Exactly! I had to explain this to my friend and business partner once. We were looking for investors for a new venture, and a small group of Iraqi-American business people were very interested. Besides all the usual business stuff, we got to know them socially, because both of us understood that if we were going to work with them we needed to be able to get along with them. (Plastics recycling is a stressful business. We didn't want personal stress on top of it.)
At one of our first meetings (but not the very first) I made a couple comments that would make it obvious that I was gay. My business partner looked at me with kind of a shocked expression. I could tell he didn't approve. I explained things to him later in much the same way you did at the beginning of this essay. I suggested that if they had a serious problem with me being gay, we needed to know before things went too far.
What if they came over to his house for a barbecue and found me there with my boyfriend? Maybe once or even twice, my guest being another guy could just be a random event. But by the second or third time, things would start to click. If that was going to be a problem, we needed to know.
Fortunately, it wasn't a problem. In fact, one of those guys (who all became my business partners) helped me out early on when we were buying a new building and selling off some very nice office furniture that we had no need for.
The woman who came to buy it owned an insurance acency, and like most successful insurance folks, she was passionate and dedicated about her product, lol, meaning I had to fend off her attempts to sell me life insurance as an investment. She pitched it the way she would pitch it to a straight man with a family. One of my partners raised in eyebrow, and said to her, I don't think he would need that.
I ran with his lead and explained to her that I was gay and single. Which, fortunately, stopped her sales pitch in its tracks.
But shortly after she took delivery of all the furniture, she called and asked me if I would come to a pool party at her house the next weekend, explaining that her gay best friend was my age and she would like for us to meet.
Maybe that's a little cringy, and maybe in some circumstances I wouldn't have appreciated it, but she and I actually became friends, and I dated her gay friend for a while. It was a nice summer fling, much of it spent lounging around her pool.
If I had kept my identity under wraps to her, none of that would have happened. Nor would I probably have been fully human to my business partners. I would have just been this weird enigma, this older single man who apparently had no social life or relationships.
Only by coming out could I be fully human. Only by sharing my identity could I interact in a fully dignified, human manner. I'm glad I did, even though I could have kept to myself and not shared.
The irony here is that only by coming out could I reveal myself as the complex, multi-dimensional human being that I am. The people who say that we should be quiet about our identities are misunderstanding, perhaps deliberately sometimes, how life works.
