Hey Destructor, welcome to the group!
Your situation is horrible, and unfortunately not unique :(. Has anybody in your family actually ever asked you if you're gay? And what kind of things do they do to abuse you? I hope it's nothing physical, at the very least.
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Onto me though (and I hate making the conversation about me, especially after replying to such a serious post, but I have to make an exception because this is kinda huge), my family now knows that I'm gay! So, in true Rainbow Connection fashion, let me tell you all the story.
Oddly enough, Pokemon is responsible for my outing. About a month or two ago, I joined the gay sex dating app Grindr. I didn't join it for the same reason most people do, instead I just wanted to see if I could make some new friends because it struck me that I don't hang out with any gay people and the two friends I do hang out with are both left over from high school. So I joined, and started meeting people. A lot of sex freaks, as you'd expect, but I did manage to meet some cool people.
One day, I changed my profile picture to one of me wearing my favourite shirt, which is a plain white T-shirt with a giant picture of a Meowth on the front. This one guy, Luke, contacted me almost immediately asking me if I actually liked Pokemon and whether I was excited for the release of B2W2 (which hadn't been released here yet at the time). I looked at his profile and saw that he lived just 1.5km away, so we decided to meet up.
We met up and hung out a few times with his other nerdy friends who are also into Pokemon, but the whole game changed on Tuesday when he sent me a text at work saying "Do you wanna go for a drive? I need to talk to you about something"
No, this story isn't going where you think it is :P.
I agreed to pick him up after work and we drove around for a bit, and eventually he told me that his two housemates Ben and Jarrad have made a spur-of-the-moment decision to buy a house in a town about five hours away, and they'd be moving at the end of the month, and he needed two new housemates to share his expenses. I've been feeling increasingly unhappy at home, feeling like I'm living under my parents' thumb rather than their roof which is not OK at age 22, so I jumped at the chance.
I had til the end of the month so I resolved not to tell my parents about it just yet, but wait until next week when my sister would be holidaying in Melbourne so that it would be less pressure-packed. Then on Friday, I got more texts from him saying that it had been moved up to two weeks, which meant that I would have to tell my parents soon. I got home from the party and told my mother straight away, and she did not take it very well... especially since she didn't know I even had a friend called Luke.
After a long discussion, I told her I needed 100 points of ID to take to the real estate the next day and I had to go down to Luke's to discuss stuff. So I gathered up my stuff and went. Little did I know that my mother would log onto my uncle's Facebook to stalk my new friend.
Luke and I were printing off rental application forms when I got a text from my mother.
"I think we need to discuss this a bit more before u make a decision. This guy is gfay isn't he?"
To which I replied, "Yes he is, is that a problem?"
She replied soon after, "Yes I think it is. Im not being nasty. Are you gay too?"
At this point, there was only one word on my mind, and it's not appropriate for PokeCommunity.
After what was probably too long, I replied, "We'll talk when I get home, but it's not like that."
She took no time at all to reply with "Please come home now"
And so I raced home, completely unsure of what to expect. I walked in to find my mother and my sister sitting in the living room in complete silence. And then it began.
"So, do you have something you'd like to tell me?"
I really didn't want to say "I'm gay" at this point, because the question was so unbelievably cringe-worthy that that answer would have seemed completely lame after the fact. So I said "The answer is yes" and sat down in my seat. At this point she went very stiff, and the voice in which she asked the following questions was very very quiet.
She ran through the usual questions. How long have you known, does anybody else know, how long have they known, "so you told them before you told me?", and so on and so forth. She asked if I was interested in Luke, to which I told her no, and she asked if there was anybody else I'd ever been interested in. Those sorts of questions. Thankfully she didn't ask me about the status of my virginity, since I've had sex with several different men in this very house, once on the couch on which she currently sat.
My sister was worse than my mother, she was very upset that I didn't feel I could tell her. Both were upset about that actually, and I do resent it a little bit. It's not as easy as that, and just because they knew they would be OK with it, does not by a long shot mean that I knew that, particularly since I've spent years getting very mixed messages from my mother on the LGBT topic in general... such as shouting "Ew, ew ,ew!" every time two men would kiss on television.
Then they turned the conversation to how they don't think I should move out... for many reasons I'm sure you can imagine and I won't bore you with. There were a couple of reasons she listed that were to do with the whole gay thing.
"My biggest fear is that you'll become one of those gay people with the funny haircuts. You just see them on the street and you think 'oh my god'".
"I really don't want you getting into the gay scene."
Those really bothered me, and they still do, but whatever. It didn't go as badly as it could have. Eventually Mum and my sister went to bed, after Mum making it clear that it was a shock and something they would have to get their heads around, but that it's OK with them.
Apparently she had told my Dad before I got home, and he was snoring when I got home, but when I got up the next morning she told me he hadn't slept very well at all. I woke up feeling really icky and invaded, rather than free like I was supposed to, and that surprised me. I don't like people knowing more about me than they absolutely have to in real life... for some reason I'm very guarded that way, but even still, everybody talks about coming out as this hugely freeing experience and I just didn't feel that way.
Mum went out of her way the next morning to assure me that my Dad's quietness was just shock, and not a sign that he wasn't OK with my being gay. My Dad and I haven't had much to say to each other since I was 14 years old, so I actually hadn't noticed his quietness at all lmao. Before I left for work, she asked if it would be OK if we all sat down and had a talk as a family, to which I agreed despite my thought process of "Oh God, two awkward discussions two nights?"
So that night we all sat down and had a discussion. They all raised their concerns about me moving out in a somewhat intervention-style format... again I won't bore you with the details of that, but we got onto the gay stuff and they did the whole speech you expect from a family trying to show they support their new gay son
"We still love you, we accept you, they say you're born that way so it's all good, it's a shock but it doesn't change anything" and so on and so on. I guess that was really nice of them, but I was never all that worried that they wouldn't accept me since I don't really talk all that much to them at the best of times. So it was nice, but completely awkward and skin-crawly and I didn't quite know what to do with myself. I just kept saying "yup" to everything they said until it was all over. I feel bad, but I couldn't bring myself to say "I love you too" because it just felt way too Brady Bunch for my tastes.
That was Saturday night. It's now the early hours of Tuesday morning and it hasn't been mentioned since! I am moving out (to a house that is five minutes away from where I live now) with two gay guys and I'm gonna have the greatest experience of my life (I hope), and my family knows that I'm gay and everything is all good.
So that's my coming out story :P