Coming Out as an Ally

Allie Nimmons:
Welcome to the Underrepresented in Tech podcast, hosted by Michelle Frechette and Allie Nimmons. Underrepresented in Tech is a free database built with the goal of helping people find new opportunities in WordPress and tech overall.

Michelle Frechette:
Hi, Allie.

Allie Nimmons:
Hi, Michelle. I was doing a fake smile, and then you said, “Hi, Allie” and I couldn’t help but real smile.

Michelle Frechette:
I know, my voice actually sounded really good that time too.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. I wonder what the-

Michelle Frechette:
[inaudible 00:00:33]

Allie Nimmons:
I want someone to write a sheet music of what that little melody that you do actually would look like. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
There’s probably some software or something you could sing to it and it’ll just write it. There probably is.

Allie Nimmons:
Totally.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. We’ll see if we can figure it out for next time. Yeah, I’m not going to do that.

Allie Nimmons:
That’d make a great sticker. Just that as a little bar of music that would make such a cute sticker.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah, for sure. How funny. Oh my goodness. So on, what day was it? October 19th, I think it was, 18th, 19th, whatever that day was. I called you on my way back from a surprise that my daughter did for me for my birthday, which was the weekend prior. I did not know what we were going to, I knew it was at Buffalo, I knew it was at the UB Center for the Arts, but that’s all I knew and I was sworn, and I promised, I would not look it up to see where she was taking me. She wanted it to be a surprise, and so I wanted her to have that surprise. I let other people look it up and tell me that, not tell me what it was, but like, “Ooh, you’re going to love that,” kind of thing. I met her for dinner and she said, “Do you know where we’re going yet?” I said, “No, I actually don’t, because I promised you I wouldn’t look it up and I didn’t.” She said, “Well, do you want to know?” I said, “Well, yeah, of course I do.” She took me to the Distinguished Speaker series at UB Center for the Arts, which was Amy Schneider, who is the woman who has, I think she has the most wins after Ken Jennings on Jeopardy. She won 40 straight days in a row.

Allie Nimmons:
Wow.

Michelle Frechette:
She’s been back for tournaments of champions and stuff like that, and somewhere around the $1.5 million mark that she won on Jeopardy.
She also has the distinction of being a trans woman, and she talks about that too. Her talk was super awesome. She just wrote a book and I have the book, I haven’t started reading it yet, so I can’t talk specifically about that. But in her talk, she mentioned the fact that she’s riding this wave of celebrity right now because she can, so she wrote the book while she still has some recognition in the community, et cetera. Also, that she has a past where she said something along has had a lot of sex, has dealt with drugs and alcohol abuse and all of this in her past, a lot of which came about by not even realizing earlier on that the feelings within herself was the need to be outwardly a woman because that’s what she was feeling inside. She didn’t even know that’s what it was because she was raised in a way that that’s not possible, so having all these realizations and everything. It was, she was entertaining. She was delightful. It was poignant. I cried. I laughed. The whole nine yards. Then afterwards, my daughter bought me a book. I got in line, she signed my book, “Happy Birthday, Michelle,” and it was very nice. She was wonderful.
There were a lot of things that she said that were inspirational, of course, when somebody’s giving a talk in the Distinguished Speaker series, it’s going to be some nuggets of inspiration, if you will. But the one thing she said, which really struck me was, coming out as a trans person, as scary as it was, was an amazing experience and she hoped that every single one of us had an opportunity to come out as something. Not necessarily as trans, not necessarily as whatever, but that we had an opportunity in our lives to come out as something. I thought, what an interesting thought, and I thought back over, have I had an opportunity in my life? What have I come out as in my life? I played through a bunch of stuff, and then I called you in the car and I was like, “Oh, this idea, Allie.” I wasn’t sure how you take the idea either because thoughts going through my own head don’t always translate when I tell them to other people. But the idea that I had is, and I even tweeted about this I think last month at some point, that my story of allyship is not about me.
Allyship is not about the person who is the ally, it’s about the community that you are an ally to. However, it’s a little about you, because it’s you, it’s your head, it’s your thoughts inside your own head, and, in some cases, there’s no coming out as an ally. You just are raised that way. You are who you are. You raised to understand why you as a family or your family or however you’re raised into allyship. But a lot of us don’t have that kind of a background. I was not raised as a bigot. I was not raised to be prejudiced. I was not raised as a racist. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t have those things in my history as a human being. We’ve talked about that before. For me to state publicly my allyship in a community like WordPress was not a big deal. But to my father who was a right-wing conservative person, I literally had to stand my ground for him to understand why allyship was important to me.
In a way, I had to come out as an ally to my dad. I think that there are a lot of people who have an even more black to white or stark change in their lives of pre publicly ally to post publicly ally and what that looks like and how, even though allyship isn’t about the person, being open about your allyship sometimes is, and it can be, in certain circumstances, dangerous in certain families, in certain communities. I think it was last month or two months ago, I lose track of time. Time is just such a social construct that I don’t understand sometimes. But not too long ago, there was a woman who was shot dead in her store. She had a shop, she flew a rainbow flag outside of that shop and somebody walked into the shop and shot her dead. She was not a gay person, she was not a trans person. She was a white cis het female who was shot dead for being an ally. Being an ally can be dangerous. It’s not as dangerous as being the person, being part of the community itself, but definitely has those tendencies. I just wanted to throw that out there and get your thoughts on that as well.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. Her name was Laura Ann Carlton. I just looked it up and-

Michelle Frechette:
Thank you.

Allie Nimmons:
I wanted to say her name. You’re right. What I’ll say is it’s not always as dangerous. I mean, in her case, it was as dangerous. She lost her life, and there are a lot of queer people who lose their lives when they come out.

Michelle Frechette:
Right.

Allie Nimmons:
But the difference is that this doesn’t happen very frequently.

Michelle Frechette:
Right.

Allie Nimmons:
Her instance was very kind of out of the ordinary.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. Statistically speaking, it’s much less dangerous to be an ally than it is to be in the community itself.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, when you called me with this idea, I was just like, “Yes, absolutely.” I found the first idea of everyone should be able to come out somehow. I found that to be really interesting, and it definitely made me think about, well, what have I come out as or been able to come out as? Even though I identify as bisexual, I haven’t really come out to people that way. If it comes up, I mention it. If it’s necessary, I mention it, but haven’t really come out to my family or anything, because it’s just never particularly, I’m in a heterosexual presenting relationship, so it’s just never come up to my family. I’ve still been trying to think of a way that I’ve come out and I still can’t really think of anything, but my life is not over. I’m sure that maybe there’s something in my future that will happen that I can come out as.
The idea that you can come out as an ally makes a lot of sense to me because there are definitely people in my life who have gone through that, who I’ve watched go through that, to varying effects and varying degrees. I went to high school with these two guys. They were best friends. They’ve known each other since they were babies. I got to be really good friends with them. They grew up in, they weren’t Catholic, I think they were Protestant, I can’t remember what denomination, but they grew up very Christian to the point where they did not come hang out with us after school because they were always doing afterschool church activities and they only listened to Christian music and they did not swear.
This was their whole life, was their religion, and that was how they were raised. It was really interesting being friends with them as a teenager because I didn’t believe in all of that stuff necessarily. They were always very respectful of the fact that I didn’t believe in all of that stuff. We had our ways where our paths diverged in terms of what we chose to spend our time doing. That was 15 years ago and I’ve stayed connected with both of them. I recently got to speak with both of them. They have both since deconstructed, they’ve both since moved away from the church for various reasons, and now are going through that process of, I had a conversation individually with each of them that was a coming out of like, “Well, how did that happen for you? What are you feeling about that?”
This very kind of emotional, therapeutic, almost conversation about that journey and where they stand now and how much better they feel or how challenging it was with their parents. One of them was like when they go home to visit their family, they still go to church with their parents because that’s what makes them happy, but they’re not as into it anymore and it’s been a really interesting process to see them come out as not Christian anymore. It was even less about allyship and it was more about, “I’m choosing to see the world in a different way. I’m choosing to leave this community that I’ve had for a really long time.” That’s what one of them actually said to me was, “I realized that what I valued about the church was the community, and I could find community in lots of other places,” which I thought was a really beautiful sentiment.
A friend of my husband’s was raised in a very similar fashion, Cuban, Catholic, Republican, and starting in around 2016, he and Greg would have some phone calls and he would just kind of be like, “What’s going on? People are really angry and I don’t understand it.” It was conversations he couldn’t have with anyone else, but it very much made me think of a young queer person maybe talking to an older person of, “I’m feeling these things. I’m having these thoughts. I don’t feel right in where I am. Where are you? I need to learn about this dissonance that I’m feeling so that I can understand it.” I don’t know a lot about his sort of coming out, but at least to his family and things like that, but he’s intentionally been letting go of a lot of things, letting go of homophobia and all of these thoughts that he’d been raised with because he’s looking around the world and seeing, “Well, I’m kind of on the wrong side here about some things.”
Seeing these slow, intermittent sort of comings out of people who are like, “I don’t fit in this box anymore and so I kind of have to learn how to be in a different box now,” is something that’s really interesting to watch and I feel like is very, very similar to the coming out process, and it is work. It is very hard. I think for a lot of people it’s very freeing and it is very, there’s a sense of relief that comes with this of, “Okay, I feel like I belong in this box now. I feel like I belong more in this space.” But it’s not, and I think any person who has had to come out as queer in any way will say, it never ends. You might come out to one person, but the coming out process is going to last as long as you meet new people, it’s always going to be happening to you. As you grow as a person, you might choose to come out in different ways or you might react differently to other people’s reactions, whatever.
I think deconstructing or changing the way that you think about the world or moving more into a space of allyship is really similar to that in that it is hard and it is work, and it is very, very introspective, and you’re making yourself very vulnerable, and you are deciding to isolate yourself from views and people that are probably very comfortable. I think a lot of, particularly parents, if your parents have raised you a particular way and you are deciding to move away from that, you are now creating a rift and that is really, really, really challenging.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s friction.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, absolutely. I don’t take that lightly. That’s a very difficult thing to do, and I admire people who do the work to do that and decide to choose maybe a different community or whatever that case may be. But yeah, there are a lot of similarities and I think that while allyship, like you said, is not about the ally, there’s so much introspection that has to be done and so much self-criticism and listening to yourself and really understanding where you’re coming from that a lot of it is about you, but the goal of it is about other people. The work is in you, but the goal is for other people.

Michelle Frechette:
Right. When I said that at the beginning, I realized that as soon as I say that, somebody’s going to be like, “But it isn’t about you, Michelle.” Yes, the work that we do as allies is not about us, but we are not a marketing firm that was hired for allyship, so our own personal walks as allies, our own, it’s deeply personal. The work that I’ve done within myself to get to the point of being a public ally is incredibly personal, and that work is within me and about me, but the work that I do as an ally is not. I just wanted to clarify that.

Allie Nimmons:
Yes. It’s a thin line, but-

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. Yeah. I’m never going to write a book about myself as an ally, that’s what I’m saying.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
But my walk as an ally is incredibly personal to me. It wasn’t something that I turned on and off because somebody hired me to be an ally. You can’t really hire allies. You can her PR firms and marketing and those kinds of things, but it’s not the same as doing true allyship and the work that an ally does.

Allie Nimmons:
Another really cool example, which I think is even more kind of like a coming out, I’m trying to see if I can find an actual link. There’s a really long-term YouTube show called Good Mythical Mourning and it’s these two absolute weirdos. They’ve been best friends forever, and they’re very similar to my friends that I mentioned earlier. They grew up in the church, that was their whole life, blah, blah, blah, blah. They both went through a reconstruction as adults, and they very publicly talk about their reconstruction after being public figures for 10 years who are very “out” as being devout Christians. They went through these things internally, and then they have a podcast where they have multiple episodes talking about that. I remembered thinking, that, to me, is even more similar than my other examples to a coming out, because you’re coming out to millions of people and saying, “You and I, as my audience, we may have had similar beliefs before. I don’t believe those things anymore.” You’re opening yourself up for criticism and attack. This is these people’s livelihood now that could be affected by unsubscribes and views and all of those things. Yeah, it’s another example to me of it is not an easy thing to do to come out as an ally sometimes because, in a weird way, a lot of the time what you believe does affect other people who are close to you and care about you and-

Michelle Frechette:
At least those relationships, it does for sure.

Allie Nimmons:
Those relationships, yeah, and that can have all kinds of weird ripple effects, just like when you come out as queer can have all kinds of ripple effects on your life.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah, this is kind of along those same lines. When I was 12 years old, my father sat me down and told me he did not want me to be upset with the woman he was going to marry as a second wife who had been his mistress. That’s how he described her to me, because he had been with dozens of other women while he was married to my mother. My father came out as a philanderer to me at 12 years old.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
I say that because the way that I interacted with him for the rest of my life from that, my entire view of my dad changed with that information. The way we share information one to another is so important, and he did it wrong. I’m not suggesting he did it right. I was 12 years old and it changed my view on men. It changed my view on so many things and really kind of effed me up in a lot of ways because here I was just learning about love as a 12-year-old and starting to think that boys were cute, and now I knew I couldn’t trust them. At least that’s what my father taught me.
Yeah, how we share information about our journeys is also very important, and knowing who we can trust and also who can understand us in a way. A 12-year-old shouldn’t have to understand that about their father. Similarly, about, not only sexuality, and I don’t think that, and I’m not saying don’t talk to your kids about being gay, because not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about don’t talk about the sex act itself necessarily if that child is not ready to understand that or the relationship part of what my dad was doing. But you have to understand the other person as well. It isn’t just about you. It’s about those relationships and whether or not you’re ready to ruin them or not in how you come out as an ally, so to speak. It’s just different. It’s all about relationships and how you broach those relationships, how you cherish them, and understanding how the other person receives information. You still have to speak your truth when you are ready to speak your truth.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
I’m not telling anybody stay in the closet. I’m not telling anybody not to talk about who they are, but I’m just saying that you have to understand that sometimes people aren’t ready to hear who you are, and you have to be able to navigate that. That for me is true as an ally.

Allie Nimmons:
Sometimes it is a very strategic choice about self-preservation. One of my best friends in high school came out to me as gay, and I thought that was just wonderful and delightful. I was one of the only people that he told, and he told his mom and his sister, but he did not tell his father because he was like, “If I tell my dad I will get kicked out of the house, so I’m going to wait until I’m off at college, and then I’ll come out to him,” and depending on who you are and how you look at it, unfortunately, his father passed away before we went off to college. His father passed away never knowing that his son was gay. As far as I know, he has no regrets about that because he was like, “We never had to have that conversation. We never had to have that rift. The end of that relationship was solid and as solid as it could be being in the closet from someone, but there wasn’t these nasty, harsh memories now associated with the end of his life. He died not knowing,” and, again, not telling people to not come out, but sometimes finding a strategic way, thinking about, like you said, thinking about how the other person is going to feel sometimes is the way to do it. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
From what I understand too, and you said something very similar to this, and I’m going to kind of riff on that a little bit. You said it’s not a once and done, basically. It’s also not just, “I just decided and today is the day,” kind of thing. It grows and having those thoughts and those and trying to decide who do you, and it’s not like, Ellen DeGeneres, right? There was that magazine, I don’t remember if it was Time Magazine or what it was that had the cover that said, “Yep, I’m gay.” It was like she announced it to the whole world, but that wasn’t the first time she told somebody that, I’m quite certain, and there were people in her life that she came out to at different parts of her life, I’m sure, and she made a very public thing so that nobody was in the dark at all. She was a public figure. It’s not necessarily like you opened that door and that was it, everybody knows. It’s just, I guess be kind is the next part of that, because you don’t know where people are in their journey. You don’t know where, and you may know that somebody is out to you and you might not know that they’re not out to other people. It’s never your job to tell somebody somebody else’s journey.

Allie Nimmons:
People, especially now in this generation where gender is becoming so much less binary. People might come out as different things at different points. I have a family friend whose child has been really struggling with their gender identity. At first they kind of thought they were trans, and then they were like, “No, I feel like I’m more in the gender-fluid space.” They were toying with pronouns and they weren’t sure what name they wanted. It was a lot of back and forth of, “Okay, I am this gender,” and then a couple of months later it’s like, “Actually, no, I am both genders, but it depends on the day.” For some people, it’s not as simple as, “I’m going to put on a magazine what I am with full confidence.”

Michelle Frechette:
Exactly.

Allie Nimmons:
Which, the whole concept of pride can be really confusing for some people because the idea of pride and pride parades and that whole movement is declare who you are openly and without fear and blah, blah, blah. Some people are like, “Well, I don’t know what I am, so how am I supposed to declare to the world what I am when I’m not sure yet?” I think it’s important to understand that there are different sort of styles of coming out where sometimes it’s-

Michelle Frechette:
Absolutely.

Allie Nimmons:
“Yes, I’m gay,” and sometimes it’s, “I’m not what I thought I was, and so I am now coming out as somebody who is figuring that out and what I need is patience-“

Michelle Frechette:
Yes.

Allie Nimmons:
“To acknowledge that I might change my mind,” and that’s okay.

Michelle Frechette:
Absolutely.

Allie Nimmons:
I think that’s really hard for some people to understand and figure out, especially parents with their kids where it’s like, “I gave you a name and now you don’t want it anymore. What’s going on?” It can be really difficult. But yeah, I think a lot of it is acceptance and patience and kindness and all the stuff that we try to talk about.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah, absolutely. I echo what Amy Schneider said. I hope everybody gets an opportunity to have that elation tinged with a little bit of fear and trepidation about coming out as something in your life, and that it’s a time of less tumultuous and more affirming of who you are as a person. I really want that for everybody to have that feeling of, “I did it. I told people. I am who I am and I’m proud of who I am.”

Allie Nimmons:
That something in your identity has slotted into place and you can share that affirmation with somebody else, I think is really beautiful.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s hard to admit when you are no longer able to walk long distances, for example. The first time I had to go through an airport and could hardly make it through an airport, I thought, “I am not disabled. I don’t want to be out as disabled.” It takes a little while to acknowledge those things within yourself. The first time you have to wear a pair of glasses because you realize that your eyes don’t work like they used to. We all have to deal with things within our life that are transitional because we are not the same person we were at birth, at 10 years old, at 25 years old, at 50 years old. We morph as people. Be kind to everybody because you don’t know what their journey is, and you also don’t know that what their exterior is matches what their interior is.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, absolutely. Good topic. This is one of the first times where we got on the Zoom and we were like, “We know what we’re going to talk about. We’ve known for two weeks.”

Michelle Frechette:
Let’s do it.

Allie Nimmons:
Let’s do it. We didn’t have to talk about it.

Michelle Frechette:
Exactly.

Allie Nimmons:
We just launched into it. Wouldn’t it be nice if every week-

Michelle Frechette:
Absolutely.

Allie Nimmons:
Was like that?

Michelle Frechette:
I know, right? But I do love that we can just pick up on things of the day too sometimes and are just like, “What are we going to talk about today?” And have those conversations too. But this was fun, and I hope, whoever’s listening, that you understand, sometimes my words actually don’t match my intent. I think sometimes I feel like maybe I say things wrong, but my intent is always allyship and understanding and acceptance of others. I hope that yours, not you, Allie, I know yours is, but that our dear gentle listeners, we hope that yours is too.

Allie Nimmons:
Absolutely. Thank you for listening.

Michelle Frechette:
Have a good one.

Allie Nimmons:
This episode was sponsored by the following companies, The Blogsmith. The Blogsmith is a holistic content marketing agency for B2B technology brands that creates data-driven content with a great reader experience. Visit theblogsmith.com to learn more. Thank you so much to our sponsors for this episode. If you’re interested in sponsoring an episode, using our database, or just want to say hi, go to underrepresentedintech.com. See you next week.