The older guy and the younger guy are the same person, but one says he's gay and the other says he's straight. This should come as no surprise to 99% of the readers of this page, because, at some age, older or younger, they've been there.
				What changed? I didn't, but my attitude about myself changed. That made all the difference in the world. Ten years ago, I made a decision to acknowledge what I had known and run from all my life: I was gay. Life started on December 23, 1989, somewhat late in life by any day's standard.

I had absolutely no idea where I was going from there, but I knew I couldn't go back. The whole idea of going anywhere at all with this was terrifying. I still had the accumulated baggage and stereotypes of several decades of "conventional wisdom", but by January 6 of 1990 I had already experienced a calm, clear vision which carried with it a shocking message of finality. Given only what I understood of my past so far, it seemed I didn't want to live at all:

			"There are times when one is compelled to express an astonishing regret for having enjoyed life so much, or at all. This is one of them. I remember the bittersweet picture of Sawtooth Ridge, and its magnificent five-mile long undiscovered valley, the whole afternoon's journey laid out before my naive and trusting eyes. It was the only time in my life I could see where I was going very clearly and distinctly, and I was not frightened."

		Fortunately for me, I was able to hold that thought long enough to think about what it meant and put any urge to opt out completely back with the rest of the past, where it belonged.		The first month was "getting used to it", around the clock, a bizarre and largely treadmill period. I reexamined my past over and over again looking for clues, and came up with almost no answers on my own. Every waking minute of every day was like a good dream/bad dream that refused to go away. I knew this much: No one should ever have to go through what I put myself through. I was determined to find a way to do something about it, too, but this was more involved than I anticipated.

I suppose that, at some early point, I imagined that I would just say, "OK, OK, I'm gay" and that would be it: The past would be revealed, the future would become manifest, everybody would understand, and I could just get on with the business of living life in the same way that I had always lived it.

One must come out to one's self before one can possibly come out to others. I practiced saying "I'm GAY" in front of the mirror. How did I know that? I knew how I knew that. What was different was that I was willing to say that, well, if what I loved was gay, then I am too. I wrote down things that I would say to people. Even as it appeared I might have a future after all, my own questioning of myself and the "wasted years" was getting more confusing.

It was a wonderful time, but a terrifying time. The operative mechanism here is that of waking up one morning and realizing you'd been lying to yourself about something at the core of your being, and that you'd been doing this for most of your life. How would you know what you could still trust?

I came out to a couple of close friends. The deal was: I have something very important I have to tell you, but you mustn't tell anyone else just yet. The first person in my day-to-day life that I told was my roommate, who was straight. It took us about two more minutes to figure out he'd have to tell his girlfriend -- before she heard about it from somebody else first!

Allegory of the caves: They were supportive, but they didn't know any more about the gay community than I did . At least one of them had friends who were good people and openly gay, but I was supposed to be the "expert". Like some teenager in Moscow or Tehran, all I had was a dictionary for support. Talk about Plato's "Allegory of the caves": my friends and I would sit up late at night talking about what it must be like when people are gay, based largely on sensationalism we had seen in the media, and we wondered if I would turn out like "them".

I'm pleased to report that I did. Well, now, as to what exactly "them" consisted of, the broadest education of my life was about to begin.

Resource: Like everyone else, I also supposed that I was unique. Fortunately for me, I was quickly steered to a peer group, the Pacific Center For Human Growth in Berkeley, where I did learn that this "aloneness" I experienced in the early coming-out process was largely needless. We all start out alone in life, but we don't need to stay that way. Coming-out should be the same healthy process of growth which others receive in their own more traditional growing years.

Disclaimer: Along the way, I will be sharing observations that could pass for advice. I'm not a professional counselor, and I have no knowledge of your personal experience level. If you think that some of my observations might apply to you or someone you care for, my purpose is only to share what I think I've learned from my own experience, not to tell anyone else what they should do.

What you read here may be spoken from experience, but it is personal opinion still. If, for any reason, you're interested in finding out more that you'll find here, by all means follow the links I've provided to other sites.

Back then, my hope was that I would someday be able to reach out to others in the same boat. Like everybody else, I felt that no one should ever have to go through, alone, what I had experienced. Today, I would say that coming-out is not a frivolous decision at any level of development. It should be considered carefully and planned in advance, because far more than personal comfort can hang in the balance. This is a once-in a lifetime decision, so there is no valid way to substitute your arm-chaired gut feelings for talking, in a safe environment, with others who have been through it.

		Alone, or in the company of peers, everybody has to do their own work. There are no magic incantations, and few ritual healing formulas.		With the young, the basic coming-out issues generally are learning to embrace reality, and dealing with one's parents and peers. Coming out at a later stage of life brings other tradeoffs. One has built up a baggage of the past to reconcile, to shake. I shook it. I didn't have much choice. I didn't feel I had much time. I saw myself then as having wasted decades of my own life in lies and self-deception. I largely disagree with this analysis now, which is leading us to a perspective I fervently hoped, 10 years ago, I would be able to provide some day.

I think I have that perspective now, but it's only what worked for me. I did my own work, but my situation needed the ears and experiences of peers who, like myself, had ducked sexual orientation issues for many years. For others, coming out as teens or young adults, there is less past to regret and reconcile.

Ten years ago, I had a whole laundry list of discoveries to share with the world. Today, I am not so sure what I want to say.

I've said most of it in these pages, and in "Ask Alex", a little-known corner of a small La Parola, enclosed in a small web site in a billion megabytes of world wide web. La Parola has been on the web for around five years, and has been a club newsletter for longer than I've been editor, which is about nine.

I still feel an alarming impatience with questions like "what does it feel like to be gay?", an impatience not entirely in keeping with the training of a person who went on to become a peer group facilitator for five years.

		Part of my pledge to myself ten years ago was that I would never forget. What has happened instead is that I have moved on, as we all must. I have acquired skills and met challenges that would have been unthinkable back then, for a variety of reasons, and yet I think it would be a mistake for me to represent to myself, or to you, that "coming-out" has lost its significance. It never does. Only a beginning, it is a fundamental rite of gay passage, with many parallels in other segments of our society.

It is a habit of mine to get the bad news out of the way first. Believe it or not, the initial weeks were the only bad news I got. If they were rough on me, please understand that the chickens were coming home to roost, as I always knew they would one day. I had the decisions and choices I made as a young adult to thank for that. Please don't read from this narrative a generalized pattern of how people come to grips with their sexual orientation. People react differently to self-discovery and personal change, very often much more realistically than I did. My situation was not uncommon, though, particularly among those who have a past to reconcile, and among those who do not have a supportive peer group from the very beginning.

I fit both categories. Once I was able to laugh again, I started a gag that, of the three conditions known to be leading causes of suicide (change in employment, change in residence, and loss of loved one), I had five of them.

Whoever you may be, you should carry the message that it can be dangerous for people to try to "go it alone". You can avoid a crisis by steering yourself, or any friend or family member beginning a "coming-out" process, to a local group of people who are trained and experienced in the issues that face us at this point. This web site is full of links to other gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender resources (so often abbreviated as "glbt").

Those links lead to links greater still, and greater still, until even the densest couch potato among us begins to see there's no refuge in the "I'm unique and alone" theories that we so often concoct to comfort ourselves in our refusals to see.

Resource: Because almost any local phone book or web index will have a listing for Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays (PFLAG), I would happily recommend one begin there for resources.

		I also recommend a firm resolve to avoid any delay in meeting with people who actually ARE gay or lesbian. The question that got me to agree to check out the Pacific Center was this:		"So, what are you going to do now that you're gay? Sit on that couch for the rest of your life talking about it? Like you did all those years the story was that you were straight?"

My friends remained supportive, my peer group was outstanding. I learned -- I learned a lot, and very quickly, although I always suspected I was trying to make up for lost time. I was soon riding the crest of an information supernova. It was a fascinating time. Along with everything else, I watched myself watching others grow. Mostly, I watched myself watching and questioning myself. Where was this headed?

What I still want to work up to, today, is the projection of a sense of "what it is like to be gay" that makes sense to community newcomers and reactionary old non-gay observers at the same time. After the novelty of coming-out issues have worn off, is there life after that? Of course there is. Other than by way of example, my own story isn't important. It isn't even particularly illustrative of the process, which is as varied as are we humans ourselves.

I also want to reassure anyone just starting the coming-out process, as I was then, that, yes, you do "get over it". As you re-discover and reinvent yourself, a new world opens up to the "real you" that you were hiding from all those years.

The biggest surprise for me was that it wasn't the "gay world" that opened up, though that happened too. The "real world", the greater community at large, opened up; it became possible to me in a way it never had seemed accessible before. Once the newness of being an "out" gay person fades, many people report an accelerated personal growth and achievement they never thought possible before.

"Born Again": There are many valid reasons why this should be so; for example, we must become comfortable with ourselves before we can truly be comfortable with others. This agonizing old homily is just one of several cited when peers report a feeling of being "born again". This phrase is almost always used, though in the same breath it is almost always repudiated because of its expropriation by fundamentalist religious sects.

After 10 years, what do I think "it's really like to be gay"?

As I confessed earlier, my first reaction would be to ask readers: what do you really want to know? Modest exposure to various schools of rhetoric suggests a turn-around response like "what do you want for an answer?". In all honesty, experience in life says that more is required. People, gay or straight, just starting out on issues like "what is gay", have a legitimate need for straightforward answers. I should surely know.

						Is it like waiting for the verdict of the Matthew Shepard murder trails, or the fate of the Mars Polar Lander, or the election returns? Is it like calling up your honey on a trip just to say "I love you!", or is it like slow-dancing to the Tennessee Waltz?
		Is it like Al Stevens' Cram Course on C/C++, is it like riding motorcycles or flying twin Cessnas, is it like troubleshooting complex COBOL systems and db2 database calls, or is it like sitting under the shade of a live oak, on a green hilltop, in the spring, and looking out upon all of the neighboring counties and the mountains beyond?
			Suppose, for the moment, that you happen to be straight, married and still hopelessly in love, and hold down a full-time career in a profession you love. You have two kids, who are growing up fast, but you love them and think that you can help guide them along the path to a happiness of their own finding. You drive a two-year old sedan, you share a family cat with every other neighbor that feeds it too, and, when time permits, which is seldom often enough, you like to get away for a vacation or a game of golf or a round of cards with the boys.

Answers: all of the above. Yes, that's what it feels like to be gay.

The point is not whether or not you happen to have a wife or kids. The point is whether you're happy with what you're doing, with the people in whose daily activities you immerse yourself every day, and with the directions that life is taking you. That's neither a gay issue, nor a straight issue. It's just an issue underlying all of the decisions and choices we all make.

If you prefer to make those decisions yourself, rather than letting the tide of events and the preferences of others make them for you, well, then, I guess that's why we're here talking about this together.

Being gay is like being anybody else. Being gay is like being whoever you were "before". Being gay is like becoming whoever you are now.

If you are gay, then being gay is being yourself; being yourself is being true to your identity. Only when you understand that, whether you happen to be gay or not, can you then appreciate the distinctions and diversity that our society's different cultures really do have to offer us. First and foremost, we are all human beings whose personal abilities, strengths, needs and likes override manufacturered differences among us -- of race, sex or sexual orientation, religion or ethnic background.

It still seems to me really surprising that there could be any point in saying that. We only need pick up the newspaper to see that a significant percentage of our population truly doesn't grasp basics that most of us sensed in grade school.

		According to the dogma of prejudice, a "little red wagon" is an object defined into the class "red", whose distinguishing property is that, attached to it, is a small four-wheeled vehicle with a handle for pulling. As regards other small, four-wheeled vehicles with handles for pulling, which may happen to be yellow, brown or pink, it is thought that those objects could not possibly be certified as wagons.

If you could go back ten years, what would be your best advice to yourself? I'll tell you what: I never considered myself prejudiced, but "coming-out" was not only the best thing that ever happened to me, it was an incredible and well-deserved eye-opener.

There's schools of thought where it's still considered witty to mock statements like "you don't know what it's like to be black." The cutting repartee goes something like this: "well, of course I don't know what it's like to be black, and even if I did, how am I supposed to believe that would change the axiomatic truthes as I know them?"

The more ingenuous newcomer to this (predominantly white) group, not knowing any better yet, may think: "well of course I know what it's like to be black; it's just like being me, only with dark skin!"

At a certain level of maturity it may seem convenient to assume that what we know from personal experience is everything we need to know about personal experience, but that is a convenient fiction, part of the baggage of "conventional wisdom" which regularly paralyzes even some of the best of folks from the neck up.

Both groups miss the point, though the first group dismisses it deliberately.

Denial of wrongdoing, denial of personal complicity, is not the same thing as accepting personal responsibility for knowing the truth and acting appropriately. The truth is that most of us find comfort in ignoring injustice when it does not affect us personally.