My Story Part 2

This is a story of coming out to my brother.

All my life I rarely traveled, I always stayed at home or on the rare occasion when I did travel, it was with my old high school friends and we went camping. Then all of sudden I started to go transgender conventions and I needed a cover story because I was not “Out” to anyone. I could not say to them that is was going to Provincetown to a transgender convention, never mind that it was in P’town. Provincetown is know as a place where gays go, so there was no way I could tell anyone. So I made up a story that I was going to a computer convention in Boston, however, my parents and brother asked me for the hotel phone number in case they had to get in touch with me. I couldn’t give them the hotel phone number because the area code was for Cape Cod. So a friend told me to give them her cell phone number and she would call me if they needed to contact me. I made up a story of the hotel phone charges would be too high for them to call me so instead they could call her number. The week after I got home, I bought a cell phone… problem solved.

This solution worked for several years. Then after one weekend at a conference outside of Boston, my brother called and said he was Woburn and he was going to stop by the conference to see me but the meeting lasted longer then he thought. YIKES! That was a narrow escape, I could just see him going to the hotel and asking about where the computer conference was and being told that there was no computer conference there, only a crossdresser convention!!!

By this time I was beginning to realize that I should maybe tell him about my crossdressing (at that time I was still in self-denial that I was a transsexual). At the conferences, one of the workshops that they have is about coming out to your family and I had also been attending a support group for a number of years and I listened to many “coming out stories”. So I had a pretty good idea on how to go about “coming out” and I started to make my plans for telling my brother. I decided to tell him when he came down to visit our parents, I had reading material reading, I put websites links on a floppy disk and I rehearsed every possible scenario that I could think might happen.

So the big day comes and every thing is all set, I invite him over to my house after his visit to our parents. He comes over, we talk, and I can’t tell him. I don’t get up enough courage to tell him. As he is walking out the door, I say at the very last minute…”I’m a crossdresers!!!” HUH??? He comes back in and we talk about it and he asks all sorts of questions. One of the questions he asks is how long have I been crossdressing, I tell him all my life. I say do you remember the time in 1962 when you came home for lunch unexpectedly and I was in bed. Well the reason I was in bed was that I was crossdressed when you surprised me. Of course, he didn’t remember, but for me it was burned in stone. As he was leaving, he hugged and said he would always love me no matter what.

When he got home after a 3-hour drive, he called me and told me that I gave him a lot to think about; he reiterated that he loved me. Late when we talked again, he told me that one of the things that help him accept me was the fact that he is the treasurer of their church and the assistant minister in his church is a lesbian. She was the first person that he met that was LGBT and that by working with her he got to know her and that she was just like everyone else.

So that is my story about coming out to my brother.