Coming Out

Coming out is like unfolding a road map. It’s awkward and full of creases, and once you get the thing open, you’ll never get it back in the glove compartment. Instead, you’ll stuff it in the pocket of the door where it will ride next to your left elbow as the miles roll under your radials. Coming out is like that.

Kara and I told our boss first, though it seems he had known for weeks. We had not been as subtle as we thought, flirting back and forth in the small office space we shared with three co-workers. The five of us worked at desks fitted into the second story of a timber-framed building with an open floor plan. Our work spaces were defined not by walls, but by the placement of our desks, file cabinets, and sloping wood ceilings. These intimate quarters made anything private impossible. The truth of Kara and me had snuck up on the two of us, but evidently had been more obvious to those we worked with. I convinced myself, and Kara too, that I could take in every inch of her with my eyes during staff meetings, imagine what her skin might feel like under my fingertips, and nobody would know. But I had not convinced anyone else.

Coming out is not an act. It is a process composed of a thousand acts, a thousand conversations. It happens every day, every moment, every time someone asks, “So what does your husband do for work?” A gay friend told me recently that even after 20 years of coming out, she still gets what she referred to as a butterfly in her chest when faced with questions about her husband. She quells the butterfly—a beautiful moth—and gently corrects, never knowing what the consequence might be. Coming out never stops.

When we told our boss, we weren’t yet practiced in the art of coming out. The information was too new even to us for it to roll easily out of our mouths. Now, the word “partner” or even “wife” has worked its way into the vocabulary of our relationship—the cells that make up our interactions however uneasy with the world. But when we told our boss, we were still protective of the news, still shielding it from light, keeping the sun off its skin. We cradled it, kept it swaddled. But we told our boss because we felt he needed to know. The three of us, plus his wife, were about to take a weekend trip together, to a concert on the other side of the state. Kara and I had put the invitation out to our co-workers months earlier, before we even knew ourselves, and our boss and his wife took us up on it. We all had tickets. We all had plans. Kara and I wanted the option of a hand on a knee, perhaps a long embrace, an arm draped across shoulders. We wanted to be a couple that weekend. And so we told our boss.

Coming out is data management. It’s a series of moments when information —all Xs and Os—is quickly let out of the box, then the lid is slammed shut again.

We invited him into a side room for a conversation. Tom was a gentle man. A banjo player. A poet. A nonprofit executive director who tried to run a nonhierarchical, egalitarian workplace grounded in values of love, creativity, and humor. He wore flannel shirts and kept his reddish beard trimmed neatly most of the time. Listening intently, he would finger the hairs of his beard, pinching and twirling them. He had a broad smile, bordering on goofy at times, that revealed a row of perfect teeth.

We sat across the table from him in the small conference room that doubled as a play room for kids visiting, the three of us against a backdrop of wooden building blocks, a row of thin children’s books, and shelves of Montessori-style sorting and stacking games.

“Thanks for taking the time,” I offered. I sat on my hands, my fingers...