BENTE

“I was 13 or 14 when I told my brother that I thought I was into girls. He said to me, ‘That’s great, but you can’t be gay right now because I am into boys.’ We knew we couldn’t both come out as gay to our parents at the same time. We thought it would be too big of a shock to learn that all their children were gay. So, we played a game of rock, paper, scissors to decide who would get to come out first. The person who lost would have to come out later. My brother won. So I waited a few years and I came out when I was 15. I always had boyfriends so no one thought that I was gay, but telling everyone wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I thought my friends who are girls might look at me differently but it wasn’t like that at all. They found it really brave and treated me the same. My father was proud of me for coming out. My mother was accepting and okay with it. I think she thought it was might be just a phase in the beginning but now she knows it’s not.”