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Telling the world
For gays, coming out means facing their fears -- for the moment and for the rest of their lives. It's a step many never take.
By MIKE HUDSON and KATHY LU
The Roanoke Times
The poem is splattered with red ink. It begins: "I want to tear the skin from my bones -- see the blood flow . . . so no one can ever hurt me again."
Lisa Sineno signed it "a suicidal gay teen." Within a few years, the Roanoke teen-ager had suffered through her parents' divorce, her sister's death and the realization she was a lesbian -- an outsider in a society that often treats homosexuality as a sin.
She felt isolated, vulnerable, worthless. Roanoke seemed a suffocating place to be gay.
So she was nervous last spring as she stood on the stage and faced her classmates inside the North Cross School auditorium. She knew many assumed she was a lesbian. But now, as she read her senior thesis, she was going to come out to the whole school.
She said good morning, told her classmates that the topic of her paper was gay teen suicide and depression, then said three words: "I am gay."
It was an important step for her -- a way of confronting her isolation and moving on with her life. She had expected some hostility. But she was surprised: Her schoolmates listened attentively and no one said anything hurtful afterward. A couple of classmates told her it was a "strong and brave" thing to do.
For many gays and lesbians, coming out is a decision fraught with anguish and fear. They worry about violence, social isolation, harassment and losing their jobs, family and friends.
"You have to decide whether it's safe for you to come out," says Pat Hyler, 52, of Roanoke. She came out when she was in her late 20s. "That means not only physically safe, but mentally safe."
Many never come out in significant ways, choosing to make their sexual orientation as invisible as possible. Most people interviewed for this story agree that the vast majority of gays and lesbians in the Roanoke Valley are still "in" -- viewing society as too hostile to take the chance of revealing themselves.
But that's changing. Many gays and lesbians say the Roanoke Valley has become more tolerant in recent years, and that their coming out experiences were less difficult than they had expected. Some find the support they need from family, friends or organizations.
More and more are making the decision to come out at home, at school, at work, even in the news media. In the aftermath of the Sept. 22 anti-gay attack at Roanoke's Backstreet Cafe, which left one dead and six wounded, many gays and lesbians rallied to demand an end to prejudice and violence. Rather than seeing the violence as a reason for going deeper into the closet, they see it as an impetus for greater openness.
The thought of violence "scares me," Hyler says. "But not enough to stop me from speaking out."
Coming out -- or staying in -- is not a one-time decision. It's a series of decisions that span lifetimes: Do you come out to your parents? Your siblings? Friends? Classmates? Co-workers? Employers?
"It's a journey," says Mary Boenke, president of the Roanoke Valley chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. "It's like every time you've come out, you think you've done it all. And then you have to do it over and over again."
Looking back, Lisa Sineno sees that she never fit society's expectations for what a girl should be. She didn't like to wear dresses, was never attracted to boys and had crushes on female teachers -- though she didn't know they were crushes at the time.
"Till I was 12 or 13, I thought I must be a boy in a girl's body," Sineno recalls. "I wanted to be asexual. I didn't want to be a gender."
Then, a couple of years later, she decided to tell her mother she was gay. But before she could do so, she says, her mother sensed what was coming and told her: "I love you unconditionally, no matter what you choose to be."
"She told me I was gay and then came out for me to the rest of the family," Sineno, now 18, recalls. "She said she's always known I was gay."
At school, however, she was in the closet and endured anti-gay jokes and slurs in silence. She hated it when her North Cross classmates would put something down by saying, "It's so gay."
Sineno was angry over having to deal with being gay, she says, "because straight people don't have to deal with being straight." During her sophomore year, she started cutting on herself with razors and Exacto knives. She wasn't trying to kill herself, she says, just to deal with her emotional pain by making herself feel physical pain.
"That became a way of making sure I was still alive," she recalls.
She started attending a day treatment program at Lewis-Gale Clinic and slowly came to terms with being gay. During her junior year, when she chose her senior thesis topic, Sineno decided to write about suicide and depression among gay teens. And she would use the thesis to come out in front of the school.
"My adviser had advised against it," Sineno says. "But I realized that I can only do this effectively by outing myself."
The speech was a big milestone in her life, for how many other people can say they outed themselves to so many peers at once?
Near the end of her senior year, in February, Sineno met the woman who became her partner, Cheryl Altizer. The couple went to Washington, D.C., in April and exchanged vows as a part of a mass gay union ceremony. They consider themselves a married couple, although Altizer, 18, is now away at Bennington College in Vermont and Sineno is on her way to Wells College in New York.
"I feel a little more secure and more comfortable in accepting myself now," Sineno says, "but there is still that fear when I'm out and about that I can get my a-- kicked if I don't watch out."
R.J. Sullivan says he knew at a young age that he was gay, as early as sixth or seventh grade. "I really just did not talk to anybody," he recalls. "I was scared -- I was really frightened by what would happen. I worked really hard to walk the straight and narrow."
Sullivan was born in Thailand but grew up in Botetourt County. He says the combination of his Asian-American background and feminine orientation made him the target of bullies who beat him up and called him names: "Chink . . . faggot . . . girl . . . queer."
He was raised a Jehovah's Witness, a faith that disapproves of homosexuality. "I don't condemn the Witnesses," Sullivan says. "But the thing is, they make it really hard to come out."
He stayed in the closet and tried to fight his sexual orientation, he says. When he was 24, he got married. "I thought marriage might make me straight," he says.
Instead, he says, it made it clear that he couldn't deny his sexuality. He was dismissed from the church, and he and his wife divorced. "I still feel bad about the trouble and heartache I caused her," he says. "I think it was mostly because I was not honest with myself or with her."
He moved to Atlanta for a time, working as a flight attendant and finding the bigger city more accepting of gays than Roanoke. But after his van was stolen, he decided to get away from big-city crime and return to the Roanoke Valley.
For Sullivan, who is now 31, being out means breaking down barriers and fighting prejudices. People are people, he says, regardless of their sexuality. He's always considered himself more effeminate than most males, and his interests flow in that direction -- although he doesn't adhere completely to feminine stereotypes. "I love working on my van, getting my tool box out and taking things apart and putting them back together."
Even within the gay community, he says, there are stereotypes that must be overcome. Because he is a gay Asian American, many expect him to be "a lotus-flower type," timid and quiet -- something he is decidedly not.
"I think we have a lot of work to do, about relationships and how we get along with each other," he says. Things would be better, he believes, if people accepted one simple idea: "Everyone is an individual."
Pat Hyler's coming out story began in the late 1970s -- at a time when the concept of being "out" was almost unknown except in New York and a few other major urban enclaves. She was married with two children and living in a small town in North Carolina when, she says, she "came to terms" with her sexuality.
She struggled for months with the knowledge she was gay. She'd always heard homosexuality wasn't normal. But eventually she concluded she couldn't deny the truth, and she couldn't live by other people's definition of normal. "I believe God made me this way -- as he made everybody else," she says. "God gave me the heart that I have, and it loves who it loves."
She told some friends and a sister, but not her parents. Still, she believes her mom and dad came to realize her sexual orientation before they died in the early 1980s. Not long before her dad passed away, Hyler was having a difficult time, heartbroken over a failed relationship with a woman. Without discussing the specifics, her dad told her: "It doesn't really matter: When you hurt, you hurt. When you love, you love. And just know that I love you."
Hyler says her ex-husband also was understanding. Despite their breakup, she says, they worked together to raise their daughters, with him in North Carolina and her living in Virginia -- first in the New River Valley and, since 1981, in the Roanoke Valley.
Even today, they hold joint family get-togethers that include Hyler, her daughters, her ex-husband and her ex-husband's current wife. "I'm not saying everything is just perfect, perfect," Hyler says. "But everybody is accepting. It's not the Cleaver family, but it's a good family, a good foundation."
She's worked various jobs over the years, doing sales and factory work, and says she generally hasn't had serious problems with discrimination in the workplace. Some people knew about her sexual orientation, or guessed it. Others didn't. Sometimes, co-workers would tell "faggot jokes" and she'd feel pressure to laugh along. Mostly she tried to avoid those situations.
Over the years, she's handled the disclosure of her sexual orientation the way most gays and lesbians do -- by degrees, with case-by-case decisions about where and when to be out, based on a continuing, careful analysis of the risks for physical and emotional danger.
In recent months, however, she's confronted the question -- How out should she be? -- with more urgency.
Things changed for her last fall, when a gunman walked into Backstreet Cafe, a Roanoke tavern favored by gays and lesbians, and opened fire.
Hyler wasn't there that night, but the horror of the violence affected her. In the weeks after the shootings, she found herself on edge, watching people more. She wouldn't sit with her back to the door in restaurants.
But the shootings haven't forced her further into the closet. In fact, they prompted her to "come out" more openly than she might have imagined just a few months earlier. Hyler joined the Hate Free Roanoke Task Force, a new educational and advocacy group. She also agreed to tell her story in the news media.
All of this has made her sexual orientation apparent to many people who'd never known before.
"It doesn't matter to me anymore who knows or who doesn't know," she says. "Because anything I can do to help make Roanoke a better place to live and work for everyone, that's what I'm going to do."
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