Moroccan Door #30.

These rainbow umbrellas seemed like as good a place as any to shove my "Coming Out of the Closet" story (especially since this photo is really more about the umbrellas anyway, rather than that lackluster white door), so here goes!

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Covington, Gay: My Coming Out Story

My mother, Gayle Covington, is a beautiful, amazing woman, and I love her very much. We have always been very close, still, I was terrified to tell her I was gay.

When I was seventeen, I went to a drug and alcohol rehab in Minnesota, and as part of my recovery, they forced me to call my mother on the phone and tell her I was a homosexual. I say “forced me” because they threatened that if I didn’t tell her, they would do it for me. They gave me about five seconds to make my decision. I chose the lesser of two evils, I chose to call her myself.

When my mom picked up the phone and I heard her voice, I started crying and hyperventilating almost immediately. I was clearly hysterical, and my mom kept asking me what was wrong. Had someone died?

The counselors had given me absolutely no time to prepare for this call, so while I tried to figure out what words I was going to say to her— in between all of my sobbing and choking and gasping for air— I was also absurdly attempting to procrastinate and make banal small talk. While choking on hysterical tears, “How’s my piano doing?” is one of the more bizarro things I remember asking her.

Having no idea that I was trying to craft one of the most important sentences of my entire life, my mother rightfully became confused at the absurd juxtaposition of small talk and sobbing, and was starting to become hysterical herself.

“Ryan, your piano is fine. Calm down and tell me what’s going on this instant!” she demanded.

Of course, she also had no idea that our entire conversation was being listened to, or that I was in a room full of people who were all staring at me impatiently. This was inarguably the most emotional and important conversation of my entire young life, and yet every time I looked up, one of my counselors would scowl at me and tap their foot. As if they had somewhere better to be and this was taking too long. Or they would point to their watch and make a threatening gesture, as they were going to leap up and snatch the phone away if I didn’t hurry things up and spit it out.

I can’t think of a more ridiculous, stressful, or humiliating way to come out to one’s mother, and there was a part of me that wished they would have snatched the phone away. Just do it already! Take the phone away and put me out of my misery!

My memory of this emotional conversation is all a bit of a blur… but under the watchful eyes and ears of my captors/counselors, I was eventually able to convey to my mother the information that they required of me. While I made my way back home to Texas, my mom had a bit of time to process things in her own way. She also learned about the cruel and unusual way in which I was forced to make that difficult phone call to her, in front of a room full of people, and must have decided that there wasn’t going to be any more of that. Not ever.

This was all still very new to her, but being the compassionate, loving, and understanding woman that she is, when I arrived back home, my mom bought me a cell phone and put it on the kitchen table.

“Ryan, secrets keep you sick. We learned that in Al-anon family group. So I think that for your sobriety’s sake, there are some people that you need to tell about this immediately. Then there are other people… there are other people that I will understand if you feel the need to wait.”

Great, I thought. So this is rehab all over again. But this time, it’s my own mother who is going to sit here and scowl and tap her foot and point to her watch while I tell people I’m a homosexual, and she’s going to do it for call after excruciating call, while I work my way through a whole Rolodex of people.

Should we start with friends and family? Or should we be thorough and just get out the white pages? We can start with the A’s and work our way through a different letter of the alphabet each day, until we’ve canvassed all of Rowlett. Then move on to Garland, Mesquite, and eventually Greater Dallas…

“But I am not going to force you to tell anyone,” my mom surprised me by saying. “Not if you don’t want to, and certainly not until you’re ready. I also promise you that I will not tell anyone on your behalf. Secrets keep you sick, but this is not my secret to tell.”

As all my fears began to instantaneously shrink, my heart simultaneously swelled with love for my wonderful mother. I took the cellphone and told her I’d think about it… to please give me some time.

I remember making a handwritten list of who I was going to tell, and in what order. I’d scratch people out, rearrange the order, crumple the whole thing up and start over… but eventually I emerged with a plan.

However, it turns out that my entire plan was all for naught, since it quickly became clear to me that my mother had no intention of being as patient, or as tight-lipped, as she originally let on. Every person I contacted seem to already know what I was calling to say, and my calls were met with a wide range of reactions.

People answered the phone with a confounding mixture of sentiments: statements that spanned the gamete of jovial but confusing jokes, to initial comments that were not just unexpected… but downright odd.

One person muffled the phone with their hand and yelled to someone in another room, “Would you shut up for a sec! It’s not her, the gay turned out to be Ryan!

Okay, I’m sorry, Ryan, now what were you saying? I think you had something you wanted to tell me?”

Another family member said, “Sorry, Barbara handed me the phone and told me there was a gay on the phone, but I didn’t expect it to be you, Ryan! Well, I’ll be darned. How are you?”

“A gay.” I can’t stand that phrasing. And it’s almost always old white straight people that use “gay” that way— as a noun to refer to a person. (“A gay cuts my hair…!”)

But that’s not what I was really mad about, I was mad at my mom. This just takes the cake, I thought, because I see what my mother has done. She has found a way to technically stay true to her word, but also still fulfill her insatiable need for gossip and clever storytelling.

She has managed to steal my thunder by crafting the whole story— MY whole coming out story— into a suspenseful mystery of her own devising. This way she gets to take credit for the whole juicy story but still remain true to our agreement. She’s robbed me of the actual narrative, and just left me with the final act: the meager, awkward, sloppy reveal. The anticlimactic climax, followed by a lengthy and sputtering denouement.

I had barely made it through a handful of calls when I threw the phone across the room and burst down the stairs. I was done with this shit. How could she do this to me? I was like the butt of her joke. She bought me a cell phone just so I could deliver the punchline to everyone. This was even more humiliating than the rehab situation.

My mom was in the kitchen when I blew past, headed for the back door. She appeared to be pretending to wash a dish, but I’m sure she had been listening all along. Listening and waiting.

“Ryan, what’s wrong? Who did you tell? Did it not go well? Talk to me.”

“Don’t play stupid, Mom, like you don’t already know how it went. Just leave me alone.”

I might have even told her to fuck off as I slammed the door and headed down the street to my childhood friend Jenny’s house. I couldn’t even remember if I’d already come out to Jenny yet or not, but at this point, it didn’t matter. My carefully crafted list and its strategic order had all gone out the window, thrown there by my deceitful mother.

I needed to vent. And besides— my mom had clearly already told everyone, so what did it matter if I’d come out to Jenny? My mom had probably all but done it for me. The cat was clearly out of the bag.

Or, at least, most of it was, anyway.

Thanks to my gossipy mother, everyone was already aware that there was a gay cat inside a gay bag, and they were all just waiting for it to come out and show its gay little face so they could see which Covington cat it was.

Jenny had barely invited me inside when her house phone started ringing. She looked at the receiver and said, “Ryan, I think it’s your mom calling.”

“What do you mean you THINK? Doesn’t it say who it is on the caller ID?”

“Yeah, but I think she’s calling from your cell phone,” said Jenny.

“Why would you think that?” I asked, even as I felt in my pocket and realized I had stormed out so angrily that I must have left my cell phone behind.

“Because it says what it always says does when you call, Ryan. It says ‘COVINGTON, comma, GAY.’ Did you not know that?”

I looked down at the caller ID, and suddenly everything began to fall into place.

Sure enough, there wasn’t enough room to fit my mom’s whole name on there. My mom, Gayle, the person who bought me the cell phone and who graciously paid my cell phone bill each month… Gayle, that wonderful woman who gave me (gay) life and was supporting me through all of this, it was her name who popped on the caller ID every time I called someone.

Or, at least, part of her name, anyways:

Covington, Gay.

“She’s calling again, Ryan! Should I answer? What should I tell her?!”

“Tell her… Tell her I’m headed home. And...

"... and that I owe her an apology.”

I sure was excited to get home and talk to my favorite person about all of this. My favorite person who, as it turns out, was not a despicable, backstabbing person at all, but the same loving mother she had always been. If I was her favorite gay in the whole wide world, then she was also mine:

My mom, Covington, Gay.