I have to tell this story.
I thought I was the first person to come out on either side of my family, but like three years after I came out, my mom was like, “By the way, my Aunt Mildred was a lesbian.”
“Yeah. My mom just told me this story the other day about her. She also had really bad depression, so bad that she was hospitalized. Her father flew out to San Diego to see her there. The nurses caught him on the way in and told him the no matter what she said, he was not allowed to get upset.” (This is the Catholic side of the family. Like, serious Irish Catholic with eleven kids and multiple priests in the family. Also super-duper Southern. And this was the 1940s and it was illegal.) “And he got real scared, but he went in. And she said, ‘Daddy, I’m a lesbian.’ He threw his hands in the air and hollered, ‘OH THANK GOD! I was worried it was gonna be something bad.’”
So. Shoutout to my Great Aunt Mildred, because she got there before I did.
Further shoutout to my second cousin Jared, who thought he was the first in even the extended family until he turned up for Granny’s 90th birthday, saw me for the first time in probably fifteen years, and heard me utter the words, “My wife…”
General shoutout to anybody who even thought they were the first in their family when they came out, even if they found out differently later on.