My Outiversary: Coming Out and Being Out

It started like a normal Friday. My first year uni exams had just finished. I’d be back all summer long in just a few weeks but I couldn't wait and came home especially for the weekend. I woke up and had a cuppa tea on the sofa watching Lorraine. Mum and I went for lunch at Tomassi’s, saw my friend Lea also having lunch with her Mum and then we went to the cemetery.

It was there, in front of my Dad’s tombstone that I told my Mum ‘I’m gay’.

So today, June 18th, is my official ‘Outiversary’, much like the Queen has a real birthday and an official birthday. There were friends I’d already told before my Mum. Some at uni in the days and weeks before, who smiled me on my way home that weekend. There were school friends I’d told years before that ‘I thought I was gay’. And there was me. I can’t name the day, but I still have the message to myself, scribbled in a school corridor saying ‘I’m gay’.

A photo of me in June 2010, a few weeks after I came out to my Mum

That’s the very abridged story of my ‘coming out’ six years ago. The story of ‘being out’ is one I’m living now.

It feels like it only started 12 months ago. Yes, there’s moments from when I first questioned and came out, of confusing and threatening times that I’m almost ready to share. But for five years, I only put my sexuality into innuendo or how much I fancied Zac Efron. I left it aside at the workplace and the church door.

Until I heard a homophobic speaker in the pulpit. Their hurtful words forced me to bring my sexuality and religion together. And get on with being gay.

It’s this last year that I’ve enjoyed being out. A few dates, a few trips to Soho, blogging about my experiences, watching films with LGBT leads, getting involved at Pride in London and CASENET (Christian Aid Sexuality Network), going to same-sex weddings.

My family at Will and Mark's wedding in March this year. Photo by Alex Beckett

I’ve now realised that my sexuality isn’t a browser plug-in to use as and when I need it. Earlier this week my Mum said: ‘you’re turning into your brother, everything has to be gay’. I am gay. All the time. Now I’ve come out with my words, I can’t stay in with my actions.

The poignancy of my Outiversary this year is ridiculously obvious, sandwiched as it is between last weekend’s fatal homophobic attack in Orlando, and next weekend’s Pride in London. And as I write this, Baltic Pride is marching for equality in Lithuania.

That’s why I’m celebrating today and this Pride season. Homophobia still kills and devastates lives in every country. I’m remembering and celebrating just as I did in Soho on Monday night with at least 7000, maybe 10,000 other people to show that love is winning.

So when my nephew Mitchell, born just a month before I came out asks me about love, I’ll show him this photo from the vigil, point to his two gay uncles (myself and my brother) and tell him I love him.

Ray Lang/LNP published in The Guardian, Tuesday 14th June 2016

This blog post is dedicated to everyone who helped me come out, especially my brother Will and by extension, everyone who helped him come out too.