I didn’t come out to my parents as a child, although I was a Queer child, because I lived in an environment that had been meticulously scrubbed of any language I could have used to understand myself and what I felt. My aunt lived with a woman, a Butch truck driver with whom my aunt had a mutual subscription to The Advocate. I knew the word “lesbians” because Ellen had been on television. But my aunt had been married to men in the past, and lesbians hated men.

I didn’t come out to my parents as a teenager, although I was a Queer teenager, because religion had become the only framework on which stability in my household was constructed. Gay was something men were sometimes tempted to be, but it was a wrong choice to make (and oh, I was a very good girl who made as few wrong choices as possible, there was so very little room for wrong choices in my world). Lesbian was something women were if they hated men (and it was a choice you would someday walk back, as my aunt had walked back from the woman with strong hands and a cigarette voice who was never mentioned again). There was no word for both. And if feelings stirred in my guts, if my heart twisted up at a boy’s smile or the way he laughed, that was just Temptation. When the same feeling twisted my heart at the way a girl’s hair fell oh just so while she was praying, it was the Spirit of the Lord stirring me at her devotion, and if I wanted to follow her like a lost puppy it was because someday, I wanted to be just like her.

I didn’t come out to my parents as a young adult because they had made it clear how disgusting gay people were, and even if I now had somehow fluttered into a better frame of mind, how could I risk making them so angry? It wasn’t as if I was gay. Just sometimes overcome with longing for a girl’s company, sometimes breathless at how good she was or how her smile made things shine. But I would date a man, someday, and marry a man, someday, and then someday came along and that question was surely settled.

I didn’t come out to my parents at thirty, even though I had words now that I wasn’t afraid to use for myself — bisexual, Queer, gay as fuck — even though I used them riotously and joyously and even though I wanted wanted wanted to wrap my community around myself and screech with joy for finally having things (so many things) make sense. Because I still knew that conversation would lead me nowhere fast.

Because they did not stop being the people who taught me from the first day of my life that good choices were what I was expected to make. Because I heard enough contempt and disgust in their voices along the way of a thirty-five-year journey with them to know what they would say. Because somehow without any words on the subject passing between us I knew we will love you no matter what is a lie at least as often as it is the truth.

Because I did not owe it to them to be the Good Queer that would make them reconsider. I did not owe them the self-flagellation of a conversation that would only hurt me and bring me no joy or closure.

So I did not come out to my parents when I was nine, fourteen, twenty-two, thirty. I did not come out to my parents.

Until I did.