Homophobes later coming out?!

*deep sigh*

I was that homophobe.

I was never actually homophobic I just did not want anyone suspecting me of being gay, I was very afraid of losing my high school friends and being judged differently by other kids or by my parents.

I've lived in CA my whole life most people would think its a liberal area that is open and accepting, well thats not really the case if you live in a small rural town.

I was never popular in school and in my mind if I had come out back then my life would have been over. (thats what I thought at the time, not how I feel now).

I only ever picked on one guy, he was always kind of feminine and he followed trends and did his hair all nice, had just as many friends that were girls as guys, very popular, charismatic and an overall nice guy, maybe a bit full of himself.

He was my younger brothers best friend from 6th-12th grade, my brother,him and I are still good friends to this day, I was never really mean to him just like.

"dude you are so gay why dont you come out"
"your so gay"

Things like that. So turns out he was never gay or anything and I was just projecting my own insecurities.

So I had kind of forgotten about all this until last year. (I stopped picking on him a long time ago like when I was 16)

Early 2015 we get a call from him, we had not talked for a few months just because we live several hours from each other and we are the type of friends that can not talk for 6 months and then pick up like we saw each other the day before.

He says he has had a mental breakdown, he had apparently taken LSD and had a panic attack, then didnt sleep for a few days. He was obsessing over weather he was gay or not because so many people had called him gay over the years (I was not the only one).

This was a 2 month ordeal for him and he was having to sleep with his parents because he was so freaked out.

Needless to say I feel absolutely terrible for what I did to him when I was young and so stupid, if I could take it all back I would in a heart beat.

He is now doing great, he came and visited last month, hes making great music and has a couple small businesses.

 

I was one of those people who would say I accepted gay people, but didn't approve of the "lifestyle". I also would obsess over who was gay and talk about gay people a lot. I remember that once when I was in 9th grade I thought I saw two girls kiss and talked about it for about two hours. I wasn't cruel to anybody, but I was really hellbent on figuring out who was gay and who wasn't, and I think I was subconsciously comparing myself to them because I was crazy insecure.

 

I remember saying things like, "It's fine if someone's gay, just so long as they don't try to touch me," and such. There was also a shameful episode where my insecurities got the better of me over a girlfriend who was questioning. I thought she was being recruited (no, she was making friends), wanted definitive answers (here I am, much older and still figuring it out), etc. Though it's far in the past, and I'm very different now, I still feel some shame remembering it.

 

Usually it's the homophobes are the ones hiding their gay tendencies, remember the dad of the creepy neighbor in American Beauty

 

I don't know if this really counts as homophobia.

I was never negative about gays because my parents taught us to be tolerant and understanding but I sure was uncomfortable around them. Perhaps this was because at school and home we were given kind of mixed messages. On the one hand we were told that being gay is OK and that gays are just like any other people and at the same time we were told that we must be aware and sensitive with gays so not to offend them.

This created the kind of feeling where you are constantly on your toes so that you don't accidentally offend a gay person and being constantly on your toes is not nice feeling. I had a friend in high school who I knew from the first moment that he was gay. This was no problem until the senior year when he came out and then for some reason I started feeling uncomfortable about it. Not like in a major way but things were not the same anymore.

My discomfort about gays evaporated after my first homoerotic encounter. Somehow I no longer feared accidentally causing offense or or feeling guilty if I disagreed with a LGBT person on a LGBT issue.

The curious thing is that I still have the same discomfort with disabled people be it physical or mental disability. A colleague of mine had malformed hand and I was dreadfully uncomfortable around him and I would probably still be uncomfortable if I met him again. Midgets, wheel chair patients and mentally retarded cause same kind of awkwardness to me and I don't really know how could I get rid of this because it's ridiculous.

My sister is a lesbian and I knew that the moment when she started in junior high school and started telling me about a girl she taught was lesbian and how she felt disgusted about it that she must be lesbian herself. It was perhaps because it went so over the top and was so random. And sure enough a few years later she came out of the closet.