I’d assumed that, by this age, I’d already have come out to my family and community, and would be living independently. This was a scary, although, I believed, necessary thought. My family was eminent among a community of conservative evangelicals all of whom I loved, but I knew if they really knew me, they wouldn’t love me. I reasoned that when I was old enough and able enough, I would move out, tell the truth, and live authentically.

After the sudden death of a close family member, which threw us into a lot of financial insecurity and out of our old home, telling the truth about my sexuality became impossible. Even more so under lockdown.

Bathed in shame and secrecy during my adolescence, I have returned to our new house every vacation with an increasing sense of homeless-ness and an ever-diminishing sense of belonging. I’d never imagined I would be locked within it, a pandemic outside, an exile within, indefinitely. The paranoia of being outed during this time is enormous, I am quite literally locked in with my biggest demons.

The LGBT+ community in college, and my circle of friends, have been a haven for me—or as close to one as I’d ever got. Between cheesy nights at Glitterbomb and harmless wondering if I was in love with my closest female friends, I was able to live more authentically than I ever had. Outside of religious circles, I could discuss my crushes with ease, talk about the complexities of sexuality and gender expression, share who I was without fear of repercussion or rejection. Every vacation requires a build-up of emotional energy, pooling my spiritual resources, putting up shields and fronts to survive and perform.

"A lot of the rhetoric around the closet and ‘coming out’ imply coming out as something inevitable, and the closet as something temporary. "

I am not the only who felt intense fear in response to the announcement we could not return to Cambridge during Easter term. I am not the only one whose fear was because of more than just how to approach exams while under lockdown. I arrived home—though I use the term loosely—and one of the first books I saw resting casually on the kitchen table was a particularly conservative number on what God thinks of gay people. The past few months have made a lot of us feel trapped, but some more than others.

A lot of the rhetoric around the closet and ‘coming out’ imply coming out as something inevitable, and the closet as something temporary. This isn’t the reality for a lot of people; for many it’s never safe enough to come out the closet, and this can mean soaking in unrepresented fear and shame. It’s harder in lockdown—away from college and communities which have understood and liberated you, re-immersed in one which unknowingly (or even knowingly) hurt you for so long. Lockdown seems like a cruel metaphor for ‘the closet’, something which, for safety’s sake, I have to live in for an indefinite period of time. Or perhaps it’s that the reality of the closet has been amplified: constantly trapped around the people whose rejection I fear the most, and whose rejection would mean estrangement. Douse a child in shame—even unknowingly—for their most formative years, and the adult who emerges will be intimate with a strange kind of fear.

The performance is exhausting. The pretence is exhausting. The fear is exhausting. For many people in privileged and socially liberal pockets, this kind of fear around sexuality seems like something reserved for teen dramas set in the Bible Belt. But it’s real and made realer still during isolation. And I can’t fit into a teen drama stereotype of simply resenting or hating my conservative family. I doubt many people are able to hate their families, even in the face of homophobia. Knowing that people on the outside might struggle to understand this is also exhausting.

What’s my message here? Saying ‘you’re not alone’ seems a little redundant at the moment—some of us really are, in our own homes, within our own families. Saying ‘It gets better’ seems dangerously close to the rhetoric that forces people out of the closet and into unsafe situations. But I suppose those statements are both true and untrue. We desperately need each other during these times: the strange fragments of individuals who come together and call each other friends, who see something of themselves in each other worth treasuring. People who don’t mind, even cherish, their differences. That’s what I miss about the community I had at university. That’s what I wish my family could be. And, one day, even if it’s in secret, I believe that’s what my new home will be. I hope you’re able to find, or build, the same thing, too.