Joe's POZ Blog

One of the timeless topics that surrounds being HIV positive is whether you disclose your status and if you do, to whom? A term has even been coined; "closeted", that refers to a person keeping some very private segment of their life from others. Reasons why people remain closeted vary greatly, but two of the most common involve either being HIV positive or gay and many times, both. I decided to share part of my coming out story, to illustrate that reactions can be varied, but most of all unpredictable.

I'm not here to tell you whether you should be closeted or out, because those are very personal decisions. Yet, based on my experience, coming out wound up being more of a process than an event. Yes there was the initial reaction, but as you will see, that reaction can be long lasting and ever changing. Leaving my closet made me rethink, not only what family and friends meant, but to ask the question: When coming out, can conditional love be better than no love at all?

Prior to my becoming positive, I had remained in the closet about my sexuality. After all I was married and for various reasons it took me many years to come to terms with my sexuality. But when I tested HIV positive there was no way to contain the truth from being revealed. My soon-to-be ex-wife would see to it that I was outed, big time.

So I had a double coming out in my late 20s. The Red Cross, who then outed me in terms of being HIV positive, had tagged my blood donation, so I thought to capitalize on that by also coming out as being gay. The two events were certainly intertwined and I imagine I figured that if people could withstand the shock of HIV, my being gay would be no big deal. I could not have been more wrong. After telling my wife, the next two people I dreaded telling the most were my parents. I imagined their reaction would be more favorable than hers and I was beginning to understand how varied the reactions could be to my coming out.

(I have omitted any discussion of my outing and my wife at the time, out of respect for both of us.)

The reactions of my friends however, were completely unexpected, but given the complexities of this outing, not overly surprising. After telling a number of close friends they began to evaporate as water on the Sahara. The exodus began slowly but gained true momentum after my divorce. Within a year, all but a couple of childhood friends had turned away from me. There was little I could do and because I was still numb from the news myself, I just let them go. I had never expected that my coming out would decimate my friends, but I was in such a different space then and I had not anticipated a number of things that were to follow.

I suppose a brief family history is in order, at least to put things into perspective. I was born in Toronto, orphaned at 4, adopted at 5 and then moved to Detroit. My parents were devout Roman Catholics and for some reason they were stingy when expressing their love or providing praise. They were the product of the Great Depression and as such they had a very limited view of what was acceptable in life. They worried too much about what the extended family would think, or how something might look to the neighbors. They did the best they could, but their abilities were severely limited by their backgrounds and religious beliefs.

When I decided to come out to my parents, I told my mother first and hoped to enlist her help in telling my father. Dad and I were never that close, for many reasons, with enough blame on each of our parts. So it was odd that he was the one to tell me that my being positive did not change his love for me, but he could not bring himself to even discuss my sexuality. Ever. His religious teachings would not let him acknowledge my "sin". And because of his religion he never spoke of my sexuality again.

My mother, on the other hand, was born to be a fag mom if there ever was one. While totally sympathetic about my infection, you could just see the curiosity in her eyes about the rest of my life. But she had to juggle her relationship with my father and that limited her acknowledging or taking an active part in my life. While our love remained, it was becoming "conditional". I decided to roll with this reaction, because there was still enough shock to go around. They deserved the time to adjust, so I let it rest. Little did I realize that the reaction to my coming out continued, even if silently.

Then there were those unforeseen reactions to my coming out, such as with my first partner. About a year after coming out I began a relationship, with Mark, which would last for the next several years. In hindsight, after coming out, Mark was just what I needed. He challenged me to become even more open about both my sexuality and infection. He refused to hold my hand and demanded that I stand on my own two feet. How I hated him at times, when I thought I needed him the most and he would firmly move away from me. Where I saw him as abandoning me, he saw how he was enabling me to become my own man. Forcing me to claim my own destiny and demanding that I accept responsibility for my own life. What a man, who at the same time could challenge me to excel, yet provide such a nurturing love. His reaction to my coming out was unexpected but welcome and his was an unconditional love.

All during this time, I never came out at work about either issue, until I notified Human Resources of my intent to go on long term disability, near the very end of my career. It was a good choice, because the day before I left work I notified all of my coworkers of my AIDS status and you could just see the fear in many of their eyes. While I hated to lie to them about my health, all those years, it was the right decision. The people, who I cared most about at work, were the ones who kept in touch after I left and that is just how I wanted it to be.

The next few years passed uneventfully. But even as my health deteriorated my parents never spoke of either issue and their contact with Mark was very limited. It was also during this time that my mother died after a long bout of illness. I suppose you could say we were fortunate in that when her demise became suddenly imminent, we were able to say our proper farewells. Once again, the three of us shared an unconditional love. But it was temporary at best.

Over the next year, my father would refuse to do anything with Mark and I as a couple, so our contact was somewhat limited. However, also within that year he decided to marry a close friend and needed my help with emptying and selling his condo. I was so excited about the marriage that I let the slights of the past go and with myself as the Best Man we hurried to set up the ceremony and the wedding luncheon. Our love was still conditional, but it worked for us.

So imagine my shock and disappointment when my wedding invitation came addressed solely to me. When I called my father, to point out the omission, I was told that while Mark was more than "welcome" at the ceremony, the wedding luncheon was just for "family". My shock was quickly changing to horror. It seems that the new wife was adding "conditions" to my relationship with my father.

I can't even begin to describe what this did to me. It shattered my impression of my family; even what little there was left of it. Other than my daughter, my father was my only family. I just was not prepared for how my being gay had escalated as an issue for my father and his bride until I arrived at the wedding luncheon. Conditional or not, I was not feeling loved at all.

The ceremony was quaint and reserved. Mark had graciously agreed to follow my lead this day, so we separated at the church. Katie and I enter the lunchroom and as we are being introduced I recognize many of Marge's sons and daughters and grandchildren. But I could not have ever anticipated the horror I would feel when I am introduced to one of her grandchildren and her date from high school!

This was the luncheon for "family" only? What a crock of shit! Mark, my partner of 4 years, the man who stood by me in my illness, the man who wrote and delivered my mother's eulogy was not considered to be family. But little missy's boyfriend of 3 months is "family", by the simple fact that their relationship is heterosexual and not homosexual. My love and relationship with my father and his new wife had become even more conditional, for the sake of appearances.

It wasn't bad enough that my father shunned us privately, but now he had chosen to do it publicly. We were headed for a showdown and after their honeymoon; my father kept trying to justify his discrimination against Mark, because of the nature of our relationship. In terms of my HIV, he was never anything but kind and understanding. However, his view of my sexuality was extremely disappointing. I began to understand his view of my life, my partner and me. I felt like I was in the stone ages: Ugh! Disease good, gay bad. This was conditional love in its worse form.

Their religious beliefs, coupled with their inability to address my being gay, had enabled them to exclude the person who meant the most to me, from their wedding. Everything that my father knew about me was tossed aside, all for the sake of appearances. I had not changed in essence; in fact I was finally living my life truthfully. But rather than unconditional love, my father shunned me for years in a way that I know he never truly understood. To this day, I do believe he did it out of nothing more than fear and ignorance. Any other remembrance would just be too difficult to bear. But even understanding the circumstances did not lessen the pain.

However, it changed the relationship that I had with my father and his wife. I had to now hold them at arms length because while I understood why they did what they did, I was not ready to forgive them for it. The resentment from being shunned, these so many years, was becoming uncontrollable. Especially because they never really understood why what they did, hurt so much. It was very hard to see what I had thought to already be a conditional love, denigrate wildly depending upon appearances. Like I said, coming out was definitely more of a process than an event.

So what do you do, when you bare yourself to someone and they shun you? How do you survive redefining a love that you thought inviolate? How do you pick up the pieces of a shattered notion and salvage whatever you can? I suppose, one piece at a time, or at least that is how I did it. It took me a while to realize that maybe you have to renegotiate some things in life as the situation changes and that included love. Over the years, I could either remain angry at their treatment of me, or redefine what "conditions" I needed from my father and eventually, his wife.

Sometimes coming out dictates that we make a leap of faith and hopefully we receive a positive reaction. But often the reaction is not what we expect and we find our self on unsettled ground. While you might wish to rescind coming out, that option is not possible and I found it better to work at solidifying my rocky landing. Through all of these years, I had to decide if conditional love was better than none at all. I decided it was and eventually my father began to understand how he had hurt me, but he still refused to accept my sexuality. But we both waited too long to try and mend fences and in the end, it was too little too late. He could never be made to understand the fact that acceptance is all that I wanted, because I never needed his approval. He saw them both as having the same meaning and in his opinion; he could not offer one without the other, especially because of his religious beliefs.

Over the last years of his life, my father missed a lot of my life, by his own choice. When he finally began to realize that life was too short for such nonsense, fate took a very twisted turn and he developed dementia. It escalated quickly into Alzheimer's and by then, any hope of salvaging our relationship was shattered. I missed out on the last 10 years of my father's life, because he just could not accept all of me. I tried my best, but in the end, I had to remain true to who and what I was and so finally I said my farewells and moved to Florida. Unfortunately, my father had already moved on mentally and was placed in a nursing home, where he would languish for three more years until his death.

I share this simply as food for thought. Being honest and out, with who and what you are, is a very personal decision and one that can have infinite variables. I encourage anyone who is contemplating such an "outing" to seriously consider the ramifications but I also encourage you to consider the tangible benefits of being out. Because ultimately the person who benefits the most from coming out is you and nobody else. There are no words to describe the isolation that lifts when you are honest about who and what you are. How your view of the world, and how it perceives you, changes, many times very dramatically.

I also can't guarantee how anybody will react to your outing, because I never would have anticipated the varied reactions I received from mine. All you can hope for is the best, but don't underestimate those closest to you, especially parents, because we can be exceptionally resilient. However, there is still the law of unintended consequences, so you can never be 100% sure of any outcome. While your coming out might be an option at first, it may soon become inevitable. Because eventually, you will choose to come out of the closet, when it becomes too painful to remain inside.

To come out or not, I encourage you to trust your own instincts when deciding what is right for you. And if your reactions are not as you had hoped, then maybe it is time to reevaluate your priorities. There is no shame in redefining relationships, even with family and friends. You cannot control how others will respond to your coming out, nor are you responsible for their reactions. This is not to say that you should accept poor treatment as a result of your coming out, just make sure you see the issue clearly. And if your family or friends choose to disown you, might I suggest that you need to seriously reconsider why you want the acceptance of someone who would deny you being yourself.

In coming out to others, many times we just need to make a leap of faith and hope for the best possible reaction. At other times, we need to accept the reaction and work to improve the relationship. Unfortunately, there may also be times when we need to decide: Can conditional love be better than no love at all?

There is no right answer to that question, because with love there rarely is one answer. In coming out, all that matters is what works for you.