Here’s my coming out story, which I happened to tell in real life last week: at the end of my fresh year in college, I was not getting along well with my roommate, so I asked another friend of mine if he wanted to room together for sophomore year. He agreed, and we made a deal (room assignment was complicated and involved lottery numbers and, well, it’s not worth going into, but it was important to have a deal in advance). The next day, or perhaps two days later, he asked to talk to me privately. He wanted to tell me he was gay, and to give me a chance to back out of the deal. It was clearly a difficult conversation for him, and to be honest, it was an awkward conversation for me. I did not back out of the deal, and I didn’t want to back out of the deal, but it took me a moment or two to adjust to the information. I don’t think I handled the conversation very well—I wanted to be sure that he knew I wasn’t gay, and I think we both wanted it to be clear that he wasn’t attracted to me, just because I was a male—this is the part that embarrasses me in retrospect, as I had no reason to think he was<\/i> attracted to me, but it seemed important at the time. Anyway.\n
We roomed together for two years, and were very close, and eventually fought and had trouble and became less close, but none of that had anything to do with his sexual preferences. Nor did I find that having a gay roommate caused me any trouble or grief of any kind, either in my social or romantic life. We were at a small liberal arts college that was particularly keen on inclusion and equality; things would likely have been different at a different place. But for us, and our social circle, at that time, and where we were, it turned out not to be a problem.\n