To Be or Not To Be...

...that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler to keep your family in the dark to break their hearts by telling them the truth...Can you take a guess which one I chose?

Last sunday, after another argument with my mother, I decided to give her a 5-page letter, coming out to her, explaining everything from the beginning, since I was 9 years old. I didn't think it was possible to summarize 10 years of my life in 5 pages of Word document. But I did it and as I was writing it, my throat was choked up, my hands were shaking and I was feeling at a point where dying would probably have been a better feeling.

As youngsters carry out this process, some write letters, some get drunk and spill it out at a family reunion, some are sober and spill it out at a family reunion, some TXT their parents (as much as this is hard to believe...the possibilities with technology), some get into arguments and do it out of spite. I did get into an argument with my mom, but I didn't give it to her out of spite. It was out of pity. Our argument was about the fact that I am a compulsive liar, that most of the things that come out of my mouth when I talk to her are lies. I wanted to defend myself but she was right: I was a liar. I had been one for 10 years with her and my whole family and seeing her cry about, moved me so much that I couldn't bear doing this to her any longer... ...so I told her the truth and it broke her heart. The truth is never easy.

Coming out, as cliché as it may sound to many, is still a process that all homosexual men go through with their friends and families. What prevents many of them from doing so as soon as they know for a fact they are gay is the fear of acceptance from the world they live in everyday, their surroundings. I often visit my best friend up at his school, at Hunter College. There, I see several of my old high schools, quite a few of whom I never came out to. Now I ran into one of them on one of the floors and we greeted each other, caught up a little bit, etc. After he finds out that I was gay, whenever he sees me now, he turns away, avoids me by any means necessary. He even scolded my best friend for associating himself with "such people". I don't understand how I can be comfortably talking to someone like that and the very next week, he looks at me as a leper. That is discrimination at its most basic form and it is a sad fact of life. What man doesn't understand, he fears or wants to eliminate. I believe Patrick Stewart said it best as Professor X in "X-Men: United" (2003): "Sharing the world has never been one of mankind's best attributes."

Ernest Gaines once said, "Why is it as a society we would rather see men holding guns than holding hands?" Thing is we call today's modern world civilized, intelligent and evolving...yet we cling on to many vices that we never truly evolve. As a result, we make the same mistakes over and over again, ultimately destroying our own selves. Can one hope for any change? Only time can tell, because as a dear friend of mine keeps telling me, relying on the human species is one of the worst mistakes one can ever make.