Unhelpful

I realize it’s incredibly trendy (and astoundingly cliché) for internet writers with any sort of audience to ‘come out’ publicly in a teary confessional. For this, I apologize.

One can’t ‘come out’ without a story. Everyone’s story is different, even though common threads run through their fabric.

This is my ‘coming out’ story. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.

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To ‘come out’, the internet can be useful, but it usually doesn’t count. The nature of virtual community ensures that all but the most infrequent of users is a member of multiple communities. These are comparatively mediated environments, allowing one to ‘come out’ in stages, generally in emotionally-safe environments. r33t.org is not an obvious environment for me to do this, and it’s certainly not a nurturing, understanding environment where the soft sell will be sufficient.

In my case, my secrets are conversational fodder in some communities, and fiercely guarded knowledge in others. I’ve ‘come out’ in some, haven’t in others, and never even closed the door in a few. This sort of ‘pick and choose’ mentality makes ‘coming out’ on the internet a bit of a non-event. To do it for real, you have to do it for real - to your relatives, to your friends, to your co-workers. I did it for real today; this is the end of denial.

There are a lot of pre-conceived notions about what one is or does after ‘coming out’. Now that I’m one of ‘them’, I can dispel some of those flights of fancies. I don’t want to dress up like a freak; I don’t want to learn the lingo; I don’t want to gather publicly to express my ’solidarity’; I don’t suddenly have an actor database running in my head; I don’t think that more love and understanding will, in and of itself, fix what’s wrong with the world.

How did I ‘come out’? What led me to that point? It began, at work, as so many conversations do: a tangent in a conversation about the latest films.

“Did you see Spiderman?”

Anyone who knows me well or whom has had a conversation with me about film knows what I’m about to say. I will look the other way as you roll your eyes. I know I’m a broken record on this point. Despite this, here we go:

I am sick to death of comic book superhero movies. I have no use for them; they annoy me to no good end. If I ever wanted to send a message to Hollywood, it would be this:

COMIC BOOK SUPERHERO MOVIES: STOP!

The conversation continued in the direction it often does when I throw that rhetorical Molotov cocktail into the field of conversation. Guys my age are simply not allowed to express these sorts of opinions. I have to explain that part of my distaste for this sort of movie has to do with the fact that I find it unchallenging and puerile. I have to explain that when I was a kid at the age where you have to start reading comic books or risk never getting into them, I was only into reading non-fiction. Fiction wasn’t real, so it didn’t hold my interest compared to the way science did. For example, professional wrestling was dead to me the minute I found out it was acting and not competition. After that, watching the Iron Sheik wear spandex while blathering at a then-young Hulk Hogan utterly lost its appeal.

This time, one of the follow-on questions in the conversation struck directly at the one secret I’ve been holding onto for most of my adult life. And then? I cracked. I did the most inadvisable thing imaginable. I told the truth. To wit:

“So you don’t like Star Trek?”

What could I say?

I said “Yes. I do like Star Trek”.

I’m officially out of the Final Frontier closet: I like Star Trek. Just don’t expect me to attend those ridiculous cons and dress like a kl………

uhhhh…

…wait a minute… Did you think I was talking about homosexuality?

Argue