Big news!  Jason Somethingorother has come out.  He’s a basketball player, I hear and the first openly gay man in any of the major sports.

Woo-hoo!  Good for him, whoever he is.

No, really.  Good for him.  I may never have heard of him before, but I’m always a supporter when anyone wants to be his true self.  Everyone should be able to do that.  I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that coming out continues to be burdened with so much extraneous stuff, stuff that I learned decades ago makes no difference at all.  I started my coming out in 1980 and I can assure you that life is infinitely easier than it was before.  I lost no one – neither family nor friends – in the process.  Yes, I was luckier than some, but at a certain point you have to make the decision that you are right and good and anyone who doesn’t recognize that doesn’t deserve to have you in their lives.  I had to make that choice before I had the big talk with people in my life.  I had to be prepared to lose any of them.  It’s like that great moment in Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy” when Arnold Beckoff tells his mother that all he needs from anyone is love and respect and if she can’t give him those two things, she has no business being in his house.

There was a time when I would have been jealous of a guy like Jason Collins.  (Yes, know his name.)  He could pass.  He had a choice.  When I was in school that seemed like it would have been heaven.  (Funny now that I think about it.  I never wished to be straight.  I just didn’t want to be so obviously gay.  I guess on a certain level, I knew gay was cool.)  As it was, I was near the other end of the spectrum.  Kids started calling me “fag” by first grade – when I don’t think they really had a grasp of what it meant except that I couldn’t play ball with them.  (The joke was on them, by the way.  I couldn’t play ball because I was blind as a bat, not because I was gay.)  It made my coming out inevitable and my friends’ complete lack of surprise – well – unsurprising.

Now, I think I had it far better than Jason.  He had the opportunity to deny himself, to lie about who he was, and he took it.  It paid off in some ways and took a heavy toll in others.  He’s like all the gay men and women I know who have collectively left scores of broken marriages and damaged relationships in their wake, collateral damage to their realizations that they couldn’t continue the lies forever.  They were trying to do what they were taught was the “right” thing.  Trouble is it wasn’t right at all.

Jason said he has struggled with his sexuality for most of his life.  That makes me laugh whenever I hear it.  I know he didn’t struggle with his sexuality.  No one struggles with his sexuality.  There are very few men who hit puberty without finding they have an infallible gauge of where their sexual interest lies.  What he struggled with were things like his prejudices about gay people as well as those of his family, his friends and his teammates.  That’s the extraneous stuff I mentioned earlier.  It all seems huge before you come out.  Afterward it just isn’t.  The people who care about you come around.  It may take a while, but they will come around.  Hell, Dick Cheney came around!

In the end, Jason Collins is no different than the rest of us.  We all have to learn to value ourselves and realize that Arnold was right:  anyone who can’t offer us love and respect has no place in our lives.