With this article I hope to help anyone who may be in the process of healing from trauma related to accepting one’s homosexuality—what is known as “coming out of the closet” in the modern vernacular.
These days many young gay people are not traumatized when deciding to accept their sexual orientation. As a peer specialist in a psycho-social club for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender consumers of mental health, I have heard of many healthy, but also of many traumatic coming-out stories.
For me, the process of accepting my homosexual identity was an extremely traumatic process that damaged my mental health and put me at the brink of emotional breakdown and even suicide.
During my years as a gay advocate in Puerto Rico, I learned of many stories of adults who were only able to accept their homosexuality after failed heterosexual marriages or when they had reached their 30s or 40s.
I was able to come out of the closet at the age of 22 with the help of friends who had already been able to accept themselves as gay or lesbian. For the years that followed, I was very self-confident about my newfound gay identity.
My introduction to mental illness in 1996 was in some ways related to repressed memories and trauma associated with my homosexual identity and to my traumatic coming-out process, worsened by the fact that I had fallen into the depths of religious fundamentalism as a way of rejecting my gay identity.
When I was between the ages of 19 and 21 I tried to change my sexual orientation with the assistance of religious “therapists.” These are individuals who will try to change a gay young man into a heterosexual person using the power of institutionalized religion.
Many things happened during my years of “reparative” religious therapy. All that these therapists did was to make me deny and hate my gay feelings so that I would miraculously become a heterosexual man. Very nonchalantly, the religious therapist asked if I would submit to being shown pictures of nude men and given electric shocks every time I would get aroused. I rejected this form of treatment.
During this period of reparative therapy, I was very sad and depressed. I struggled with feelings of wanting to die because I hated my life.
I do not regret for one second the decision I made to accept my homosexuality and live my life the way I always knew I should.
Before I immersed myself deeper and deeper into their religion, I had once had a conversation with someone I trusted in their church. I was around 18-years-old. I told this minister that I wanted to get married to another man and love him and live with him for the rest of my life. This was, of course, against their teachings. Instead of referring me to a gay youth center for guidance and support, I was bombarded with anti-gay religious rhetoric. At that time in my life I didn’t have the emotional strength or the intellectual capacity to challenge their church.
All of the affirmative services that the gay community offers to gay youth and gay adults in this country are literally life-savers and are at the cornerstone of good mental health for many people. For available resources in New York City, you can call the LGBT Community Center at (212) 620-7310, or if you have been diagnosed with a mental illness and are LGBT you can call the Rainbow Heights Club at (718) 852-2584.