Hi

I don’t know if this is the right place to post this at all. I felt the need to express this in some way so I googled LGBT forums and this is the first one I found. I don’t know what I want to accomplish by doing this. Maybe find people experiencing the same things. But over the past few days I feel like I’ve had an awakening or realisation that I need to get off my chest to someone, even if it’s just the anonymous internet. They say writing things down can be therapeutic, at least. Let’s find out if that’s true.

I am a partially closeted gay man approaching 30. When I say partially closeted, my parents know, and some of my friends know, but I don’t live life as an “openly gay man”. My best friend doesn’t know – or maybe he does, but I haven’t said the words to him. I told him I thought I might be bi when we were 17 and drunk, which he didn’t really react to. The next time we got drunk, he brought it up to ask if I had feelings for him; a thought which had clearly freaked him out, which freaked me out in turn! I denied it, and sort of re-closted myself to him by saying I wasn’t really bi, I didn’t know what I meant by it.

He brought it up again a few years ago, again when we’d been drinking. I again said I didn’t really know what I meant by saying that I might be bi, that I couldn’t explain it, and he told me to try. In retrospect I probably should have come out to him at that point. He had probably thought about it and would have been supportive, and not assumed that I had a thing for him like he did the first time. But it took me by surprise, and I guess I’m a coward, because I repeated what I had said the first time: that I don’t really know what I meant by it, and I’m not bi.

Which is true. I’m not bi; I’m gay. I don’t know why I find it so hard to tell people. I don’t think it’s the act of telling people that scares me. It’s the fact that they will see me differently afterwards. That things will be different. The fear that I might now be excluded from certain activities or events, or even just conversations. That upsets me.

I never really think about these things though. I live my life one day at a time; I can always come out tomorrow, right? It’s never at the forefront of what I’m thinking about. I think that might be because I’m depressed. Taking life by the horns, and doing anything important or which requires a lot of effort, is pretty difficult for me. I’ve never been diagnosed with depression, though I have been to see a doctor about it a few times. I have a thyroid problem, one of the symptoms of which can be anxiety and/or depression. So they always look at that first. Take a blood test, monitor my hormone levels, adjust my dosage accordingly and tell me to come back in three months. Same thing happens the next time I go. It’s just treated as a symptom of my under-active thyroid. It’s circular, and I don’t know what I can do about it. I guess that’s another reason I decided to write this.

I have a few gay friends. One of my friends from high school turned out to be gay, and we’ve stayed in touch, though we aren’t as close as we were as kids. We meet up sometimes, go to gay bars, and occasionally I’ll meet a guy and we’ll hit it off, but it’s never anything more serious than a one night stand. It’s rare it even becomes a one night stand, to be honest. I’m not exactly in the best shape at the moment. It’s difficult to motivate myself to improve when I’m probably depressed and in the closet (and not what you’d call actively looking for men).

Anyway. I started writing this by saying I had an awakening/realisation which prompted me to think about all of these things that I now can’t get out of my head. It’s kind of embarrassing to say this but  it was a book aimed at young adults/teenagers which caused this. I don’t usually read books aimed at younger people; the last one I read was the last Harry Potter book, whenever that came out. I don’t know why I decided to read this one. I guess a review I saw made me interested, along with an article saying it was going to be made into a “mainstream coming of age drama” movie, which is unusual for an LGBT book. The book in question is ‘Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda.’

I’m not sure the book is anything special, but it cut me up. It’s about a closeted gay kid who begins an online friendship/romance with another closeted classmate who happens to post on social media that he is in the closet at the same school. Eventually he comes out to everyone, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. Reading about that made me realise all the things I’ve missed out on. Happiness, that first romance, first boyfriend, and just being who you are to the world. It made me feel sick to my stomach that I took the cowardly route and just stayed in the closet all of these years. It made me want to come out, but a part of me feels like it’s too late. I feel like I’ve damaged myself at a fundamental and basic level by not doing this when I first became an adult. I desperately want those years back, but I know I can’t have them. It’s deeply saddened me to the point that I’ve laid in bed most of the past few days just thinking about that.

But it’s also made me realise that maybe I still can have those things, even if they are a few years too late. I just don’t know if I have the determination, motivation and strength to try to have them. To improve myself. To come out to everyone and be an openly gay man.

Thanks for reading. There are a lot of half-baked ideas, themes and half-told stories in there which I will probably expand on in future posts. Sorry for the way I meander in my writing; I was just writing as it came to my head, and didn’t want to worry too much about editing afterwards.

James