My Story Part 64 – Little White Lies

When you are in the closet, you get to be very good at telling little white lies. Before I came out to my family I use to have to make up stories about where I was going. When I went to Fantasia Fair in Provincetown, I couldn’t tell my parents where I was going because P’town has a reputation of being a “Gay town”. That might raise too many questions. So I use to tell them that I was going to a computer convention in Boston. Well that created another problem, they asked for the phone number for the hotel in case of an emergency. If I told them the phone for the Bed and Breakfast that I was staying at in P’town then it would have a Cape Cod area code and if they did call and the B&B answered, that would create more problems. A friend came to the rescue, she told me to give them her cell number and say it is too expensive to call the hotel directly and she would pass the call on to me. When I got home, I bought my own cell phone… problem solved

Another time I went to a trans-conference in Woburn MA and also said it was a computer conference. Well the following week when I talked to my brother, he said he had a job interview in the area and he had planned at stopping by the conference, but he got out of the interview late and headed home. Can you imagine if he stopped by the conference and asked where was the computer conference and they told him that there wasn’t one, but they have a transgender conference. A couple of months later I came out to my brother… problem solved (that wasn’t the only reason why I came out to him, but it was the trigger).

At work it was a different problem. I couldn’t tell them that I was going to a computer conference because they would have known that there were no conferences there. So I created another “little white”, I told work that I was going up to my brother’s for the week. However, when I returned from vacation I couldn’t talk about it. I was having the best time of my life and I couldn’t talk about it. All I could say was, “Oh I had a great time at my brother’s”. Imagine what it is like not to be able to talk about the best things in your life, your family, your vacation, your sports team or your hobbies to your colleagues at work, that will give you an idea of how I felt.

Therefore, when I did come out, it was like a dam bursting. You could not shut me up about talking about trans-issues. For fifty years it was all pent up inside me and finally I could talk about, some people said that I went overboard. But I think it was totally understandable.