My Coming Out: Alexander Chee

October 11, 2006

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Alexander Chee is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Edinburgh. His second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin in 2007.

I wrote a play in high school while I was closeted. The play was about coming out, and dealt with two male roommates at college, one gay, and one straight. I wrote it the fall I was sixteen, after having spent the summer hiding my sexuality from my openly gay roommate at Georgetown University's summer session for high school juniors.

The struggle in the play was a pure fiction -- my roommate was relatively unconcerned about my reaction, as he was sure I was also gay. I wasn't ready, though, and didn't take the chance to come out. The play was partly what I wanted people to think my summer was like, once I got back. It was a way to tell them I was gay but also a way to hide in plain sight. A way to argue with myself. That was where I was at with it.

I wrote it in a gifted and talented playwriting workshop at my high school, and to my horror, it was selected as one of three plays to be read by real actors, out all of the plays written in this statewide program in the Maine public school system. It was a big honor, and because I was closeted I never told my mother.

After the reading was over and the actors and my teachers were done telling me how good they thought it was, I went home and felt like I'd done the worst thing in the whole world. I knew how proud my mother would have been, how much it would have meant to her to be there. I remember standing at the back edge of our station wagon, and seeing the script on the floor. She was about to come around the corner of the car, so I threw something over it. Because as angry as she would have been to find out right then, she would have been more hurt, to know she'd missed out on seeing me honored by the state of Maine.

You're the one that has to look yourself in the mirror every day, she said to me all the time, growing up. No one else. It surprised her when I came out to her, but I quoted her back to herself. I told her how the reason I was telling her was because I was trying to be the son she'd raised, and not some stranger who lived some other way.

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