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this really big secret that you’ve spent years hiding (not easy—congrats!). You’re religious, or your parents are religious, or your best friend has a thing against gay people, or you’re not wild about the gay characters you’ve seen on TV, or you just have the very common desire to be “normal” and the ideaof other people talking about how you’re “different” makes you want to die.
    That feeling that you have in your chest is your heart telling you that it’s time to come clean, but your head is trying to stop that from happening, because what if … [ insert horrible thing that someone could say or do to you ]. That thing you’re trying to stop from happening is called coming out , and it’s super important, for at least three reasons:
    1. Being gay is not something you can change. It’s not something you chose. It’s like being brown-eyed. You can pretend to have blue-colored eyes with those blue-colored contact lenses, but those don’t fool anyone, and the sooner you get over trying to fool people, the sooner you can start to have a happy life.
    2. People who are “against” gay people are fucking idiots, and often secretly gay (or curious about experimenting) themselves—in other words, hypocrites—and the last thing you should be doing is molding your life to make idiots and hypocrites happy. Idiots and hypocrites may try to convince you that being gay is “wrong” or “disgusting” or means you’ll “burn in hell forever,” but those people are undereducated religious fundamentalists who believe evolution is a sham and dinosaurs are a liberal conspiracy. You should relish the chance to flip these morons the finger.
    3. Statistically, the people most scared of gay people are the people who don’t know any gay people. The more those people realize their neighbors, brothers, moms, roommates, cousins, nieces, coworkers, veterinarians, and mailmen are gay, the less scared they’ll be. Bycoming out, you’re doing a great favor to all the other gay people out there who don’t fit the stereotype either. Keeping quiet only helps the assholes who want to stereotype and marginalize gay people because it serves their own twisted purposes. Don’t let them get away with it.
    A Note About Anti-Gay Bigots
    Studies have shown that anti-gay people often turn out to have secret gay desires themselves. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, since the psychology is so simple: They hate themselves, and they don’t want this thing they hate about themselves to be discovered. If this is news to you, Google “gay sex scandal” plus “Larry Craig” or “Bob Allen” or “George Rekers” or “Ted Haggard” or “Catholic priest.”
    How to Come Out of the Closet
    You might want to do it while driving. After all, if you’re reading this, it probably means you haven’t come out yet, and if you haven’t come out yet, it probably means you’re having a hard time imagining looking into someone’s eyes and saying, “I’m gay,” and the great advantage of doing it while driving is that you have to keep your eyes on the road.
    Or the other person does, if they’re driving.
    And then it’s out there.
    You’re done.
    You don’t have to do anything else.
    The other person’s response is their business, and it will depend entirely on them. If you are coming out to your mother and she is religious and quaint and easily fooled, she might be floored, might be hysterical, and may even start to hyperventilate. She may demand you pull the car over and let her drive, even though you’re on the freeway. Since hyperventilation and the safe stewardship of a moving vehicle are incompatible, you are fully in the right to deny her request, and by the time you are off the freeway she will have collected herself (true story).
    Your friends, if they are good people, will say, “I’m so glad you told me. I just want you to be happy.”
    If your friends are of the slightly annoying variety, they will say,