Coming Out

World Traveller Series II: Events & Incidents ~ Episode 5

by Brett Hayhoe

There is no event or incident in a gay person’s life quite like coming out.

It means something different to every individual who does it. Each person’s journey is a road not previously travelled — destination unknown, outcome uncertain. Sometimes uneventful. Sometimes tumultuous. Often both, in quick succession. Coming out can, and frequently does, reshape everything that follows: whether a person keeps their family or has to find a new one, whether they keep their friends, their colleagues, their city, their livelihood, their sense of self.

Mine was, as it turns out, a mixed bag.

The Knowing

I knew I was attracted to males at a very early age. But being raised in a small town, the path to personal honesty was not a straightforward one. There were no role models. No sense that safety was available. And an almost inherited understanding — absorbed rather than taught — that the proper path ran in a single, well-worn direction: girlfriend, fiancé, wife, child. In that order. Without deviation.

I did, at one point, tell my girlfriend at the time — a woman I truly loved. Her reaction caused me to retract the statement almost immediately. I said I was only joking.

I was not joking.

The Marriage

Let me be unambiguous about something: I do not regret my marriage. I do not regret my son. Both are part of a life I would not undo.

What I do regret — and the word is inadequate — is putting my wife through the deception and the eventual heartache that followed from it. Our relationship followed the expected path with almost textbook precision. If there is regret to be carried over anything, it is in the years that followed: I had very little to do with my son’s life from the time he was five, and that distance has never fully closed.

As a single gay man, I am aware that I will most likely die alone. Perhaps that is the karmic accounting for a marriage entered into under false pretences. Perhaps it is simply the shape a life takes when the early choices are made from fear rather than honesty. Either way, it is what it is.

The First Telling

My wife and I did not separate because I was gay. But we could never have reunited for that very reason.

Twelve months after we separated, she invited me to dinner. It was a genuinely delightful evening — warm, comfortable, the kind of dinner that reminds you why you liked someone in the first place. At the end of it, she revealed the real reason for the invitation: she wanted to try again.

I told her we couldn’t.

She asked why.

I said: because I’m gay.

She was the first person I had told. The significance of that was not lost on me even then. She was, in truth, the only person I felt I genuinely had to tell — the one person whose understanding was not optional.

What followed was tears, vomiting, distress, and disbelief. I walked out. I walked home.

And personally? I felt on top of the world. There was almost no thought given, in that moment, to what she was going through on the other side of that door. Coming out had a euphoric effect — the particular lightness of a person who has finally set down something very heavy. An authentic life was now available. The relief was enormous.

The empathy came later. The regret, too.

The Sisters

Coming out is not a singular event. It is a series of conversations, each requiring its own version of courage, each carrying its own unpredictable outcome. Loved ones, siblings, parents, close friends, colleagues, business associates — the list does not end quickly.

Both of my parents had passed away by this point, which removed that particular conversation from the agenda entirely. A mercy, perhaps, though not one that came without its own complicated feelings.

My four sisters were another matter.

The eldest had already caused family disruption by outing me second-hand — at the time, I denied the allegations — so when the confirmation arrived, she gloated a little. Fair enough, in its way. The second eldest, always known for her matter-of-fact approach to life, simply said: that makes sense — that’s why he didn’t try to get back with his wife. The third eldest became closer to me and introduced me to anyone who would listen as her gay brother, which was genuinely touching. The youngest simply shrugged. This sort of thing has never particularly exercised her either way.

Four sisters. Four completely different responses. All of them, ultimately, fine.

The Best Friend

The meeting with my closest friend was arranged at a bar. A couple of drinks does make these conversations marginally easier — not because the alcohol provides courage exactly, but because it slows the pace of the room slightly, and slowing the pace helps.

When I finally got the words out, he said: well, it’s about time you came out.

The relief was almost overwhelming.

Everyone in my personal circle had a variation of the same reaction. The people who knew me had, it turned out, largely already known. The coming out conversation confirmed something they had already accommodated. There was no drama. There was no loss. Just an adjustment of the stated facts to match the understood ones.

The business community was a different matter entirely.

The Business

I had been operating a very lucrative monthly luncheon club. It was doing well. The guests were regulars, the bookings reliable, the whole enterprise ticking along with the comfortable momentum of something that has found its rhythm.

Then I came out.

The next luncheon had no bookings. Not fewer bookings — no bookings. Like the turning off of a light switch.

I rang around to find out why. One businessman’s response conveyed the sentiment of the rest with particular clarity: you’re too gay.

I said I had not done anything differently from before.

He said: no — we always thought you might have been. But now we know.

That was the end of the luncheon club. The end of that income. And, not immediately but eventually, the end of my life in Cairns.

There is a particular kind of shock that arrives when you discover that the people who accepted you conditionally will withdraw that acceptance the moment the condition is made explicit. The thinking had always been gay — perhaps — and that uncertainty, that plausible deniability, had been the operating space. Remove the uncertainty and the space closes.

Cairns had been home. The gay scene there had given me friends, nightclub owners, café owners, a social world that made life bearable and, for a couple of years, genuinely enjoyable. But the glitter, as it tends to, eventually wore off. Reality arrived. A move became necessary.

The Reckoning

There are many anecdotes from those years that could be shared. Most would not survive a G-rating. Suffice to say that coming out changed everything — some of it for the better, some of it for the worse, and most of it in ways that were impossible to predict from the inside of the decision.

Would I have done things differently with the benefit of hindsight? Probably. But hindsight arrives with 20/20 vision and none of us, at the time, have a crystal ball.

I have had four serious relationships since my marriage. All four were, in their own distinct ways, disastrous. I am therefore not someone positioned to lecture anyone on love, or relationships, or the wisdom of the heart.

They say the fear parents carry when a child comes out is the fear of loneliness — that their child will be consigned to a life without a partner, without that particular form of companionship. I am grateful, in a complicated way, that my mother did not have the opportunity to carry that fear on my behalf.

Living an authentic life. Being honest with myself and with those around me. These are real things. They matter.

They do not, in the end, fully compensate for the loneliness that arrives most evenings, or for the knowledge that there will most likely be no one to hold a hand at the last moment.

But they are what there is. And an honest life, even an incomplete one, is still a life that belongs entirely to the person living it.

That counts for something.

It has to.

The World Traveller Series II: Events & Incidents is written and produced by Brett Hayhoe — publisher, editor and administrator of Q Magazine.

Read more at Q Magazine Blogs — Ask Brett Podcasts & YouTube — Ask Brett Podcasts | Hayhoe Channel

Next episode: My Work Life in Melbourne