Coming Out in Rockford, IL

By Tynan Sinks

Sometimes I feel like I don’t have much of a story.  If I look back on what I might refer to as “hardships” in my life, I’m not sure coming out would even be one of them.  I mean it was definitely hard, but all in all think I got lucky.  Some people resent me because they feel I didn’t have it “hard enough,” like I haven’t paid my dues for the initiation into the gay club or something.  We can be so hard on each other sometimes.  Whatever, this is how it was for me.

It’s like this.  I went to an extremely conservative Catholic high school.  It was the kind of place that you’d see in a comic book or a cartoon, almost a caricature of itself.  Girls in plaid skirts and boys in blazers and ties, having catechisms and Hail Mary’s shoved down our throat on a daily basis.  Free thinking of any kind was discouraged, and anything that even resembled an alternative lifestyle was avoided a mini-skirt on a Sunday morning.  I was sixteen.  Luckily, I had been raised in an extremely liberal family that encouraged me to think for myself.  Homosexuality was never frowned upon growing up, my parents had many gay friends, and half the time I didn’t even know they were gay, not because they were hiding it, but because it just wasn’t an issue.  Needless to say, ideals home life and school conflicted more often than not.

Like many others, I grew up knowing somewhere in the back of my mind that I was gay, it just took me a while to be ready to face it.  Then, when I was seventeen, it became clear that I couldn’t avoid it any longer.  When people ask me who the hardest person to come out to was, my answer is always the same: Me.  There was a long time when I knew, but I just wasn’t ready to deal with it.  I could talk for days about how gays should have equal rights and how, despite what we were taught in the classroom, there was nothing wrong with being a homosexual.  But when it came down to it, I was petrified to admit that I was one of them. 

One of my best friends growing up was gay, and I’ll never forget how hard he had it, coming out and all.  His parents sent him to a psychiatrist who all but tortured him for being gay, his parents refused him food, almost disowned him.  I’ll never forget the day he came to school with bruises on his neck and told me his dad tried to choke him to death because he was gay.  Obviously, this whole ‘coming out’ thing was much more than all the afterschool specials made it seem.  He was the strongest gay role model I had in my life, so naturally he was the one I went to first when there was a “possibility I might be gay.”  It hit me like a ton of bricks when he said “If you were straight, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”  Harsh?  Maybe.  But it’s exactly what I needed to hear.

After that night, it was pretty much set in stone.  It all was just a matter of how to deal.  I was blessed to have a great group of friends who I knew would accept me no matter what, so slowly but surely, I told each of them.  No big deal.  Before I knew it, thanks to the high school rumor mill, I was out to pretty much everyone whether I wanted to be or not.  To my surprise, no one treated me any different.  It was almost like people respected me more for being my true self.  I think some of them saw it as a big “fuck you” to the Catholic school system, which won them over.  Whatever it takes, I guess.

The last and final step to my whole process, and the one that was the hardest, besides admitting it to myself, was telling my parents.  As I said, they were incredibly liberal and were friends with many gays and lesbians, but that still didn’t make it any easier.  There’s just something about telling your parents that is so…final.  Telling your friends is great, but it’s like practice, if you don’t like one person’s reaction, hopefully the next person you tell will react better.  You can gauge all of the reactions and sort of come up with an average.  But you’ve only got one shot to tell you family.  I told mine after dinner.  We’re not a very serious family, so when I said “I need to tell you guys something” at the dinner table, they knew something was up.  I think my exact words were:

Tynan: “I guess I just wanted you guys to know that I’m gay.”

Silence.

Mom: “How long have you known?”
Tynan: “Forever, I guess.”

Then I cried for two hours straight.  I don’t even know WHY.  I just felt like it was huge weight off of my shoulders, and I had nothing to hide anymore.  I was at home in my own house again.  My parents finally knew who I was again.  I wasn’t living a lie.  I had officially come out and the world kept on turning.

I know so many guys like me who have had it so rough, who were not nearly as lucky as I was and are still having trouble with their friends and family after years of struggle.  Some of them aren’t even out to one or both of their parents, for one reason or another, which I just can’t imagine.  But there it is.  There truly isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t appreciate how easy I had it.  But maybe that’s a good thing, you know?  Maybe it’s a sign of the times.  Maybe people are finally starting to realize that there are a whole slew of other things that I could be that are worse than gay.  That’s what I hope, at least.  Someday we will learn, I really do think that despite everything, we are already learning.