I have often thought that I wanted to come out to my homophobic uncle, who bullied me horrendously when I was very small. And if he objected, I would say, "You tortured me when I was a child! You made me want to die, when I was six years old! You don't have to be in my life, and you can't talk to me about God, when you were the devil!" (I called him the devil, all those years ago, because I realized that it wasn't that he didn't care how much he hurt me; he did care--the more he hurt me, the happier he became! Just like the devil.)
I also fantasized about saying, "You probably think being gay comes from someone's childhood. Well, I guess you would know--you were the man who hurt me the most!" (I am female.)
But then I started to wonder if coming out was an excuse to say how much he had hurt me. And I realized that coming out as bisexual wasn't as important to me as telling him exactly how much he had hurt me, that I was still trying to heal from it.
Saying that seems harder, emotionally, than saying that I am gay or bi. He seems much nicer now, especially for him, but am I just supposed to pretend nothing happened, because he is nicer? I have been hurting from this, much longer than I have been hurting--and fighting my own arguing inner voices--because I knew I was not straight.
He has said before that "if you're gay, don't come out," as if he didn't know how cruel that was. But all my life, I have been living under this unwritten rule, that I can't say anything about his abuse, and especially about the incident when I called him the devil and he almost got in a physical fight with my mother over the way he threatened to "bust your ass" to me.
There is still a part of me that is afraid of him. I still remember being held upside down against my will, "tickled" on the ribs as I fought for breath against the physical pain. I felt like I was dying, like I was drowning. My mom thinks I have PTSD from it. I do too.
He lives with my grandparents, unfortunately. So if I go to visit them, I usually have to see him too. And I see him on holidays and birthdays, too. And I am tired of dreading seeing him.
So I feel like I should focus on getting ready to "come out" as someone who is still healing from his shit. And that is much scarier to me than simply coming out. I'm not sure when I'll be ready, but I'm going to try to love myself until I am.
I feel better about actually coming out as bisexual/gay, after hearing what my two aunts, his sisters, said recently. (I don't like either term very much, since it implies either 50-50, or 100%, and though I like both, I just see myself as happier with another woman.) They seemed to say neutral, or maybe even positive things, about a gay person they knew. Here is their exchange:
Aunt 1: "She said that she had a hard time with her son being gay, at first, because she thought she couldn't have grandchildren."
Aunt 2: "Well, she'll just have to do what I do, and love on other people's children."
And no, I have no idea whether Aunt 2 was implying anything about her own children, my cousins. At the very least, she thinks that one of them won't have children, or that she will have to wait a while.
So it seems that my aunts, for the most part, will not really care. That has made me feel a little better. In a strange way, it took off some of the internal pressure I feel about coming out (though I know I shouldn't feel this pressure).
And if it weren't for the unaddressed bullying, I would not care, at this point in my life, how my uncle reacted to my being gay. Perhaps by addressing the bullying, I can eventually also feel free enough to come out. But the bullying is harder to acknowledge and address.
Sometimes I think I want to call him, and talk. Yet I don't know if I should interrupt my everyday life to do that. And that subject never seems to come up at family gatherings.
And I still feel scared, scared to rock the boat and break an unwritten taboo in the family. But I used to be more scared. So maybe I won't always be this scared.
I am going to focus on "coming out," calmly (like I usually talk to him, not angrily), as being hurt by him. And, for the hardest part, in the meantime, I will try to break the habit of putting myself down for being "too weak" to say something (as if I wasn't trained since childhood to fear him, even if he isn't as much of a threat to me now).
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