From "Coming Out at 48" to "Coming Out / Staying Out"...

There are more than a few interesting bloggers out there and one that caught my eye early in my own blogging timeline was "Chris P." who blogged at Coming Out at 48.

The sub-head below the blog title read "At 48, a married man tells his wife he is gay. Life stops in its tracks and then begins again. He still goes to sleep in the evening and he still rises in the morning, but everything has changed" and his blog entries were a fascinating series of semi-daily observations by a man whose whole world had suddenly shifted as he made his first tentative steps out as a gay man, not without some trepidation.

I wasn't the only one reading. Coming Out at 48 was featured in a New York Times article in August of 2006 ("When the Beard is Too Painful to Remove"). Here is an excerpt from the article:

The loss [of a long term spouse] comes on top of the adolescent awkwardness of not knowing the social norms of a new world, described on the blog Coming Out at 48. Its author, who identifies himself only as Chris, writes of changing his clothes many times before heading to his first gay bar, finding it empty and not realizing he had arrived too early. He writes of not understanding the sexual terminology in gay personal ads and looking for an “always gay’’ man to teach him what he needed to know.

In an e-mail exchange, Chris compared the experience to “living abroad,’’ where the “thrill of a new place’’ competes with “the deep loneliness’’ of unfamiliarity. It is not, he said “the existential loneliness of not knowing who you are and where you belong, but the loneliness of ‘What am I going to do this weekend?’ ‘How am I supposed to behave?’ or ‘When will the phone start to ring?’ ’’

Eventually, "Chris" found surer footing in this new world an met someone with whom he clicked. Coming Out at 48 remained online (it's still in my blog roll) but most blog entries disappeared. "Chris" decided to focus on his new life instead. Until now.

Meet Paul. For a while now, I have been keeping in touch with "Chris", whose real name is Paul, and he recently reached out to say that he had launched a brand new blog. He felt the itch to write again and to share his most recent experiences. His new blog, "Coming Out / Staying Out" has been added to my blog roll. It's still in its infancy but I am sure it will be worth your time. Feel free to ad it to your RSS feeds.

Related:

• On Writing (Coming Out / Staying Out)