Breathing Through Paige McCullers

Coming out at any age is a life changing moment. There is no right way to do it and there isn’t always a right time. While many people are able to experience love, comfort and acceptance from those around them, just as many are faced with ridicule and are left feeling more hurt and confusion than they had before.

Coming out as a gay teen is often complicated by the fact that teenagers, by their very nature are awkward beings who already lack a certain degree of self-confidence and exist within a judgemental bubble fuelled by their peers and the media. For so many gay teens, the initial stages of ‘coming to terms’ with their sexuality, even before coming-out, are filled with tales of self-doubt and blind fear.

On the whole, straight kids grow up having their feelings and thoughts validated in every book they read, every television show or movie they watch and in every group conversation they are a part of. There are hundreds of TV shows which depict examples of, for example, straight girls navigating their path to adulthood while factoring in the feelings, desires and emotions that come with falling for a boy for the first time.

What we watch and read helps us to determine how we should act, and interact, socially. Being raised Catholic and attending Catholic school for thirteen years, I spent at least eight of those years unable to even put a word to what I was feeling. Gay wasn’t something that was talked about. Gay wasn’t something which existed in my world and without any characters, on TV or in books, which I could identify with, I was left to identify as they only word which truly described how I felt: different.

Upon entering high school, the word different consumed me. I felt different. I wrote about being different. I probably acted differently because I felt completely lost about how to act, given what I was feeling. Different was as close as I was able to get to naming those all-consuming, overwhelming feelings. The only character I can remember identifying with, at any time during those confusing years, was a single mother in an ungoogleable (that’s a word now) movie, which I am sure I was the only person in the entire world to rent almost weekly.

There was nothing special about the movie, or the character I began to identify with. Looking back, the only stand out feature of the entire movie was that it was probably one of the first I’d watched in which a female in a lead role was acting of her own volition and not longing for, or needing, a man.
It is only now, at the age of 30, that I can honestly say I have found a character who speaks to the person I was and represents what I was going through all those years ago. This has occurred eighteen years after obsessive weekly movie rentals, fifteen years after falling in love with a girl for the first time and thirteen years after fully coming out during my thirteenth, and final, year in Catholic school. Paige McCullers typifies my entire teenage experience and I can honestly say that if the shy, frightened, self-hating fifteen year old me had been able to watch Paige McCullers’ journey, I wouldn’t have felt so alone.