As twenty-seven-year-old Dina Sakhr describes her villa in Abidjan on West Africa’s Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), she mentions her favorite aspect—a backyard with a pool and enough acreage to ride a motorcycle. The tropical weather calls for a year-round use of air conditioning. She continues to describe her family’s beachfront property, a weekend escape where ATVs, jet skis, and coconuts await them. This paradise has one flaw to Sakhr—it’s an environment in which she is
unable to say she is gay.
Although she misses her home in Africa, it’s a place where the topic of homosexuality is taboo. She hasn’t told her parents about her sexual preference because of their ignorance and her fear of disappointing them, but she thinks they have an idea.“I’ve always been a tomboy,” Sakhr says with a French accent. She attended French schools during her adolescent education and came America at the age of nineteen. “When I was younger, maybe fourteen or fifteen, I didn’t know what gay was,” she says. Sakhr’s mother suggested she stop hanging out with boys. “She asked ‘are you gay? If you are we can fix you.’” Sakhr was crushed.
While living with her sister at the age of twenty, Sakhr’s girlfriend came over often. She felt their relationship was obvious but still had a hard time telling her siblings.
“I wrote my sister a letter and put it under her pillow,” Sakhr says, staring off with her ice-blue eyes. “She found it and came to me crying but said she already knew and that it was okay,” she recalls. Affection in Lebanese families is culturally uncommon. For Sakhr, it was especially difficult to show another girl affection. Revealing the truth brought her relief from constant thoughts of anxiety.
Sakhr says that if it weren’t for this particular girl, her “first everything,” she wouldn’t have come out so easily.
For forty-seven-year-old Andrew Freeman of Andrew Freeman & Co., a boutique agency specializing in hospitality and restaurant marketing, coming out to his family and friends came as no surprise. They said they already knew.
“I came out at the age of thirty to my best friends first, then my brother, his wife, and my father all on one night,” Freeman says from the airport. He travels extensively, giving lectures about his profession. “I was in the world of theater in New York, and I didn’t want to carry around the secret that I was involved with another man. He was angry that I was hiding it and didn’t tell anyone,” he says. Having gay role models who were successful bankers and lawyers helped Freeman cope.
Before coming out, Freeman worked in the advertising and marketing industry, which he feels was a straight world with a “don’t ask, don’t tell policy.” His biggest fear professionally was not being able to move up the ladder. “Now I use being gay to my advantage because in this creative profession, it’s part of a persona. It’s magnetic,” Freeman explains.
His fears with his family were much different and more personal. What worried him most was not being able to see his nephews or ever speaking to his family.
Freeman describes his father and brother as typical males. “My father suggested I see a psychiatrist—that it was just a phase. He would try and convince me that I wasn’t gay,” he says. “I told him he needed to accept me on my terms.” The two didn’t establish a good relationship until Freeman was forty.
Now openly gay, Freeman has no professional or family fears, but daily life still worries him. He’s afraid of getting bashed. “When I was on my way home from Tahoe once, we stopped at an In-N-Out and were chased by these teenage boys who called us fags. I’m scared of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Though Sakhr’s and Freeman’s stories and outcomes are different, they both share common ground. “Before I came out, it was my problem,” he says. “But now it becomes your problem, if you have a problem with it. It’s liberating now. I’m going to be out loud!”