IU and Bloomington celebrated National Coming Out Day on Tuesday through events at both GLBT Student Support Services and the Back Door, a queer bar.
Here are the coming out stories of four Hoosiers.
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IU graduate Victoria Laskey, home for Thanksgiving break her freshman year, sat on her bed in the middle of the night and cried.
The door ajar, her mother heard the sobs and came in.
She was the devout Roman Catholic who asked her to keep a figure of the Virgin Mary in her car at all times, the chef of countless Sunday-night roast beef dinners.
She asked what was wrong.
“I just got dumped,” Laskey said.
“By who? What happened?”
“Her name’s Kate.”
Laskey said silence took over the room as her mother’s stable world shifted.
“Why didn’t you tell me? I thought we were closer than that,” her mother said. “What about grandchildren? Will I ever have grandchildren?”
Laskey had barely come out to herself as lesbian and suddenly she had come out to her mother as well. The tears did not stop, but conversation about Laskey’s sexuality did — for about seven months.
Then they sat at Buffalo Wild Wings the next June and awaited their food.
“Remember that thing that happened back at Thanksgiving?” Laskey’s mother asked, to a nod from her daughter. “I think I’m coming around to it.”
Two-and-a-half years later, pacing around her apartment, Laskey called her mother. She wanted her to meet her first serious girlfriend.
Eventually, she did and laughed through a night in the living room.
As they left, Laskey’s mother pulled her aside and spoke softly.
“I like her.”
***
IU graduate Brennan Murphy originally came out as gay his sophomore year of high school, but it didn’t end there. He and his family visited 11 countries in the summer of 2015, and, from Brazil to Japan, he debated countless times whether or not he could safely come out.
He could not be out in the actively religious Blue Mosque in Istanbul or on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, where homophobic killings had recently taken place. Granted, it wasn’t so different from the U.S.
“When I walk down a road late at night and I see headlights coming from behind me, I start breathing heavily,” he said. “Someone could mow me down because they don’t like how I act and who I am.”
Murphy’s fear spilled over in an ancient Indian fort.
“So, do you have a girlfriend back in the States?” the family’s tour guide asked Murphy as they walked.
“No, I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“A young, handsome man your age not having a girlfriend?” the guide said. “Boys your age are getting married here.”
Murphy took the compliment and kept walking. He said he never knew how the guide would have reacted if he had come out in that moment.
According to Murphy, coming out is a gamble in most places, but the Ni-chōme region of Tokyo was one exception. He said hundreds of gay bars are in a five-block radius there.
Murphy could come out in Ni-chōme, but he could also come in — in to the queer community.
He said the queer community often feels like outsiders, so its members band together.
“We disregard all the things that seem to make us separate, and we welcome the things we have in common,” he said. “We create one refuge from, in some ways, a harsh, hostile world.”
***
Before IU junior Andy Canada knew he was transgender, he said he knew he was gay.
“I thought that I was gay, but I was still interested in men, even when I was a woman,” he said. “So it was like, how can this be? How can I be gay but be straight?”
It was freshman year of high school, in a class of just more than a dozen people at a rural North Carolina school, when everything clicked. He was a gay man.
“It was pretty soon after that that I really wanted to get moving, that I wanted to become the person in public that I felt I was in my private life,” he said.
He and another transgender student asked one of their teachers if they could present a 30-minute slideshow presentation about what it means to be transgender and gay.
“Some of the students were pretty supportive and accepting after we taught them what it was all about,” Canada said. “The teachers were less so because I think they had already gotten their viewpoint of what they thought the community was all about.”
It was sophomore year when Canada told his mother, and she told his father. They decided it was a phase and still don’t use his preferred name and pronouns.
However, his brother was a different story, Canada said.
“He was the most accepting of anyone in the family, which was great because he and I are really close,” Canada said. “And I think that has helped a lot, having my brother on my side.”
***
IU graduate student Don Dumayas was still in elementary school when he came out to himself as gay. It was while watching Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic that he knew he would be attracted to men.
By sixth grade, Dumayas had heard derisive comments for exhibiting stereotypically feminine mannerisms, so he tried to suppress his homosexuality. However, he said he had to know what his mother, the most important person in his life, would do if she knew.
He posed the question hypothetically, and she shouted that her son could not be gay.
“It blew my mind,” Dumayas said. “I was telling her, ‘No, no, I’m just kidding.’”
About a year later, Dumayas marked in his planner the day he had begun liking a classmate, the same planner page another classmate would notice in art class shortly after.
“Oh my God, you like him,” the classmate said. “Like, you’re gay.”
Initially, Dumayas denied the label, just as he had to his mother. However, when he realized his classmates would accept him, he embraced his sexuality.
Years passed before he broached the topic with his family again.
He packed a box of souvenirs from his latest travels and slid a coming-out letter into the bottom. He handed it to a postal worker, tracked the package, and when it arrived at his mother’s door, he turned off his phone. He feared his mother’s response.
When he turned his phone back on, there it was, a message of acceptance and love from his mother. The same sort would come from his sister.
“It was a lot of burden off my shoulders that the most important people in my life know who I am and accept who I am,” he said.
