closet.

Data Dumping
3 min readMay 17, 2021

It did not take me long to leave the proverbial closet. I took the time to consider the possibility that I would find a woman sexually attractive enough to have as a bedmate and felt it was not unappealing. It did help that my queer friends were having a liberating time of their lives exploring their sexualities and expanding their friend circles so the allure of the queer community came at me like a whiff of chocolate chip cookies. But this is not the case for other individuals. I have met other people that merely entertaining the idea would shatter their clearly tenuous relationship with their family and other friends they have held onto as some illusion of real life.

I live in a generation where the ability to be openly non-heterosexual is becoming more common for people to tolerate if not accept. At least that is the space I resided in offered. I am sure that the sexual liberations offered as the LGBTQIA communities around the globe have met with various levels of acceptance and bravery. I applaud the communities that face the threat of violence at any level or risk their housing for the opportunity to be free in their sexual orientation. I used to look at the question of people trapped in an openly unforgiving family hoping to explore and embrace this aspect of themselves in a way that did not lead into a predatory space. I hoped these people could hold onto these desired through this trial space and upon establishing their independence from their family that coming out then would be safer. I did not need to live in these spaces so I do not know if the spaces were built on a barrage of hatred for sexually liberated individuals.

I look at my best friend and her sister who chose to run from their mother’s home instead of co-habitat under her oppressive way of regarding them and her success in this space of being a divorced woman who took her children from a known molester. But I did not need to live in that space. I don’t need to live in the spaces where my sexual exploration would have any kind of impact on my housing security. I kind of miss that level of acceptance in some ways but in my case, I was going to be seen as odd so my movement into this space was almost not a conversation starter.

But that was not the case in my aunt’s generation. At least that is what the stories around her suggest. Even when the times opened up for her to explore her sexuality, her comfort in hiding in plain sight was her life. I look at this choice and ponder on how many other people choose to commit to their hidden lives despite being in a position to make what I perceive as healthier moves for their lifestyles. I have read books on late in life lesbians that found a partner they would uproot their lives for. I recall a woman in one of my lesbian circles that waited for the death of her mother to finally enter the lesbian community as letting her mother see that would have caused more trauma than she was willing to process. Since the ancestor realm is a thing for us to acknowledge, I wonder if children that choose to make these kinds of waits do they plan on telling their parents in the ancestor plane or accept that their parent looked upon them after they left the physical plane and let it ride? It does not bother me that my advice was to endure until the conflicted person was able to stand on their own feet. I hope that it was a statement that made them even consider finding their own footing sooner or allowed them the small vindictiveness to stay as a spy on the inside like some quietly queer people continued to work for openly hostile political parties. Not all these people were in these roles as spies but it is nice to think they were making that kind of sacrifice for the advancement of the LGBTQIA community.

Although, applying that work may have been questionable since the issues around sexuality is not a fixed battle lines war but a social one.

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