Last Sunday was the annual Castro Street Fair. Most, if not all, of the gay events in the city have been overrun by straight people, especially gawking tourists or teenagers from around the bay. But this Sunday’s fair had an amazing vibe, what I love especially about gay men, that happy, free, open attitude. I loved walking around, just being in a mass of thousands of gay men and lesbians. It reminded me of what I love about being a gay man: drag queens doing hilarious Britney Spears parodies, AIDS activists, couples kissing, an art booth where you could get your stress level tested by a gay tom cruise, gay men and lesbians two-stepping to bad country music, etc. This was marred only slightly by the three SUVs from a limousine service carrying tourists who were literally hanging out the window pointing at the gay men and women, shouting “Oh my god, they’re *kissing*” and then taking pictures. A drag queen in front of me on the side walk started picking up trash and throwing it at the middle-aged woman taking pictures of her without her permission. I helped.

I do love being gay and I love gay men. I love the core of my gayness—sexual and emotional attraction to men—and I love the culture of gayness as it has come to be in America. I love living openly. And I love that I’m in a place where such is possible.I never really had a big coming out moment.

I think I just gradually got there (and boy do I mean gradually, from about age 17 to 28). The first person I told was my best friend at BYU that I was “attracted to men” when I was a puddle of mess on my bed just after graduation. He was very kind and warm and supportive. But we talked about it like it was a temptation, and something I did not want to do or be. (To make matters worse, I was deeply in love with him.)

The first couple years of grad school, I was still in the process of extricating myself emotionally and mentally from the Mormon church, and I openly identified as bisexual, a rather common and clichéd step on the way to full-blown Gaydom, for many of us. I think that it was obvious to most of my friends that I was gay, and I’m grateful to them for being supportive and open and just letting me figure it out without judgment. My best friend in grad school, who coincidentally had the same name as my best friend at BYU, weird that, I think was fine with it, but he seemed disappointed when we couldn’t talk about how awesome girls were anymore, even though I assured him that I still thought girls rocked and from time to time were even attractive. And he wanted to make sure that when I was acting queeny it was authentic and not something I felt I had to do. That said, he was also supportive.

I think the real nasty coming out happened by accident. Over christmas break when I was 28, I had printed out an email from a friend wherein he asked me if I’d met any hot guys recently. I threw it away and my dad found it in the garbage. I didn’t hear from my parents for over a month, and then my mom finally answered the phone in February told me what happened. It was a meltdown. I think both of us said some things we regret now. Both of my parents still struggle, 10 years later, but they make enough of an effort to make me proud of them. It can’t be easy for conservative Mormon republican parents to get used to having an atheist, leftist, cocksucker as a son. [And see how brash I am, using the word "cocksucker" in a sentence without even a second thought? The horror for my parents...]

Anyway, the problem with coming out is that there are layers in the process. For me, the hardest part was really coming out to myself. I’m not sure if it’s because of the Mormon upbringing, or just my own self-image process, but I could not assimilate my sexual desires into how I saw myself as a person. I could not integrate being gay with everything else about who I am or thought I was. I didn’t have an actual date with a guy or sex until I was nearly 29, not because of homophobia toward other gay men and lesbians, but because it was so dissonant with how I saw myself. That was the single biggest struggle.

The second part of coming out, telling other people, is ongoing, perhaps never ending. And it’s complicated by the fact that from time to time (especially when traveling) I’m in situations where I’m unsure or feel unsafe and have to choose to ‘cover’ my sexuality in that moment, or as it were, to step momentarily back into the closet. There are also moments when I just don’t like people or don’t want to be personal with them and consciously choose to cover with them. But most of the time, it’s just the irritating process of meeting someone or being in a situation and having to figure out if and how to ‘come out’ in the process of interaction so that it’s out in the open and I don’t have to worry about it. Living in San Francsico has completely spoiled me, because for the most part, people don’t make assumptions about sexuality, and there is such a high proportion of gay men here that any man could possibly be gay, so I can literally just not think about being gay. Working at a University in another city with students and colleagues who, despite being within 90 miles of San Francisco, are in a different universe about sexuality, I find that I go back and forth between the freedom of not thinking about being gay in San Francisco, to the burden of having to manage the information at work.

The Human Rights Campaign, about whom I’m at best ambivalent, has a national coming out day project on Youtube, and I really enjoyed their promotional.