Before you read this one: Josephine's story includes being raped as a child. If that is part of your history too, RAINN runs the free, confidential National Sexual Assault Hotline twenty-four hours a day: call 800-656-4673, text HOPE to 64673, or chat online. For LGBTQ+ young people specifically, the Trevor Project also answers around the clock.
Josephine R. sent us six sentences that cover about twenty years.
"I am Pansexual and Polyamorous. My dad and 2 of my siblings support me, but my mom and her family don't support me and don't understand why I am who I am. As a child I was raped by my former stepfather. My brain repressed it for 10 years. I found comfort in music. I came to terms with who I am through having a supportive father and through people like Jeffree Starr, RuPaul, and having the amazing couple I have to be by my side during the rough times and there to love and support me."
"My brain repressed it for 10 years"
She states it the way you would state a date of birth, and we are not going to dress it up.
What she is describing is a documented thing that happens to children, and the detail worth sitting with is the sequencing. For ten years she was living a life that had a hole in the middle of it, and she did not know the hole was there. Any account of who she was during that decade, including her own, was written without the thing that mattered most.
That is the context for everything else in her paragraph. When people talk about coming out as though the only variable is a parent's reaction, this is the kind of thing they are leaving out. She was not working out one thing about herself in a quiet room. She was doing it while a much older injury came back up.
"I found comfort in music"
One line, five words, and it is doing a lot of load-bearing work.
Music does not require you to have language for the thing yet. That is the whole use of it. You cannot explain a repressed memory to anyone, including yourself, but you can put on a song that matches a feeling you cannot name and be accompanied by it for three minutes. For a child with no vocabulary and no safe adult, that is not a small resource. It is often the only one that is available without asking permission.
Who she credits
Read her list again, because the shape of it is the point: a supportive father, some public figures, and the partners she has now.
Not one of those is a coming-out conversation. She did not "come to terms with who I am" in a single scene with her mother. She got there by accumulating evidence over years that people like her exist, are visible, and are loved, and some of that evidence came from people she has never met.
That is what visibility is actually for, and it is why it is worth arguing about. Somebody being loudly, unmissably queer on a screen is not decoration. For a teenager assembling a case that their own future is possible, it is evidence, and it counts even when the person supplying it is a stranger.
"My mom and her family don't support me and don't understand why I am who I am." That is still true in her account, in the present tense. She did not report it as a thing that got fixed, and she still arrived somewhere good. Both of those belong in the same story.
If you are somewhere in the middle of this
Our coming out stories page is filling up with accounts like Josephine's from across the community, and it exists because reading someone else's version is the thing that makes your own feel survivable.
Please talk to somebody trained for it rather than to us. RAINN is free and confidential at 800-656-4673, or text HOPE to 64673, and the Trevor Project runs twenty-four-hour support for LGBTQ+ young people. You do not have to be in crisis to use either one.
And if you have a story of your own, we would like to read it. There is a form at the bottom of the stories page. You choose whether your name appears on it.
If a flag is not safe where you are, a pin or a ring carries the same thing more quietly, and you can read what each of the flag designs actually means on our flag meanings page. All sales benefit LGBTQ+ charities.
Last updated: September 30, 2026
