Coming out at Salve

By: Kate Howard
Posted In: Features

* Name has been changed for anonymity

Mark* was in the closet, enduring what some call Seven Minutes in Heaven at a junior high party. He was miserable.

“Kissing this girl is disgusting,” Mark thought to himself, and he wondered why the other guys liked to do this. It was another seven years before he worked up the courage to come out of the closet.

“Worrying about what other people will think about me is really the root of waiting till I was 21,” Mark says. “I grew up learning that being gay was wrong, an illness. I grew up hearing derogatory words like ‘queer’ and ‘homo.'”

Mark was raised in a conservative, Republican family, and it was many years before he ever thought he might be gay. Liking girls was something that he would grow into, he told himself, and he just wasn’t ready for that yet. Junior high turned into high school and high school to college. Mark, a wholesome looking and attractive young man, still had never had a real girlfriend. A year into college, he knew he should face the fact that his sexual orientation was not going to evolve or mature. He was gay, and he could no longer ignore it and pray that something would change.

“I didn’t wake up one morning and choose this,” Mark says with a trace of sadness in his voice. “I want people to know it isn’t a choice, and it’s not something I’ve worked for. If there were a pill I could take to make me straight, I would do it to fit the norms of society.”

Mark is just now beginning to tell his friends at Salve that he is gay, something he knows they’ve suspected all along– but he wasn’t ready. He was forced to weave a web of lies over the past two years while he tried to figure himself out. Fake names and switching pronouns weighed heavy on Mark’s mind, and although he wanted to come clean, he admits that the secret life had its charms.

“I’m not going to lie; it was kind of fun to make up stories and keep things quiet,” Mark says with a glimmer in his eye and a wide smile. “But I’m glad I don’t have to lie anymore.”

Now that the truth is out, Mark’s biggest fear is the reaction of people who don’t know yet and friends in the future who may not be as open as his friends at Salve. There are other, more practical concerns as well. He’s constantly worried about the perception people hold of him. Like many gay men and women, he is troubled by ignorant people and the possibility of hate crime. His family remains in the dark, and although he knows they will still love him, Mark fears disappointing caring parents that fantasize about white weddings and rambunctious grandkids.

“I could marry a girl and pretend to be straight to please my family,” Mark says. “I could get married, but the sexual intimacy of a marriage is part of its sacredness, and that just wouldn’t be there.”

Still, Mark feels he has been given a positive experience in comparison to many young gay people in his situation.

“I’ve talked to people who have been on the verge of jumping off buildings because coming out was so hard,” he says. “Suicide never crossed my mind at all. I have been blessed with friends who I knew would ultimately accept me, and it was just a matter of being ready myself.”

He has told many of his closest friends by now, but that wasn’t where he began. Establishing a network of gay friends at Salve was crucial, and a new friend from the GSLBA became Mark’s first confidante.

Each person after that became just a bit easier, with one exception.

“I was terrified to tell my roommate, because he’s a straight male who, for the last three years, thought I was also a straight male,” Mark remembers with a laugh. “Well, I thought that was what he thought.”

His fears turned out to be unfounded, though, when his roommate told him that he always knew, but he had never really cared. There’s always a ‘male macho complex’ to consider, and Mark was calmed when his roommate and best friend did not freak out.

Mark is approaching complete openness about his sexuality, but he is remaining anonymous in this article because he has not quite achieved it. He’s starting small and working his way to the big picture, and both Mark and his friends are changing thanks to his newly embraced openness.

“Honestly, I grew up in such a closed-minded environment that I thought if you weren’t straight, white, Catholic… there had to be something wrong with you,” Mark says. “Now I realize, who am I to say that one is better than another? Who is anyone to say?”

Mark was once so protective of his fa