Fear and its reality

For many years, a lot of people expected me to come out of the closet, speculated about my sexual orientation and made cruel fun about it. For some of them it seems to be a happy moment, when I finally admitted to be engaged to another man. That was the day, when the fun stopped and the fear started to drive me further away from my family. From one moment to another, my private life got exploited and I had to face homophobia as never before, even from those people, who always said that they would have no problem with it.

Fear, obviously, can make you change your mind easily.

At first, it seems that, for example, my adoptive parents would not have any problem with it, nevertheless, this only lasted for a few days. When I brought my fiancé to their home, they started to show me their real face about it. When the gardener came along, my fiance was introduced as a ‘friend of the family’ and not as my boyfriend. (Luckily for them, they did not know that we were already engaged) I cannot remember that my sisters husband ever got introduced as a ‘friend of the family’. As far as I remember he always had been my sister’s friend aka boyfriend.

I only can speculate about their reasons, but I am pretty sure that their reason was fear. Fear of losing their gardener, when he learned that they have two gay men as members of their family. Maybe, they also were afraid of the rumors that could have spread out and erased some of their precious friendships. But no matter what the reason was, it cannot excuse it. Especially, because it was not a single incident.

I hardly can remember, if it was that day or during the next meeting, when my adoptive dad took me aside and asked me to promise him to not introduce my fiancé to my grandmother, his mother. Since my cousin is gay and she reacted harsh and unfair towards him, because of his gayness, he was afraid that it also could happen to me or as he said it, she might disinherit me or even worse, disinherit my adoptive parents. One of my biggest mistake was that I made this promise.

Before that, me and my grandmother had a good relationship, which fell apart afterwards. Of course, she constantly asked me about my relationship and everything inside of me wanted to tell her the truth, yet I was not allowed to do so. To avoid answering such questions, I started to visit her only when my adoptive parents were around, so that they could answer these questions for me. At the end, I avoided to meet with her completely. So, this fear of consequences has killed a good relationship anyway and by the way I did not inherit anything, when she died, not that I ever cared about such a thing.

But these two episode had more consequences for my life. From that fateful day on, me and my fiancé started to fight and these fights never stopped, even after we separated few years later. At the end, introducing him to my family was one of the biggest mistake I ever made.

After that promise to hide him from my grandmother I decided to stop introducing him to other as what he actually was, out of fear that my grandmother could hear about it. About three to four years later I saw myself forced to come-out to others. And during that time I also decided to come-out totally for everybody, since the former good relationship to my grandmother was already dead and I simply was tired of hiding it.

This coming out lead towards more fights with my fiancé and finally made us separate over it.

But not only my adoptive family lacked in supporting me, even my biological family did the very same. Day in, day out, I had to accept homophobic comments and insults from my stepfather and even my own little brother dared to blackmail me about it. (I have to mention that my other little brother got pretty pissed off about it and acted in my defense — so not all members of my family are like that.)

Yet, my family were driven by fear of consequences and totally forgot that I had to experience this threads and insults on a daily basis. For months, my email was filled with death threads against me and my family. A lot of my blog-postings and social media posting got such nasty comments too. And to top this I even had to face a police investigation about sexual harassment. Later it got sexual insultment before the Public Prosecutor stopped that none-sense.

In all of that, I never got physically attacked so I can call myself lucky. Funny, isn’t it?

Because some people started to behave out of fear, my life took a turn into fear. And yeah, this fear is still existing inside of me and still make me hide my relationships; only very few people know about it and I have my doubts, that this will change in future. I have heard the phrase „It gets better“ and I also used it many times, but can we actually be sure about it? When will the attacks stop? When will the life threads be overcome? Will we ever be accepted and free to live our love like straight couples?

The only way it can get better is when the people start to overcome their fear, when the discrimination and homophobia will be erased from people’s mind forever.

One fine day, hopefully!