Miles' Coming Out Story
Miles Ryan-Cummings shares his experiences of coming out.
To my delight, every single one of them was extremely happy for me and did not change their behaviour towards me. This was my first experience of true liberation; I was able to be myself around people I love, and my sexuality was no longer taboo. Now it was time to tell my parents.
I’m not even sure why this took me so long to do, to be honest, I was more certain that they would react well than I was my friends – they had told me stories about their gay friends. Perhaps I thought that I would suffer a bigger loss if I was wrong. Who knows? As a result, the next ‘phase’ of coming out didn’t happen until I was 19, travelling around Southeast Asia and lacking inhibition. After several months of making friends with people who had only ever known me to be gay, I was becoming increasingly comfortable with myself.
One evening, during my daily Facetime with my mum, she was telling me about a TV programme she was watching that featured a gay couple. I decided to strike while the iron was hot and casually slip it into the conversation. Unsurprisingly, there was no big reaction from her, not in a way that diminished what I said, but in a way where she made it clear that it made no difference to her. I can’t really remember the ins and outs of our conversation, but we talked about it for a while and after our call ended, I was an emotional wreck. I don’t think I have ever experienced such an overwhelming mixture of relief and happiness in my life.
Such an organic moment did not quickly arise with my dad. My dad is the son of two Jamaican parents and being aware of the connotations of homosexuality in Jamaican culture, and indeed by members of my family, coming out to him was more daunting for me, despite him having never shown a hint of homophobia. Also aware of the dark colonial history that these connotations are embedded within, I am sympathetic towards these attitudes.
After returning to the UK and leaving for University, I got into a relationship where I would often go and stay with my boyfriend, whose home was at the opposite end of the country. On a Father’s Day walk, my dad was asking about my plans, and I thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to let him know that I was going to stay with my boyfriend. As with my mum, I casually slipped it into the conversation and my dad reacted in a very similar way. We talked about it for the remainder of our walk and again I became an emotional wreck, as did my dad.
I sometimes feel guilty about my coming out story, however, I think it is important in highlighting racial inequalities that surround the process of ‘coming out’, often sold as a dramatic and necessary event in the rite of passage into queerness. I think that this take on coming out is unfair and my advice for anybody grappling with a similar scenario would be to take your time - the most important person to come out to is yourself, something that I am continuing to do.
Years of externally driven internalised homophobia takes a lot of work to unlearn, and whilst I believe that coming out to others is useful in achieving this, it does not necessarily have to be the one-off dramatic event often portrayed in pop culture. Come out to whoever you want to when you want to.
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