hello internet!

He talked about it all in a lighthearted manner because that’s Phil, but you guys.

He was outed. Phil got outed. It turned out okay for him, but Phil got outed. Phil lived through one of the scariest things possible as a gay person: being forced into a potentially dangerous situation and not knowing who you could trust. Phil was outed in rural Britain when being gay wasn’t as accepted as current times and that’s terrifying. He had that control, that autonomy, taken from him.

Phil talked about how shameful you feel before you come out, even if it’s to people you know are accepting. He talked about the way that you feel guilty for being yourself, for not being yourself, for hiding it, for telling people, and for not telling people. That’s so often ignored in coming out stories and people don’t seem to realize even when you’re coming out to people you know will accept you, you still feel guilty.

He talked about the ways that when you’re young and not positive and you try to force yourself to be straight like everyone else and the realization that you’re just not meant to be like everyone else.

He talked about not letting yourself hang onto people you know won’t accept you; that those kinds of don’t have a place in your life and stop trying to make them fit.

He talked about the way that having a few friends who accept you literally changes how you view your sexuality and how you express it and the importance of having allies.

The way he talked about the fact that as a queer person, especially a het/cis passing, you never stop coming out. That you’ll always be defending your sexuality, that people will always just assume. That it’s tiring but it never stops.

Most of all, Phil pointed out how stupid being homophobic is. How could you not want another person to be happy, to live authentically? How could you want another person to live in any way that made them feel like their life was incomplete?

He tackled these topics so lightheartedly and so quickly and so Phil-like it was almost easy to forget that these topics are so fucking intense.

At the end of it, I’m so proud of Phil. I’m so proud of him for what he did for himself, what he did for Dan, and what he’s doing for us.

Dan, on the other hand, grew up with parents who made comments demeaning the lgbt community (even if it wasn’t a direct intention), and friends who did the same. He was ruthlessly bullied and instead of having a community he could come out to (like Phil did in college), he hid further and further within himself and rejected who he was completely.