out my Father had thought of little else. It had been unthinking and uncaring and ignorant and he hoped that I could find it in my heart to forgive him. Of course I did. The person in my family who had the hardest time dealing with it was my oldest sister. She wasn't mean about it or anything but you could tell it made her uncomfortable. One time when I was visiting my parents I was reading Borrowed Time, Paul Monette's memoir about his last years with his partner Roger as Roger succumbed to AIDS and died. Apparently I had left in on the bedside table in the guest room and my sister had found it and thumbed through it. By the time I visited next my sister had managed to find a copy of the book and had read it. She told me about how beautiful it was and how sad it had made her. My initial response was that yeah it is really sad when Roger dies. And her response was that, of course, that was very sad but it wasn't what she meant. What had made her so sad was that she realized that no one had ever loved her the way these two men loved each other. At the time my sister was already married with six children. With tears in her eyes she looked at me and said "you're going to find that, aren't you? When you do, will you tell me what it feels like." Having someone close to them come out changes people. I've seen it time and time again. Don't count your family out because they say things that are hurtful when you haven't given them enough information about yourself to know that they are being hurtful. The vast majority of LGBT people that I know (and I'm pretty enmeshed in the community) had coming out experiences that were much better than they anticipated--not all, but most. Good luck!
