"Did we really need to know this? We knew you were weird."
On today's episode, the first half of a really great roundtable discussion on coming out between my metamour Daniel GreenWolf and a group of my friends, Seva, Corwin, Jami, and Brian, moderated by your stalwart host. We try to show a variety of experiences with the process of coming out as polyamorous, altered by sexual orientation, family reaction, age we came out, and other circumstances through our conversation.
...Of course, we're a bunch of chatterboxes who are all friends so we talked for nearly three hours, so I cut that down to about two and cut that in half to give you two digestible episodes. This first half is who did our panel come out to first (and how, and why), and what reactions they all got. (SPOILER: the tagline is part of one reaction.) It's a pretty motley group of reactions and of who we talked to first - even if "official" comings-out were to family, a lot of us cut our teeth or developed our vocabulary for this or figured out our explanations with friends or lower-stakes acquaintances beforehand, and I found people's takes on whether those conversations "counted" or not to be an interesting part of the conversation.
l hope that this episode helps people who have come out and it didn't go especially well, or who haven't come out yet because they're worried, see that the odds of it going well aren't terribly bad even if they aren't perfect. (And if it goes badly, we have your back next week - we talk all about controlling the message and managing reactions and conversations with someone who isn't understanding or positive in response.)
I am deeply thankful to all my guests for being willing to share personal stories of their pasts for these episodes. Jami and Brian are friends of the blog and podcast who have been polyamorous for several years and share much of their background story in Part I of the Coming Out podcasts; Corwin is a frequent podcast guest and occasional guest writer for the blog who is the owner and operator of Upline, CT's premier rope studio. You can find him at www.uplinestudio.com. He's been non-monogamous for eight years. Seva is his partner and a co-teacher at the studio, who's been polyamorous for seven years. Daniel GreenWolf is my metamour as well as a talented magician and performer. His site and upcoming virtual show information can be found at www.DanielGreenwolf.com. You can find more information about all the guests from the podcast here.
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