Lessons from Coming Out in 1976

The author in France at 17

In September 1975 I was 17. It was my French mother’s lifelong dream that I spend my senior year of high school in a lycée in France, living with relatives and becoming bilingual. But she hadn’t counted on a having a gay son, and a very precocious one at that. During my junior year I’d developed a circle of gay friends (through the Drama Society, of course), and we’d been taking weekend trips into the city to visit the gay bars, so by the time my plane…