I never really had to come out to my parents. It was really something they just knew from the beginning.

The only real coming out in my household was me coming out to myself. I remember having crushes on girls in the the third grade, and thinking it was a perfectly normal thing; like everyone had crushes on girls.

My parents had normalized homosexuality and other aspects of the LGBT+ community to the point that it wasn’t a thing that needed normalizing. It was just like getting married to a guy, or having a crush on the opposite gender. I was so used to it that when I told my friends I had a crush on the cute blonde girl from Room 142, I wasn’t expecting vomit noises and comments about how yucky that was. I was expecting ‘awww’ and ‘Gabby and Cristina, sitting in a tree’.

For the next three years, I trained myself to tell everyone that asked that I had a crush on this boy or that boy. I would silently pray that I would stop having feelings for girls.

Then I moved to Texas.

I met my best friend, a trans guy. I met my mom’s friends, people of all genders and orientations. I started thinking to myself ‘Maybe this won’t be bad.’

One night over dinner, almost four years after the vomit noises and the disgust of my ‘best friends’, I casually slipped out six words over green beans and lasagna: “You guys know I’m gay, right?”

I got two syllables in response.

“Uh-huh.”