Human Kintsugi: Our Brokeness is our Beauty
Three years ago, after I came out as gay to my family, I sat down to write a story about finding myself. The real narrative, years later, is about embracing the vulnerability to show my struggles to others. This story, of growing up closeted, of heartbreak and death, and coming out to my family, is a story of learning to love my own flaws. I write this essay to everyone who has felt shame.
The Japanese tradition of Kintsugi repairs broken pottery by filling the splits with gold and silver. Breakage and repair are celebrated, highlighted through the precious metals. This essay mends some of my human cracks with gold, as I pray to be my own piece of beautiful Kintsugi pottery.
Americans often tie our worth to our accomplishments and status symbols. I remember clinging to the advice of my youth’s idols, convinced that if I could mimic their success, I would be worthy, lovable. I didn’t know it at the time, but I needed to hear a more radical message, one already told by the great religions, from Christianity to Buddhism: Success does not determine worth. In my ignorance, I lived not only in the closet; I lived in shame. Shame is a robust process that turns negative self-thought into a deep-rooted sense of inadequacy and a system of false beliefs:
• I am not acceptable the way I am.
• If others ever see my true self, they will reject me.
• I must hide some part of myself.
Shame is not bound to sexual orientation. It is universal.
Imagine what it’s like to come from a place christened the “Mistake on the Lake.” As a Boston student, people would apologize when I said I was from Cleveland as if my hometown and the people I grew up with were so miserable that I deserved condolences. It’s no secret that Cleveland suffered decades of embarrassment: In 1969, the Cuyahoga River was so polluted that it exploded into flames [1]. In 1972, the mayor’s hair caught fire on TV [2]. The sports teams suffered epic meltdowns in nationally televised games such as the Brown’s 1986 AFC Championship loss [3].
I never felt ashamed of being from Cleveland, despite the mockery. I lived there for eighteen years; I know how amazing the people are. I know how beautiful Lake Erie is on an August evening, the joy of summer days at Cedar Point, the camaraderie at autumn bonfires. When the Cavaliers won the NBA championship in 2016–52 years after Cleveland’s last victory parade — it wasn’t a painful day of reckoning; it was jubilation. The nation saw Cleveland as the resilient Comeback City that we had so long professed to be. I never questioned the intrinsic value of Cleveland. Loving Cleveland was easy because I was surrounded by a community of people to share that love with. Together, we overcame the belief that something was wrong with our city. In contrast, growing up in the closet meant I didn’t have a gay community and finding internal pride didn’t come easily.
People often ask when I first knew I was gay? Coming out is a process rather than a sudden moment, but as early as in middle school, I sometimes felt an attraction to male models in the magazines. Popular culture taught me to respond to these feelings: “That’s bad. That’s not normal. I must not think that. Nobody can find out about those thoughts.” When I was too young, too green, and too busy dreaming of playgrounds and mountain bikes to understand the complicated processes of shame and denial, I developed the idea that there was an unlovable part of myself. That a part of me could never be seen on the playground. These thoughts grew louder in high school.
By age fourteen, I realized that I was attracted to men, a truth that came out in subtle ways. I gave a presentation on Dolce & Gabbana (D&G) for my Italian language class project. Does D&G make women’s clothing? I was so enthralled by the photos of male underwear models — it’s all I remember from that project — that to this day, I still don’t know. In my sophomore year, D&G played another pivotal role in my sexual self-discovery. I was still confused about my attraction to men — was I bi? Was there something wrong with me? For the 2006 World Cup, D&G ran a series of underwear advertisements featuring the Italian men’s soccer team. I will never forget the first time I saw those ads online, the sweaty chiseled athletes standing together in the locker room with crisp, tight designer underwear gripping their bodies. I knew what I wanted at that moment, and, finally, it wasn’t to be straight.
Behind the veneer of a straight guy, my isolation and shame grew in those formative years. I made great friends through my swim team and jazz band, but I had a detached sense of self and never believed that anyone would love or accept me as a gay man. And so I hid behind my accomplishments — Varsity Letterman, National Honors Society — and carried on as a typical teenager with a huge secret. But in my senior year, I would have a choice to make: Would I continue to devote my life to a lie, or would I find a place to feel safe being my authentic self? An academic scholarship to Northeastern University in Boston offered the opportunity to move to a faraway, liberal city where nobody knew me. And so I was off to Beantown.
I began college, still ashamed of myself and pretending to be straight, though my sexuality quickly bled through the façade. In my first-semester writing course, the first assignment analyzed Susan Bordo’s “Beauty Rediscovers the Male Body.” I began, with all the imagination and risk of a student’s first college essay, by stating that I was tasked with writing a reflection on Bordo’s article. Without context or logical transition, the second sentence refers to a photo of “a Calvin Klein model, his eyes gently gazing downward as his penis protrudes [bulges] through his underwear.” This is the silent scream of repressed sexuality.
Nervously craning my neck down the student center hallway to make sure nobody I knew was in sight, I snuck into my first NU PRIDE club (then NUBiLaGa) meeting at some point in my Freshman year. The PRIDE club leader had us break into groups and play Two Truths and a Lie. One of my truths was the admission that I was still in the closet, and I always remember the sad look on peoples’ faces. Of course, this honest, empathic response was actually touching and empowering.
One moment that stands out even more clearly than that PRIDE club meeting was the first time I told a close friend my secret. I had grown close to a girl who lived across the hall. One day while hanging out with friends, I asked her for a word in private. We sat on the landing of the fire-exit stairwell. I was so ashamed of what I was about to say that I curled into a ball, head buried in my lap, hands clutched behind my neck (note: the names of all romantic interests are pseudonyms).
“Melissa, you know your friend Davey?”
“Yeah, the drummer? What about him?”
“Well, he’s, uhh, you know . . . He’s super cute!” I finally exploded.
“Aww, Greg, are you gay?” she asked me.
I clenched my jaw, pursed my lips, and gave a meek nod as she put a reassuring hand on my back.
Sophomore year came, and I decided that I did not move to Boston to sneak into PRIDE club meetings and reveal my secrets in stairwells. I told my friend Adam that I needed to talk to him about something “big.” Knotted up inside, I told him the truth, that I was a gay man. I will never forget how calmly he looked at me, thanked me for telling him, and said that being gay “is not a big deal.”
A few weeks later, I huddled my roommates together in the living room. I wish I had a gut-wrenching story to move the memoir forward in a dramatic fashion, but my roommates sincerely loved and accepted me for who I was. I learned that human compassion can be as radiant as shame is deep. It lights the way for us in our worst times if we can only be lucky enough to have friends and family who shine grace.
This was a breakthrough, but I still did not understand the damage done by growing up closeted. I did not realize that it’s not normal to grow up hiding our most basic desires. I did not understand that we only hide something so fundamental if we see it as an unlovable stain. Thus, I still could not imagine coming out to my family. What good son wants to disappoint their parents? I was often asked if I was out to my parents, and subsequently, why not? I wasn’t out to my parents because I explained, as Midwest conservatives, they would freak out, and as a student, I could not afford to lose financial support. Yet, people belittled my very legitimate fears. “Oh, it’s the 21st century. Of course it will be fine.” Or the always unhelpful, “My friend [so-and-so] has Republican parents who were totally fine with it!”
I graduated from Northeastern in 2013 and moved to Silicon Valley determined to be some type of successful, worthy person. The future looked bright in San Francisco, a gay mecca and home to a prestigious tech career. In SF, my life still lacked the fulfillment I had been seeking since that day in stairwell years earlier. Seeking other outlets, I joined an open water swimming club. I swam Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, and even completed a two-and-a-half-hour swim from Angel Island to San Francisco. Despite my dedication, I could not find a foundation of self-worth in any of this. As time went on, I grew in my career, switched companies, and met my first boyfriend.
In April 2016, my life reached a turning point. My boyfriend broke up with me after a year and a half together. Breakups are an unavoidable part of life, but it is an incredibly lonely experience when your family never knew about your partner. Only a week after the breakup, a good friend of mine shot and killed himself. I learned about it on the evening news. I will never know what he went through, but I do know that it ended with a click and the sound of a gat [4].
My world collapsed. The man I loved and imagined spending my future with had left me. My friend met a violent end. And my family and coworkers didn’t know the half of it. But eventually, this pain and solitude forged the tenacity to show Greg, an openly gay man, to the world. In my darkest hours, trust and honesty saved me.
I bought a shirt that said PRIDE in huge rainbow script lettering and wore it around San Francisco. I still have the text messages I sent my friend Ed, a close gay friend from Boston, about how over the moon I was to wear a PRIDE shirt openly and publicly. But even in a city like San Francisco, not everyone is willing to accept us as we are. The next message to Ed wasn’t joyous; it was a mix of terror and trauma. “Want to hear some fucked up shit? While wearing that shirt at a bar tonight … I was gay bashed and threatened for the first time!! Wow.”
I had been at a bar with some friends that night when a drunken heckler started irritating my friends. gay-bashed to leave us alone, and his response was to mock my shirt, calling me “one of those people.” He started shoving me. I stared in disbelief. This was about to turn into a fight. I knew I needed to leave.
As I walked out of the bar and into the street-lamp lit evening, the door swung open behind me. There was the drunken heckler angrily brandishing a skateboard. I thought about walking away, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the skateboard. Would I take a blow to the head with 32 inches of wood and a pound and a half of metal? With my back against the brick wall of the building, I stared at a lamppost across the street, over the heckler’s head, to avoid making eye contact as he screamed one insult and threat after another: I hope you die. Nice pride shirt, fucker. I see you’re one of those people. “Why don’t you go suck a dick, because obviously, you do.”
When I got home, the reality set in like a brick wall. Was I the victim of a hate crime? Did I almost get my head bashed in with a skateboard? Should I have called the police? I called my friend Joel in a panic. “He told me I should go suck a dick and die for wearing a PRIDE shirt! I think I just got gay bashed.”
I won’t forget saying those two words together for the first time: gay-bashed. My whole life, I could hide behind the facade of a straight man when it was convenient. But that was no longer true. I was stripped of all the veneers and finally forced to see my true self: I was another gay male afraid of rejection, and now, fearful for my safety. The next morning at work, I didn’t know how to explain any of this to my colleagues. They didn’t know that I was gay.
I stared at my email and then texted Ed again. The impact of the isolation I felt at work that morning told me that I had to start my journey outward by talking to my colleagues. The next text to Ed was a week later.
“been writing an open letter about my experiences being gay in the security community :-\ … I’ve stayed out of those discussions mostly, but if I get asked if I have a girlfriend one more time, I’m going to go nuts.”
Ed predicted the inevitable result of all this when he replied, “Any plans to finally come out to your family? You can’t keep that closet door closed forever.”
I wrote a short letter discussing the recent events (the breakup, the suicide, the attack) and shared it with a senior manager that I trusted. That brief letter, by the way, became the first draft of this memoir. The manager was supportive of my desire to talk to my coworkers about what I had been through. She noted that because I looked like any other straight white male in the office, it would be impactful for people to see the hidden challenges in my life. I wouldn’t share that letter for another year as I wasn’t ready to tell the whole story. Instead, in a team meeting, I finally opened up about how it felt to be in the gay minority in the cybersecurity industry. Bringing my whole self to work had been so empowering that I decided to come out to my family at last.
In the late fall of 2016, I began planning: the date was set for just after Christmas. As one does when preparing for a life-altering event, I discussed my plans at length with companions. They opened up with vulnerable stories of cheating spouses, divorces, and deaths. One of the most empowering stories came from another gay friend whose coming out did not go well. I felt sad that my friend’s parents weren’t more supportive, but after all those years of having my reasons for not coming out belittled and not knowing how my parents would react, it helped me hear such an honest and human story.
After months of discussions, it was time. On the morning of December 26, 2016, I drove to my mom’s house, though all I remember from the drive was sitting in the parked car, doing a breathing exercise to calm my nerves. One breath in, a long exhale out. I walked through my mother’s doorway like I might on any ordinary morning, but this time I carried the full weight of what I was facing. She was the woman who had loved me and cared for me my entire life. But her understanding of me was about to change radically, and I had no idea how it would affect our relationship.
I sat down on the couch directly across from her. My stomach turned into knots as my heart sped ever faster.
“Mom, can I talk to you about something?”
“Of course,” she said, as time stood still. “What is it?”
Composing myself, I continued. “I’ve obviously moved out on my own and done a lot with my life as an independent adult. I want you to know that I’m gay, and I hope you can support that.”
My mom thanked me for telling her and was happy that I could be honest. A few days later, my dad took the news just as well. These were great moments, but they left me with a tough question to answer. During all those years I had spent convinced that my friends and family wouldn’t accept me for who I was, it was I who had never embraced myself. So much of what I learned as a boy taught me that being gay was wrong, that it was abnormal, that it was some flaw in my masculinity. I accepted these judgments as true, and even as I came to understand that I was attracted to men, my subconscious was drawing a darker conclusion: something was wrong with me.
Growing up in the closet, we acquire false truths that are hard to acknowledge, let alone release, even after coming out. Being openly gay and entering into relationships with other men doesn’t mean that we are free of the troubling shame we learned as children. When a child learns that some part of themselves is unlovable, the adult they become will continue to cling to this truth. As dark as the lie is, this idea that we are unlovable becomes the mind’s most comfortable hiding place, and we must confront that. Coming out was a process of giving myself permission to live openly, but it wasn’t yet an acknowledgment that I was worthy of love, no matter my flaws.
As I prepared to come out to my family, why did I not share those fears with other gay men? Why did I project my own insecurity and self-rejection onto those around me? Why did I grumble in resentment every time someone emotionally misunderstood how hard coming out to my family was? Why didn’t I say, “This is really hard for me. As a human being it feels good to get approval and affirmation from others. What if my family doesn’t approve of me? Am I strong enough to find my self-worth inside?”
In modern urban meccas, where gay is mainstream, and there is so much pressure to succeed, we should not make it taboo to admit that we have struggled to accept ourselves and to show these insecurities to others. Being unsure of ourselves isn’t a gay thing; it’s a human thing. And if it’s forbidden to be insecure, then we’re making it taboo to be human. Being confident and fulfilled isn’t about being perfect; it’s about believing that we are enough as we are, all of our faults included. It’s about letting others see how imperfect we are.
When I was preparing to come out to my family, I hid from my friends how hard it was to accept myself. I avoided confronting my deepest vulnerabilities by projecting those feelings onto others. Through projection, I insisted that I was fine inside and that only others might not accept me. Lucky for me, other role models in my life had done the self-acceptance work to be able to climb into my sadness, give me a hug, and carry me out of it.
My journey was never about coming to my parents. It has always been about coming out to myself as a human. Loving myself for my own insecurities and weaknesses was the most important coming out of all. The more I love those wounds, the more they become my own Kintsugi.
Acknowledgments
The Velvet Rage by Alan Downs opened my eyes to the role of shame in my life and is a must-read for people interested in the subject. Thanks to Kyle Corsiglia and Jamie Moran, licensed therapists who work with gay men in San Francisco and graciously discussed my essay to flesh out these thoughts. Trisha Crabtree provided thoughtful and actionable editorial feedback to develop and polish my journey into a written story.
References
[1] http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Cuyahoga_River_Fire
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgtsqfxLG0w
[3] https://www.espn.com/30for30/film?page=believeland
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_of_the_Nation
