Episode Summary
It can take great bravery to come out of the closet, to let the people we know the best know us on that deep, real level - especially if knowing the true us might be hard for them. There isn't a commonly held rite of passage for coming out as queer, but that doesn't mean we can't create one.
Episode Resources
→ Queer Spirit Podcast: https://queerhealingjourneys.com/podcast/
→ The Self-Confident Queer: A Free Guide for Queer Folks To Build Your Self-Worth: https://queerhealingjourneys.com/confident/
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About the Show
Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.
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Full Transcript
Venegoni: You know, even though I feel like I was very lucky and very privileged to, when I did come out, like, my family did accept me for the most part compared to other people, but it's still there's... you know, a misunderstanding and a challenge there that it's not really like celebrated.
It can take great bravery to come out of the closet, to let the people we know the best know us on that deep, real level, especially if knowing the true us might be hard for them. There isn't a commonly held rite of passage for coming out as queer, but that doesn't mean we can't create one.
This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. Joining me today are returning guests Nick Venegoni and his husband Thom. Nick and Thom joined us way back in season 1, when they gave us a look into their handfasting ceremony, a wonderfully full-bodied ceremony which invited their entire community to weave a love spell together. Check the show notes for a link to that episode if you’d like to know more! Nick and Thom also joined me in an exploration of favorite questions to ask my guests: What is a rite of passage you wish you'd had? As queer folk, we shared the experience of coming out and spent some time thinking through what a coming out ceremony might look like. Nick, who works with the deeper questions around queerness and spirituality as a therapist and coach, led us off.
Venegoni: Yeah, so a ritual passage ceremony I wish I could have had would be something along the lines of a coming out ceremony. You know, I think that for so many queer people that not only is it not honored, but it's something to be ashamed of or to hide. And so I think that there's... there's a big opportunity that is lost there. And that it… not only you lose an opportunity for feeling proud or feeling empowered about who you are and the way you show up in the world, but it can for many people just create a wounding around shame. And that's part of why I, through my therapy practice and my coaching practice, have created, you know, some workshops and processes for people to be able to go back to repair those experiences, to maybe feel more empowered and to carry that power forward into their life.
Thom: Yeah, I would... I mean, my whole thing is I wish that nobody had to come out.
Thom: That because if all of these forms of sexual expression are just… are natural, which is what we're just in denial of as a society, and as a culture. We don't ask straight people to come out. So I hope we get to a place where nobody has to “come out”. That we somehow learn how to make it as organic a process as supporting the psychosexual development of heterosexuality. And queer people, of course have to go through the process of being enculturated as heterosexual and we have to have like two brains. And it's almost like when we come out, we're sort of saying, "Okay, I'm kind of tired of like being putting on the other brain for you. I now know I need you to put on a different brain for me." Like people don't understand that like, "Well, I have already been struggling and suffering to make you comfortable. So when you say 'I am now uncomfortable', it's like, oh, you have had one moment of discomfort and I have had a lifetime of pain."
Thom brings up a great point here. It seems to me that the dominant/louder/more powerful groups in our society routinely ask members of other groups to conform to their standards. We see this with divisions related to sexual orientation, race, and religion. What Thom describes is something known often as code switching, when individuals feel they need to speak or act to match the norms of a group outside their own. Another thing that can happen is that the dominant culture can also try to pigeonhole members of other groups to make them easier to categorize, which ultimately of course dehumanizes them and erases the chance to know the fullness of each person.
Thom: People's sexual preference and sexuality can also transform. You know, I mean, there are... You know, for the most part, there's a central tendency of like, “these people are just these people”. But there are people who do travel through a spectrum and back again in their life. There are lots of women who start out getting married, having kids, and then they decide they're lesbian. And, you know, that's way more common among women than it is men. But there are men who like get married, and they feel like they're one way and then they change their mind, or, I don't know... I just feel like if you're like 12 years old, and you try to tell your parents like, "Oh, I like my same gender" then they're going to start creating your experience for you, instead of understanding how to support your own exploration of what that means. Just the way that heterosexual people, it's like, well, you're going to date a lot, you're going to meet people, you're going to figure out what you like, you're going to, you're going to go through a series of relationships. You might go through a series of marriages. I think we just need to grow a lot, like as a society, not as individuals. But our cultural story, like our shared cultural story, I think needs to grow and mature and become a lot more sophisticated. But that said, there are a lot of people who do have wounding around coming out or not being able to come out or not being able to seen or witnessed in the right way that you know, can be... You can go back into those moments and heal them and heal that moment in time and, you know, really change the present. Not change the facts, but change the energy which might be limiting you in ways that you don't understand yet, you know...
Thomas: I think the closest thing that I had to a coming out ceremony was - and I think, I think I might have shared this with you, Nick, I don't remember - that the stagecraft teacher in my college who built a stage… well, she built a stage, she built the door and we… a closet - she built the closet! And we all got to come out of the closet, you know, in a big line at a coming out day dance, the Mary B. James coming out day dance. And at that dance, the queer people, the self-identified queer people, were wearing a purple flower and the allies were wearing pink. So everybody was, like, trying to figure out what color everybody was wearing. And, like, under dance lights where purple and pink kind of look the same under dance lights…. so it was really crazy! But it was like an actual celebration, because when I came out to my parents, it wasn't such a good… it was a really hard moment.
Thom: Well, I didn't really come out to my family, they just sort of figured it out and I never corrected their assumptions, which was a nice way of doing it. But they also didn't bring it up and make it hard for me so that I could just then, like talk about boys that I liked when I was in high school. And you know, as I got older, they weren't, like, surprised that I was dating men. But I've always been very untraditional in a lot of ways so they weren't really expecting me to be traditional about relationships either. But when I came out to my grandmother once, and I realized like, oh, I've never actually just told her that I'm gay, you know? And one day, I went to go visit her with a friend of mine, a female friend, a woman friend of mine. And she was like, "Oh, is this your girlfriend?" And she thought maybe she was expecting... it was so weird. She's like, "Are you expecting?" And I was like, No... I was like, Grandma... actually, I called her Nana... I was like, "No, Nana, I'm gay." Like, "I don't date women." And she just got quiet for a moment and went blank and all she said was, "I don't know... I don't know what you mean." And that was like... I was like, "Okay, she's not ready to go there." She's not freaking out. You know, she's not crying and world has ended...
Venegoni: It's like you just spoke Klingon to her.
Thom: Yeah, she was just like, "What? I don't know what to do with this information." So then we just got to have the same relationship we always ever had. And I got to have the moment of being like, Okay, I have informed you and I'm glad that there's no you know, drama that I need to sweep up and we'll just carry on. And, you know, she never made that assumption again which was good. So...
Thomas: Is that something that you, that either of you have ever thought about, doing any kind of retroactive… well, actually, sorry, let me go back, Nick, to something that you said about workshops and practices that you share with your… around coming out. Is there anything that you could share with us in this venue of like, how those work or what you do, or what support you offer?
Venegoni: Yeah. So, you know, I've been studying for a number of years at a school in Berkeley called the Foundation of the Sacred Stream, which teaches a variety of classes in transformative studies and energy medicine and that kind of thing. And one of the classes that they offer was called Initiations of the Sacred Masculine. They do another one for women called Initiations of the Sacred Feminine. And before I even took that class, I was thinking about wanting to do some kind of workshop for queer folks but I wasn't really sure. And so it was after that class, where we sort of talked about the... you know, what we're talking about but just around, like gender identity, not so much about sexuality. But the way that when a boy becomes a man, or when a girl becomes a woman, you know, that transition in adulthood based on your gender... and how in a lot of older cultures and tribal cultures, they still have processes around that. But in modern Western culture, they don't have that. And, you know, so through that class, we went through a series of processes to help us see that and understand that and the effects of that... of not having that and what can we do to reclaim that. And so I took that as a template of inspiration into what I created, which I just created this course, and it's called Reclaim the Power of You, but it's specifically for queer folks around reclaiming power that was lost during that period of coming out. You know, when people may have, you know, disowned you or abandoned you or rejected you or judged you for that process. And so there's a... you know, it's... it's a several week process that I take people through of exploring that and understanding that and then getting through to a point through this spiritual process that I've created using guided meditation and other tools like that to help people reclaim that power that was lost through that experience of coming out which to me is a kind of initiation, you know. So the I... all of these things... you know, I think that, you know, a big part of what your podcast is about, you know, in a way can be framed as an initiation, which I think of initiations as these gateways that we have the opportunity to walk through and transform ourselves in our lives. And those gateways hold power, you know, so it's a way to sort of step into, you know, a new experience of who you are. Whether that's like, I'm no longer a child, I'm an adult now, you know, whether that's through your gender, your sexuality, or your biology, or you know, whether that's... In Christianity, there's confirmation, you know, whether that's a... you know, a vision quest that you know, someone goes on or anything like that. I think they're all different opportunities for initiation that can be like a ritual or just a process that could feel like a hardship or an ordeal. Sort of a growth spurt in a way where you have an opportunity to really grow and step into a new level of power in terms of who you are in the world and carrying that forward in your life.
I love that! Framing our life transitions, whenever, however they come, as initiations. Initiations that lead us through gateways that hold power. That's why I think we should really honor our transitions, mark them, make a big deal out of them - at least in our own hearts. Because these are the gateway moments in our lives. When we go through something like a divorce, or a we get a diagnosis, or we walk away from an old career, or we come out - these experiences may not be comfortable or fun, but they allow us to step into a new experience of ourselves. We'll be right back.
[MUSIC]
It's wonderful to have you here! Be sure to check out our new series called “Daily Magic for Peace” Daily Magic for Peace offers a quick and simple way to focus your intentions, prayers, and actions toward healing the crisis in Ukraine. Find the show as a separate podcast on your favorite player. If you feel like you've done all you can but still want to do more, join us in doing some Daily Magic for Peace.
Thom: I turned 50 a year ago. I just had my 51st birthday but a part of my 50th birthday... we did a ceremony, sort of a... like a power-retrieval type ceremony where we did go back and look... heal like specific woundings from when I was younger so that all of that energy would then collapse into the present and I would then move forward into this next part of my life without that energetic disturbance or that energetic attractor, if you will. And so that was a situation where it wasn't specifically related to coming out because I didn't have any coming out wounding, but we did do a ceremony where we went back to deal with a past, you know, scenario and then heal that in the present and that was really eye-opening and amazing and don't know why I never thought of it before.
Venegoni: Yeah, I mean, I think that's just another example of what I'm talking about of these... these demarcations that you can use as a way to sort of propel yourself forward into, you know, a better place or a new phase in your life. Yeah.
Thom: Because I wanted my fifties to be my power years and I thought, well, we better go in and clean up the past a little bit. And it was interesting how... I mean, it wouldn't say I felt lighter but I would say that I had like clusters of memories around some of this old trauma that all just kind of... like I sort of forgot that like, I forgot to behave in all of the ways that I behave because I'm constantly trying to just take care of the trauma or cope with the wounding. And it's like, oh, okay, well, that's not there anymore so my energy can now go to the things that I really desire, you know. And be it really, really in the present with what I want to be in need to be in alignment with right now. And I can see how that could work for coming out also, you know, some sort of a power-retrieval ceremony, where you, you know, go back into that space and, like reclaim your power. Because what happens is, of course, we gave up power somewhere to someone, and we forgot that that's what happened, but energetically, that's still the reality. These are great questions. You know, most people… most people don't ask us these things everyday. So I don't, I don't often think about... about it.
We don't talk about these things enough. And we can create opportunities to go back and reclaim our power. We only need our creativity and an openness to explore time beyond the linear. Underneath any trauma or wounding, we are still whole and we can find our way back to our true selves. Ceremony and community can help. I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to sit down again with both Nick and Thom and also grateful to be able to share their wisdom with you.
Nick Venegoni & his husband Thom live in San Francisco, California and have been together for 15 years. Nick is the host of the The Queer Spirit podcast and a sound healer practitioner. Be sure to check the show notes and download a copy of his free guide to help queer folks build self-worth, called “The Self-Confident Queer”. Thom is a mystic and ritualist in the school of Natural and Ancestral Witchcraft and co-creator of the Trees and Stars open coven. Our music is by Terry Hughes. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast player to be notified when new episodes are released. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.