Coming out is a life-long process. My story.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012 at 07:06PM
Queer Spiritual Counseling in CBST, Jewish Community of Amherst, National Coming Out Day, Queer Rabbi, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Yale GALA

I started to write this as a one-line status update on Facebook for National Coming Out Day (October 11). As I should have expected, a lot more 'came out' than one line. This is my story. Leave a comment. Tell me yours.

Coming out has been a lifelong process from being "outed" abusively at middle school, to coming out to my parents in middle school, to going to college with the vow never again to tell anyone I was straight, to picking up a guy at the Halloween dance at my brother's college and having to let my brother know the next day so he heard it from me first, to staying out all night on dates when home on vacation from college, to bringing home boyfriends from college, to being still too nervous at college to interview Quentin Crisp for the Yale Daily News because my father would read it and disapprove, to co-leading the first Gay-Straight dialogue at Yale, to living with boyfriends, to holding hands with men in public, to being intimidated by drunken homophobes then learning to not be intimidated by them, to being a hotline and outreach volunteer for GMHC, to being arrested in an Act Up protest, to applying to rabbinical school with tons of "Gay" and zero "Jewish" on my resume, to coming out to residents at the nursing home where I interned as a chaplain, to being an intern at NYC's LGBTQ synagogue, to using the word Queer from the pulpit at my non-LGBTQ congregations, to leading Body Electric retreats, to teaching sacred sexuality at Nehirim and Easton Mountain retreats and finally letting Easton put my face and name on the website, to earning my certificate in Sexuality and Religion at Pacific School of Religion, to creating a profession and a practice called Queer Spiritual Counseling, to falling in love with amazing men and trusting my heart, to seeing the last few important things about which I am not "out" and knowing that I will take care of them eventually, to believing that God created me as I am, so Queer, so non-conforming, to knowing that living out my identity is the best thing I can offer to the world, to being in love with a truly breathtaking man and being grateful for this moment.

Article originally appeared on Queer Spiritual Counseling™ - for people of all faiths (or none) (http://queerspiritualcounseling.com/).