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My name is Michael Horniak and I'm here to tell you that it gets better. I was 29 years
old when I came out. I'm 31 now. A couple more weeks and it will have been officially
2 years. I grew up in a small Western Pennsylvania town. It's about a half hour or so north of
Pittsburgh, and if you know anything about that part of the state you know that it's
probably not the most progressive. I was raised Roman Catholic. I can't say that anybody in
my life told me that being gay was wrong, but they didn't have to. It was implicit in
the culture around me. I went to a public school, but...
almost everybody there was some form of Christian. There were a lot of Catholics.
There were some evangelicals. Gay, ***, homosexual, all of those words were thrown around as insults in my school. It didn't
matter if you were gay or not. Middle school was probably the hardest time. For my entire
time in middle school, I was fortunate enough to have a mother who worked in the school
district and in the same building where I would go to school, so I didn't have to ride
the bus. In my 7th grade year I can remember going into homeroom every morning and basically
desperately trying to hold myself together. I don't think there was ever any time when
I actually completely and totally lost control and broke down, knowing what I was going to
have to face that day. I spent the majority of my 7th grade year avoiding lunch time by
sitting in a teacher's classroom, until she decided she didn't want to babysit me anymore
and sent me on my way, not, perhaps, realizing what she was sending me into, so I don't really
blame her. High school, believe it or not, was slightly better than middle school, because
people started to get older. There were still some cruel people in high school who didn't
grow up quite as fast as some of the other people did. After high school was college.
I met a lot of new people there, made some new friends. But I was still looking for places
where it was comfortable. I ended up going to the same college that my sister went to.
And I had looked up to my older sister for a while, and sometimes we didn't really get
along. That started to change as we both started to get older, but because I went to the same
college as her, I sought out a lot of the same social circles. And, at the time that
was an evangelical Christian social circle. I spent my time amongst evangelical Christians
for the majority of my college career, even running across the occasional gay Christian
or gay person who had left the group because of the pressure from the Christians in those
groups. I can remember one specific time when my best friend in college told me about someone
that he knew that was gay, and he told me he could tell. And he told me it was basically
how people reacted to him, how a gay man would react to him, the things that he would do,
like, that they would look away in shame if they were caught looking at him for a long
period of time. Because this person was my best friend, and I wasn't interested in him
in that way, part of me was relieved that I was kind-of safe from his gay detection.
But really, I hadn't even come out to myself at that point. I was kind-of looking, almost
hoping that his test would work on me. But that was in college, and I graduated college
when I was 21, and it was another 8 years before I came out to myself. If you're here
watching an "It Gets Better" video, you're probably familiar with the name Dan Savage.
He's an advice columnist and makes podcasts in the same subject. Relationship advice,
*** advice all kinds of things. And one of the things that he does is advise young
people who call into his show about the coming out process. And one day I was listening to
one of his podcasts and a teenager probably 14 or 15, had called in, tired of lying to
himself, tired of lying to family members, tired of lying to his friends, wanting to
come out, but afraid to. And I listened to Dan talk to this teenager, and enumerate all
the different things, and I realized that I saw myself in the teenager's place, and
all of these pieces of advice could apply to me. And for the first time in my life,
while I was driving home from work, I said out loud, "I am gay." And, I almost had to
pull over when I made that admission to myself because it was pretty... It was a pretty big
deal. After I said this to myself, it wasn't long before I started telling other people.
I can only recall two negative reactions.
And, this may frighten you, but the two negative
reactions were my mother and my father. My mother was immediately devastated.
My father was pretty surprising. When I came out to him, he said it didn't change anything and
that he still loved me. The difference happened
when I told them that I was not going to be
a good Catholic and celibate about this.
That it was time for me to live my life the way
I wanted to. The way I deserved to live it. And I know this is an "It Gets Better" video,
and you may be a practicing Christian, or some other religion, or some other division
of Christianity that I am not, and never have been, but in addition to coming out as gay,
I also came out as an atheist to them. Which was harder for them than me being gay, but
also easier for them to ignore, because basically all I do now is not go to church, whereas
being gay has lasting implications, in the fact that I could bring home a boyfriend,
and they don't know how to deal with that. But overall, one of the things you come to
realize is that, there are people who will accept you for who you are. There are people
in my life who have accepted me for who I am. I am not afraid to be out to anybody.
I am comfortable that I will always have people who accept me for who I am, friends and family,
even if my parents don't necessarily agree. You may not be ready to tell this to somebody
who is important to you in your life. It may not be time. You may be financially dependent.
If it's not your time to come out, console yourself with the knowledge that when you
get out of your parents' house, or whatever situation you're in that limits you from coming
out and being who you are, I can tell you from personal experience, from the moment
that you come out, and you start living truthfully to yourself, it gets better. About a day after
coming out to my parents, I came home from work to find my mother in tears, trying to
deal with this whole situation, and we had a conversation. And one of the things that
she said is that I looked like a completely different person to her because of how much
more comfortable and happy I was with myself. Even through her disapproval of it, she recognizes
that it's better for me. It's part of the reason that I have hope that she will come
around one day. I'm not sure what my father thinks, because he doesn't talk to me about
these things. Maybe when he's ready he will.
There is nothing that you're dealing with
right now, no matter how big it seems, that is actually more powerful than your will to
live. It just looks like it from where you're sitting now. One day in the very near future,
those kinds of things won't be in your way anymore. All of the people around you will
grow up, and you can leave behind those people that don't. Life is worth living. Your life
is worth living. And don't let anybody tell you otherwise. Because they're liars.
To my Russian friends who may be watching this video because you noticed some cyrillic in the title:
your country has betrayed you. They've forgotten that you are people, too, and that you deserve
happiness. Those of you who have stood up to your government: you're nothing short of
heroes. Please be safe. For those of you who are unable to stand up in this way, I ask
that you also be safe. If you must leave to live, then you must leave.
I have a friend, whose name is Christopher, and I want to thank him in advance, for translating this video
into Russian, and giving it Russian subtitles. And I believe that's all I have to say.
Thank you for watching.