Coming Out Advice | 5 Tips To Make Coming Out Easier

If you like listening more than reading, you can play my coming out advice just below!

Need some coming out advice?… Well being a gay guy who has personally survived this I want you to know I’ve gotcha covered and here are my 5 best tips!

This post is dedicated to an entry from my “what do you struggle with” survey and I think talking about coming out is very necessary because any gay guy knows how hard it is to open up about who you REALLY are and plus I’m gay too so this is a topic very close to my heart.

I’m not going to name the person who sent this to me but their message said
“I would love to come out to my sister and my parents, but my parents are homophobic (as far as i know at least) and i’m just scared to tell my sister about it because well… its hard to do.”

Can I just say, absolutely it’s fucking hard to do so without further ado, let’s get into my 5 tips for coming out…

If this tip seems a little vague then what I mean by this is to be truly at peace with the fact you are gay before you unleash it.

A lot of my time in the closet was me fighting against how I was feeling. I was really certain about the way I felt about boys but I felt like it was wrong to feel that way and not until I accepted it myself was I ready to even speak about it to someone else.

I also think this tip is important because if you are already beating yourself up and can’t cope with the fact you’re gay now, imagine how it’s going to feel if the people around you don’t accept it either…

…Think about it, it will be 2 negative forces with a very bad result and as long as you are ok with yourself, you atleast have one person you can rely on and that’s you.

So tip one, take a step back, accept that this is who you are and work on embracing it. Because your sexuality IS beautiful it is normal, you just need to do a bit of reprogramming and you will be just fine.

What I mean by that is at what point on what day are you going to drop this… This is important because certain situations can make people i.e friends and family behave in a different way. If I were you I would avoid all high pressure environments like parties, seasonal holidays etc because it you just never know how someone can’t react under pressure….

For example If it’s your mum’s 48th birthday coming up this week and her and your dad are running around like a headless chickens trying to prepare for a party, it might be better to wait until the next week after the shenanigans have died down to tell them.

Even if you get a bad reaction from them at least you took their feelings into consideration and did all you could.

Remember this one when you get cold feet because every time I plan to do something & then chicken out for whatever reason, this really seems to work. I want you to imagine right now, how you would feel if you were out of the closet & had nothing to hide…. It would feel pretty good right?

Well what i suggest you do is articulate all those good feelings down into a sentence on a piece of paper, write it down.

The reason writing it down is important is because when you actually go to come out you might get very nervous, a thousand things will race through your head & the last thing you’ll think of is the end result of how good this will make you feel afterwards… & it doesn’t matter how many times you go to do it & postpone it, go back to your piece of paper, remember the benefits of the action & I promise you your motivation will get bigger each time.

I find the more I drill the benefits of an action into my mind, my thirst for the benefit becomes so much stronger plus I’m 5 times more likely to go through with something, so I would definitely recommend doing this.

If your parents go bonkers, give them time to adjust :
Ok Yes, you deserve their love no matter what.

Yes, you are the same child that they have always loved.

And yes, It can be really uncomfortable not feeling accepted by them.

But chances are if they good parents… they will come around eventually.

You might have parents that say so the fuck what and we always knew and in that case you are a lucky bastard.

However, if things don’t go down so smoothly remember, although in your own mind you’ve had time to accept this, your parents haven’t yet and they may indeed be very shocked…

so having a level of understanding about this will come in handy when or if the fireworks go off and It’s very important to remain calm and collected even if they are going bonkers because if you behave irrationally in this situation too, it will just adds more fuel to a fire and create even more negativity for yourself in your head.

No matter the reaction stay calm and if it gets too hectic just remove yourself from the situation as quickly as you can.

I believe this is the most practical & important!
This may not affect everybody but if you know your parents are going to react really badly, make sure you are self dependant.

I cannot stress this one enough and the reason I say this one is the most important is because if you aren’t self dependent as in you don’t have a source of income, you don’t have somewhere to live other than the family home and your parents don’t take this well and they want to be real fucking cunts about it. Well hello, you’ve now just given them the power to control not only your happiness but your entire life.

I’m so lucky I didn’t have to deal with this but I get young guys a lot saying :

“oh I wanna come out so badly but my parents will disown me”

and honestly if you think that your parents will disown you or try to change you from this, I honestly feel so deeply for you because I could only imagine it being the worst feeling but the best advice I can give is just wait until you are out of home and supporting yourself.

it’s biggest tip I can give because you have every right to be who you are without being changed and no one is allowed to change you but you.

And if holding it in for a bit longer means you can avoid being exiled from the family or controlled then I would lean more towards that for sure because there is tons of other ways you can still express yourself and get it out like joining online forums, you can find other people in similar circumstances, you can tell me here on this blog or do whatever you can to get comfortable until you are self dependent and then tell your mum and dad.

Biggest tip of them all.

So yeah, that’s my 5 tips for coming out guys! I hope you found that useful and if ANY of you use these tips please make sure you write to me and tell me about your coming out experience because I think it’s such a special part of your life and I’d love to hear about it.

Thanks for reading xo
Thomas In Action