Growing Up, Coming Out is a series of personal reflections from queer American designers, released every day this month.
My coming out story was very uneventful. I was going to Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island—I had applied to fashion schools in New York, but I also really wanted to leave New York. I just wanted to do something different, see something else—and there was freedom in not being around my family and being able to just discover me.
I came back home for Thanksgiving, had a really fun dinner with some extended family, and afterwards I just sat my parents down and I was like, “Oh, by the way, I’m gay. And now I feel comfortable telling you.” I agonized over it; I struggled with it—everyone does, you know, because you don’t know what their response will be. Will my family reject me? But my mother was like, “We know.” And that was sort of it. I have always been embraced and supported and respected by my family. I think my coming out allowed us to get closer. Being immigrants and being Black, that’s not a common thing, but every story is different.
However, it wasn’t like that for a lot of my friends and other people that I would have expected to have an easy pathway to coming out. I think it’s about respect: Your family respecting who you are, and you respecting yourself enough to come out, because a lot of people don’t feel comfortable enough to put themselves out there.
Photo: Getty Images
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