Welcome to Down to Find Out, a column in which Nona Willis Aronowitz addresses your biggest questions about sex, dating, relationships, and all the gray areas in between. Have a question for Nona? Send it to downtofindout@gmail.com, or DM her on Twitter or Instagram.
Q: I'm 17 and I'm gay. My parents are really homophobic and the fear of being kicked out of my home makes me keep my sexuality to myself. I'm not sure if I should have romantic relationships yet, because it could be emotionally draining for me and my potential girlfriend if I am still closeted. I was afraid of telling this girl I know that I like her, but I decided to risk it and I told her I like her and she feels the same way! We have an official date, but I still don’t know if it would be healthy for us to have a relationship. What do I do? —Ana from a small city in Chile
A: Ugh, this is so, so unfair. You just achieved the holy grail of teenhood: You like someone, and they like you! There’s truly no better feeling. And yet, because of homophobic parents and a homophobic society, you’re rightly afraid to act on a normal, thrilling impulse. The question is: Should you take the risk to be your authentic self in a world that’s hostile to gay people?
You mention your worry about a closeted relationship being “emotionally draining,” but let’s address something more important first: your safety. The potential consequences after an intolerant family learns their kid is gay are no joke; they sometimes face rejection, verbal and physical abuse, or even homelessness. In the U.S., LGBTQ youth are far more likely to be homeless than those who identify as heterosexual, and family rejection is often the cause.
Though Chile is a Catholic country where sex between same-sex couples wasn’t even legal until 1999, it has made some strides in recent years when it comes to LGBTQ rights. Civil unions were approved in 2015, and after a gay man named Daniel Zamudio was beaten to death in 2012, Chile passed an anti-discrimination law. But there’s a long way to go: The country has some of the highest rates of bullying and teen suicide in Latin America. While a majority of young Chileans support gay marriage, a 2019 report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development found there to be "low" overall acceptance for LGBTQ people in Chile, noting that the country is only about "halfway" to full social acceptance. In a small city, far away from the center of Chile’s LGBTQ community in Santiago, I can imagine how isolating it might feel to be gay.
If you did decide to embark on this romance, you’d have to ask yourself how far you think your parents would take their homophobia. You’re in the best position to evaluate your risk: Do you have good reason to believe that your parents would actually kick you out if they discovered you were gay? Have you heard them explicitly say anti-gay comments? If not, talking to them about your sexuality — gradually and incrementally — might be an option to consider. If you want to test the waters, try bringing up an LGBTQ person in the news or mentioning a friend or relative who’s gay, without revealing your own sexual orientation.
But something about the words in your letter — “really homophobic” — tells me you’ve been closely observing your parents, and your gut tells you it’s not safe. If this is the case, keep in mind that any same-sex relationship you pursue would need to be absolutely secret. You’d have to keep texting and any other physical evidence of your relationship far away from your parents. You’d never be able to fool around in your house. In this scenario, it’s hard to overstate how high-stakes a stealth relationship like this would be.
“I don’t think anyone realizes how crucial housing is until you don’t have it,” says Joanna McClintick, Youth Sexual Health Coordinator at The LGBT Community Center in New York City, who works with a lot of teens in your situation. “Kids are coming out earlier and earlier and yet they depend on their parents” for shelter and food. Queer people have a long history of employing “unique and careful ways to figure out the lives that they want to lead,” McClintick says, and you should “feel proud of the brave history of our community going for love in the face of extreme oppression.” But, crucially, you are not independent yet and don’t have your own money. As utterly frustrating as it is, choosing this path may not be the safest one until you have some modicum of autonomy.
And you’re right to intuit that secrecy would infiltrate your relationship dynamic. It wouldn’t “necessitate a failed relationship,” McClintick says — secrecy is (unfortunately) a common part of being gay for many people around the world, and some stay together under the radar for decades — “but it certainly doesn’t make it easy.” There would likely be arguments surrounding the stealth nature of the partnership, not to mention logistical obstacles to exploring sexually, especially if this girl’s parents are also homophobic. And of course, you’d have to be honest with your date about your situation; she may decide that dating a closeted person isn’t what she’s looking for.
All that said, even with all these risks, my answer isn’t “don’t do it.” There are risks to depriving yourself of happiness, too. There’s an emotional toll to staying isolated and repressed, a toll that might be worse than the stress of dating while closeted. McClintick says that an overwhelming amount of young people she counsels at the LGBT Center have suicidal thoughts, and “a lot of that comes from feeling lonely and like you don’t have an outlet.”
Your budding interest in this girl might also serve as a gateway to a larger community, and that’s beautiful. Keep reaching for that. Even if you can’t take a bus to Santiago, get connected in other ways; message LGBTQ online groups the same way you messaged me. Todo Mejora, the Chilean affiliate of the It Gets Better network, might be a great place to start. Even if you can’t talk to your parents, try to find another adult (like a counselor, teacher, or supportive family member) to confide in. That way, if the worst does happen—if you do end up losing your housing—you’ll already have a built-in community to help you.
And if you’re down to chat in English, Samah Ikram, a counselor at the Hetrick-Martin Institute, recommends a resource called Q Chat Space, which connects LGBTQ youth to people their own age. It’s especially useful for teens like you, “who do not have access to a community or feel more comfortable sharing online,” she says.
Ultimately, despite the dangers of homelessness and violence, there’s a transformative courage involved in trying to be who you are, even if you have to take great pains to hide that from your family. Pursuing relationships in the face of great personal cost has always been a profound way gay people fight their own oppression. Officially, safety comes first, and anything you can do to secure that is encouraged. But even McClintick, who sees the horrible consequences of bigotry all the time, ventures that it might end up being “super-way better to be in a relationship with someone you love than being scared and freaked out because of homophobia. Because then homophobia is winning.”
