I always said I was never going to come out to anyone because I found it such a foreign concept. I had so many straight friends in high school, and they were never expected to come out to their parents as straight. To me it felt almost more performative than a personal representation of my sexuality. I was born in 1996, which is pretty much the last year of the millennial generation—the very cusp of Gen Z. While I don’t really identify with Gen Z, there are certain themes of the millennial generation that don’t really align with me. To me, millennials feel older in their thinking. It’s this gray area, and I find myself quite comfortable in it. So it was really eye-opening for me, returning to the high school and having conversations with these kids that were maybe three years younger than me. I realized how much that generation flipped in the course of three or four years. The conversation [around coming out] is a bit passé to have in high school now, because everyone is so out. Ten years ago you were making a YouTube video; you were doing something to say this is my struggle, this is my thing. And I am in no way taking that away from those people—I just never really felt my upper-middle-class upbringing was enough of a struggle that I could be a leader of a community.
My best friend has this kind of joke where he says, “It’s so interesting with you, because you lack a certain trauma.” I really do identify with that. I had girlfriends in high school, and they were in no way real girlfriends—there was no sexual exchange there. They took me under their wing and would do all the talking if anyone had a problem with me. I’d get dressed up with the girls, or tell them what to wear. Then, at some point in my late teens, the girlfriends I would bring home turned to boyfriends, and there was never a conversation around that. I actually never came out to my parents.
The big relationship of my teenage years—the one that really redefined my sexuality—happened when I was around 19 with someone I went to high school with, but after I graduated. I was sneaking him into my parents’ house in the middle of the night—I remember there being problems with that, but it was more problematic because he tripped the security alarm one night. Even still, though, he came down for waffles the next morning—we could still break bread with my parents. That was really a zoom-out moment for me like, Whoa—I got lucky in the lottery of who my family is.
