Host: Dame Wilburn

Dame: [00:00:05] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm your host for this week, Dame Wilburn. It's Pride Month. Woo-hoo. And this year, we're talking about an age-old rite of passage for the queer community, coming out. And just like all queer things, coming out includes a multitude of experiences. It can be equal parts thrilling, scary, joyful, casual or vital. But fundamentally, all folks who have to leave the proverbial closet are facing a world which at best sees them as an other. And at worst, is openly hostile towards them. So, to look that world in the eye and say, "Screw you, I'm here and this is who I am" is no small feat. 

Today, we'll hear two stories about that defiance and the not-so-easy road to get there. Our first storyteller prefers to go by just her first name, Sejal. Sejal told this story at a StorySLAM in Berkeley, where the theme of the night was Endings. Here's Sejal, live at The Moth.

[cheers and applause] 

Sejal: [00:01:15] Growing up in Bangalore in South India, my only exposure to the LGBT community was in offensive Bollywood movies that featured clearly heterosexual actors pretending to be gay by wearing floral prints and speaking effeminately. But then, I moved to America, and college greeted me with a group of liberal friends who would say, "Love is love." I would go to Lady Gaga concerts and scream, "Baby, I was born this way!" and feel completely empowered. But then, I would go home to India for the summer or the winter, and people would ask me, "Do you have a boyfriend? Have you thought about your future and your partner?" And I would say, "I just haven't found the right man yet."

See, I knew in the back of my mind that even though I came out to all my friends in my junior year of college, I would explore my sexuality for a few years, and have fun and discover this side of myself. And then, eventually, I would make it work with a man. I was bisexual, right, so I could do that. [audience laughter] See, coming out to my parents, my family, it never really felt like an option to me. It felt like the end, the death of so many things that I had imagined, the end of my relationship with them as I knew it, the death of the future they had always imagined for me.

And so, as I tried to avoid this inevitable ending, I told myself all these things and told myself the sacrifices that they had made for me and the pain that I really did not want to cause them. But it turns out that I'm not as bisexual as I thought I was and I probably can't make it work with a man. And so, two years ago now, I did end up coming out to them. There was no anger, there were no questions of whether they still loved me or not, which I'm very lucky to have. But there was a lot of pain. Agony, really. My mom cried, my dad cried, which he never does. And then, my mom wrote me an email that made me cry the next day.

And she said, “Dear Sejal, I'm proud of you for being as brave as you have been in telling us about this after keeping it a secret for, I don't know, how many years, but I am begging you to think about a future with a man and think about if you can make it work. Because in your 25 years of life, Papa has never asked you for anything. I see that he is completely broken, and that makes me completely sad. If you're with a woman, I don't know how I would accept it. I don't know what people would say. I can just imagine them feeling so sorry for us and us having to hang our head down in shame. And I'm so sorry if I am not as open-minded as you would have liked me to be, or I'm not as liberal or I don't understand this, but I don't. I will still always love you and admire you."

It was a very hurtful email, but it was not a hateful one. It was not a hateful one. I could tell that she was struggling as much as I was. And so, after weeks of feeling pretty helpless, I started to realize-- My parents and I still talked three times a week, four times a week. I started to realize that a lot of their fears, a lot of their insecurities came from them never actually having met an openly gay woman in India. They thought homosexuality was something that happened to Americans and to men. [audience laughter] And I was like, "They've never seen a happily married, successful Indian lesbian." 

So, I was like, "I just have to find them a happily married, [audience laughter] successful Indian lesbian, and then maybe they'll see that this is something that a future that I could imagine for me." And so, naturally, I turned to where we all turn in these times, Tinder. [audience laughter] I actually contacted a lot of women that I had gone on one, two, three dates with, and I said, "Hey. So, I just came out to my parents." I explained.

I wrote a very sincere message saying, basically saying, “Do you know any Indian lesbians that might be able to relate to what I'm going through?"

I didn't have a very big LGBT community back then when I had just moved to San Francisco. What was funny was I got a couple of dates out of the Tinder messaging. [audience laughter] But I didn't really get someone that I could speak to, or could speak to my parents or whatever I was imagining. And so, I didn't want to give up. So, I started contacting wedding photographers that had LGBT weddings on their websites.

I was like, "With Indian women." All of them replied.

One of these photographers put me in touch with Archita, who lives in Philadelphia, came straight from Calcutta, India to UPenn, went to business school at Wharton and now works as a management consultant at BCG. I was like, "I hit the left lesbian jackpot." [audience laughter] And incredibly, she effortlessly understood everything that I was going through. Even offered to meet my parents, and even more incredibly, my parents agreed to meet with her. And on the way to meeting Archita at this café in Philadelphia, when my parents were visiting the East Coast, I was texting her, worried about all the worst-case scenarios. I was like, "If they ask you about how you're going to have your baby or she was pregnant at the time or anything, I am so sorry." Worried about if they might say something homophobic. 

But when they got to that café, my mom offered her a box of Indian sweets, mithai. My dad hugged her and congratulated her on her baby. And in that moment, I realized that Archita was helping my parents understand me better, but she was also reminding me of their humanity. So, it was an end. But it was an end to a future that never would have worked, and I was much more excited about the one that was beginning. Thank you.

[cheers and applause] 

Dame: [00:07:53] That was Sejal. Originally from India, Sejal is currently living between San Francisco and New York. She is a product manager by day, and a screenwriter and city wanderer by night. Since Sejal had some help with her own coming-out experience, she loved to do the same for others going through something similar. Need a cool, successful Indian lesbian to tell your parents about? Send us an email. Sejal's got you. 

Our next storyteller is Michael Buonocore. Michael told this story at a StorySLAM in Portland, Oregon, where the theme of the night was Backfired. Here's Michael, live at The Moth.

[cheers and applause] 

Michael: [00:08:39] I grew up in a really small town. Really small, like three taverns, 2,000 people, one stoplight. The stoplight was on the highway that ran through town, because that's what you did with my hometown. You drove through it to someplace better. One time I played tennis in high school, and one time I had a match against this guy who looked out through the chain-link fence that surrounded the court, and he was like, "What do you even do for fun around here? Do you go cow tipping?" And I was like, "No. Not me personally. [audience laughter] It happens." [audience laughter] It was not the kind of town that you grow up gay in. So, I didn’t. I was normal. I was determined to be normal. I wanted that more than anything, more than I wanted to bury my face in Dave Hartman’s soft gray sweatshirt forever. [audience laughter] 

I wanted to be normal. So, I did what any confused young man would do to get my head straight and learn how to lead a normal, healthy life. Not the priesthood. [audience laughter] The military. [audience laughter] I got a security clearance in the days before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. So, problem solved. My plan actually worked great. I did well in basic training. I got my security clearance. I went to the Presidio of Monterey to study Russian, where I would ultimately become a Russian linguist. "Hey, Presidio." [audience chuckle] And the coursework at the Presidio is really intensive. It’s the military, so they make you study. 

So, every evening after dinner, the newbies had to be in their uniforms at their desks, books open and studying. They would come around to your room and check on you to make sure that you were. And so, the first several nights, what happened was someone would come to the door and knock and poke their head in and make sure that I was sitting there at my desk. They'd check my name off and move on to the next newbie. Until one night, Scott Ballou came to my door and he came inside. We had seen each other around, but we had never talked before. He was curious about me. 

So, he came in and he said, "Hey, newbie, how goes the studying?" I was alone in my room. My roommates were out in the common area with everyone else watching a brand-new show called The Simpsons [audience laughter] with the rest of the world and I was stuck in there studying alphabet letters and simple words. So, I complained to him about that. He came and stood behind me and looked at my book and said, "Yeah, that’s the easy stuff." He put his hand on the back of my neck. He put his hand on the back of my neck. I can’t tell you how many times I had shattered my sense of identity into a million pieces over and over again. So, I would never look in the mirror and see a gay boy staring back at me. But just for that moment, it felt like my molecules reassembled themselves at the touch of his hand. And just for that moment, I felt whole. 

He gave my neck a gentle squeeze and said, "It gets tough really fast, so you should study ahead," and walked over to the door. As the door was closing behind him, he said, "Study hard, newbie." The weeks that followed were a blur of classes, and friends, and studying and stolen moments with Scott where we would make small talk and just stare into each other's eyes until finally one night he came to my room and I was on my top bunk in a T-shirt and shorts. I had made it through mandatory study hours. I was just hanging out alone in my room again, and he came in and walked over to my bed and he said “Hi,” which was my favorite dreamy thing that he would say to me. [audience laughter] And I said hi. I curled myself closer to the edge of the bed, closer to him. And without hesitating, he put his hand on my leg and tucked his fingers behind my knee, like that's where they were meant to be.

If my roommates came back and found us like that, I could have my security clearance revoked. If the army thought that I was gay, they could send me home in shame and kick me out. But all I can feel is the warmth of his touch on my skin. All I can see are his blue eyes looking back into mine. If the world finds out I'm gay, I will lose everything. And all I can hear is the sound of my plans for a perfect normal life backfiring in my ears almost as loud as the sound of my heartbeat thundering in my chest. And all I can do is kiss him.

[cheers and applause] 

Dame: [00:14:24] That was Michael Buonocore. Michael is a storyteller, podcaster and runner that works in affordable housing. The father of two great kids, Michael lives in Portland, Oregon, with his partner. You can listen to his brand-new storytelling podcast, The First Michael, available now wherever you listen to podcasts.

In some aspects, Michael's story almost sounds like a fairy tale. Someone swooping in to save you from yourself and show you what love really is. But coming out is rarely that simple. Michael's story took place right before Don't Ask, Don't Tell was enacted, when being gay in the military literally meant you were considered a security risk. Here's Michael to tell you more about what happened after this story ended.

Michael: [00:15:15] Scott graduated from the program and left. I said goodbye to him, and I was devastated that he was leaving and immediately was overcome with this feeling of shame and self-loathing and feeling like I had been so stupid, like I had jeopardized everything to have this experience with him. And so, when he subsequently would reach out to me-- I was quite cold to him, and eventually he stopped calling. The immediate effect for me was to almost sort of push me more deeply into the closet, because I had this view of what could have happened and how easily I got swept up in it. And it terrified me.

Dame: [00:16:05] After his relationship with Scott, Michael went back to dating women and eventually married and had two children.

Michael: [00:16:12] So, when I came home from the military, I came home with a wife and two young children, had an amazing little family and the sweetest kids. All the joy of parenting. The struggle of reconciling my identity, and we eventually got divorced. We were able to be friends and coparent together. I'm also lucky and grateful for that. It's not so simple as to say that was the wrong life or not the right thing, because I adore my kids and I had a loving relationship with my wife. That is the complexity of life sometimes that it's not-- there aren't these black-and-white decisions necessarily, because there can even be a strong narrative of like, well, pick. Are you gay or are you straight? That construct actually wasn't true for me either. 

I did really have to wrestle mightily with coming to learn and accept who I really am. I have so much admiration for younger generations who are embracing their gender identity, their sexual identity and just socializing that in a way that creates space for people to come out in whatever way it is meaningful to them, and perhaps to come out and then come out again and then come out again.

Dame: [00:17:44] That was Michael Buonocore. Michael was able to reconnect with Scott years after this story took place, and he gave us permission to share a photo of the two of them on our website, themoth.org/extras. 

That's all for this week. We hope that no matter where you are in your queer journey, you can show yourself some love this month. We'll leave you with some words of advice from Michael.

Michael: [00:18:09] I would want to say to anyone who was touched by my story, you're beautiful and perfect just the way you are and hold on to that. Sometimes it gets harder before it gets better. But there is light. Just hold onto it and keep moving towards it and there are people who are here for you.

Dame: [00:18:39] Until next time, from all of us here at The Moth, have a story-worthy week.

Julia: [00:18:45] Dame Wilburn is a longtime host of and storyteller at The Moth, and the host of her own podcast, Dame's Eclectic Brain. 

This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by me, Julia Purcell, with Sarah Austin Jenness and Sarah Jane Johnson. Recording support on this episode was from Rowan Niemisto at WDET. 

The rest of The Moth’s leadership team includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jenifer Hixson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Glodowski and Aldi Kaza. 

Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.