Twenty-Five Years Out—and Still Coming Out

Twenty-five years ago, I came out to my family.

I would love to tell you it happened because I had finally achieved perfect emotional clarity. That I woke up one morning, looked confidently into the mirror, and declared, “Today, I shall live authentically.”

That would be beautiful.

It would also be complete bullshit.

The truth is, it took the shock of September 11, 2001, to make me stop postponing my own life.

By then, the carefully constructed version of my future had already started collapsing. I had been engaged to a woman. We were supposed to be married in June, but the wedding was canceled at the end of April. That should have been the moment when I told everyone the truth.

It wasn’t.

Instead, I did what generations of emotionally constipated men had done before me: I avoided the subject, kept moving, and hoped the situation might somehow resolve itself without requiring an uncomfortable conversation.

Spoiler alert: it did not.

On September 11, I was in West Palm Beach with my parents when the world changed. We watched the images from New York in disbelief—the smoke, the falling buildings, the confusion, and the unbearable realization that thousands of ordinary people had gone to work that morning and would never come home.

Someone I had worked alongside at a bar was among those killed in the towers.

Suddenly, all the excuses I had been using to delay telling the truth felt very small.

September 11 did not make me queer. It did not magically give me courage. It did not hand me a perfectly written speech and cue inspirational background music.

What it did was destroy the illusion that time was guaranteed.

It forced me to confront something I had been desperately trying not to admit: people could spend years waiting for the “right moment” to live honestly, only to discover that the right moment never arrived.

So, the weekend after September 11, I sat down with my family over Sunday dinner and told them.

Yes, over dinner.

Because apparently my family believes major emotional revelations should be served with carbohydrates.

There was no parade. No rainbow-colored confetti cannon emerged from beneath the kitchen table. Nobody handed me a membership card or a complimentary toaster. There was simply a conversation that terrified me—and then the strange realization that the world had not ended because I had finally spoken the truth.

The world had changed.

So had mine.

But coming out was not the ending of my story. Honestly, it was barely the end of the first act.

In the twenty-five years since that dinner, my life has taken more turns than the New Jersey Turnpike during construction season—and somehow, there is always construction.

I loved a man during a time when his military service required parts of our relationship to remain invisible. I learned what it meant to love someone while an institution treated that love as something dangerous enough to threaten a career.

Later, I married a woman I loved deeply. I became a husband and then, after losing Angelica in 2020, a widower. I grieved a life I had believed would last much longer. Eventually, I had to find myself again beneath the loss, the expectations, and the labels that never quite held all of me.

I also found my way back to faith after spending years believing the church had already rendered its verdict on people like me. I had once been made to feel that love and God existed on opposite sides of a locked door. Today, I am a queer man serving as a deacon in a Presbyterian church.

God, apparently, enjoys a plot twist.

Through all of it, I learned that coming out is never truly finished.

You come out to family. Then friends. Then coworkers. Then doctors. Then the person sitting beside you at some painfully heterosexual social event who asks whether you have a wife.

You come out again when someone assumes that marrying a woman meant your queerness was only a phase. You come out when people cannot understand how you could have genuinely loved both men and women. You come out when your identity evolves and you finally find language that fits more honestly than the words you used twenty-five years ago.

Sometimes you come out simply by refusing to edit yourself for someone else’s comfort.

At twenty-six, I thought coming out meant making one terrifying announcement over spaghetti.

At fifty-one, I understand that coming out is a lifelong practice of choosing truth over convenience.

It is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is as simple as correcting a pronoun, mentioning an old boyfriend, talking openly about my late wife, walking into church without hiding any part of myself, or putting my name on a book that tells a story I once believed had to remain secret.

That does not mean it gets easier every time.

There is still a calculation. Is this person safe? Will this change how they see me? Am I about to become the unofficial spokesperson for the entire LGBTQIA+ community because someone has never knowingly met a queer person before?

No pressure. Let me just consult the agenda from our last global gay meeting.

Twenty-five years after taking that first step, I am still coming out—not because I am uncertain about who I am, but because the world continues to place us in rooms where honesty requires a decision.

That is the part people often miss. Pride is not the absence of fear. Authenticity does not mean you never hesitate. Courage is simply the moment when the truth becomes more important than the fear attached to it.

September 11 will always carry grief far greater than my personal story. I would never try to

turn a national tragedy into a tidy inspirational metaphor. There was nothing tidy about that day. There was only shock, loss, and a sudden understanding of how fragile the lives we take for granted truly are.

But that terrible day changed the direction of mine.

It made me realize that I could not keep waiting to become myself.

Twenty-five years later, the road from that kitchen table has been wild, painful, beautiful, and occasionally so absurd that even I would have rejected parts of it as unrealistic if they appeared in one of my books.

I have loved men. I loved and married a woman. I became a widower. I lost faith and found it again. I came out, reconsidered, rediscovered, and came out again. I became August Quinn. I built AQ-BOOKS around stories that refuse to whisper because I spent too many years believing mine had to.

I am not celebrating twenty-five years of having everything figured out.

Good Lord, absolutely not.

I am celebrating twenty-five years of refusing to stop figuring it out.

I am celebrating the frightened twenty-six-year-old who sat down at that kitchen table and finally said the words. He could not have imagined the life waiting for him—the love, the grief, the books, the church, the second chances, or the man he would eventually become.

He only knew that time was not promised.

So he took the first step.

And twenty-five years later, I am still walking.