I made myself a promise: even if it meant becoming a stranger to my loved ones, even if it meant keeping secrets, I would have a life of my own.
Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives

Coming out as queer in a Slavic household is not for the faint-hearted. Unfortunately, it normally doesn’t go well, but occasionally you get parents who are “westernized” enough to accept you or not throw you out on the spot.

My experience was somewhere between the two. On one hand, I had my mother, a Ukrainian immigrant who escaped the Soviet Union in the 90’s from religious persecution. On the other, my father was born to two Croatian immigrants who were political refugees from the former Yugoslavia. While one parent was more westernized than the other, both still held deep roots of the religious, patriarchal Slavic societies that they grew up in. I may have been young, but I knew it was a recipe for disaster.

Ever since I was twelve, I knew I liked girls the same way boys did, and ever since I was twelve, I also knew that telling my parents was most likely going to end poorly. Whenever I had thought about telling them, I felt physically ill remembering the comments and outbursts that they had over the queer community. How unnatural and disgusting it was. How something was wrong with those people.

So, unsurprisingly, coming out to my parents at sixteen was filled with fear and tears and a lot of pleading. I cried, my mother cried, and my father tried to smooth things over.

“I knew it,” my mother told me.

“We love you,” my father had hugged me.

The next day, my father had pulled me aside to tell me, “Don’t tell Baka (Croatian: grandma) and Dida (Croatian: grandpa).”

I knew that to tell them would mean losing them from my life. My grandparents made yearly trips to Međugorje, an unofficial Catholic pilgrimage site where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to children on Apparition Hill in 1981. The same grandparents who attend church at our local Croatian parish at least three times a week. You don’t just come out to grandparents like these and not expect to lose them.

Likewise, my mother made sure to emphasize how she wasn’t going to tell anyone in her family due to the same religious views as my father’s. It’s a punch in the gut to live with the knowledge that your family would ostracize you over who you choose to kiss, but that wasn’t a battle I wanted to fight at the time.

Since then, my relationship with my parents had seen many ups and downs, especially when I started dating. They never wanted to know (and still don’t) about my love life. I had accepted that the parts of life that brought me so much joy would have to be kept away from them in order to preserve the sensitive balance of our relationship. If I didn’t talk about or display my queerness, it didn’t exist to them, and that was something they could live with. And because I wanted my parents in my life, I lived with it too.

While the majority of the consequences of being “out” in a Slavic community is dealt by your family, there are still the broader social consequences as well. This is especially true for women loving women who are masculine presenting, where there is always a fear of being “found out” by the rest of your community.

Up until senior year of high school, my mother was adamant about picking my clothes for important events. It was a fight every time we needed to go somewhere that would hold our diasporas, either Ukrainian or Croatian. I remember getting into screaming matches over whether or not I was going to wear a dress, and you better believe that my mother was going to get me into that dress.

The worst part was the reactions from others. I’d get compliments constantly whenever my mother picked my clothes for weddings, Christmas and New Years parties, Thanksgiving, Easter, and every other event or holiday you could think of. These compliments were music to my mother, but to me, it made my identity expression more complicated. Couldn’t they see I was uncomfortable?

Alternately, I’ll never forget the moment where I went against my mother’s desires for my attire. I had just graduated high school and was attending my friend’s graduation party. I refused the dress my mother suggested and instead went with slacks and a nice shirt.

I showed up to the graduation party feeling comfortable in my own skin for once, and what my friend told me stuck with me even years later.

“I love your fit, you look like yourself.”

Immediate euphoria.

As masculine-presenting queer Slavic women, we are constantly torn between the desire to please our family and our friends, and the desire to express ourselves in a way that makes us feel truly ourselves.

When I began to dress the way I wanted to, I noticed the reactions immediately. My Slavic family and friends didn’t know what to make of the girl who was suddenly wearing men’s button down shirts, slacks, and blazers.

And while I felt uncomfortable and saddened with the reactions I got from others around me, I was more uncomfortable stuffing myself into a dress that I wanted to burn instead of wear. I needed to decide whether I wanted to make people around me comfortable, or if I wanted to be comfortable.

After years of battles between my mother and I, with the nagging fear of being cast out of the society in which I lived, I made my decision. No more dresses forced onto me, no matter what happened when I wore my slacks instead.

The terrifying fact of being queer in the Eastern European world is that you’re going to upset people. A lot of people. And they’ll probably be the people that are closest to you, ones who have held you as an infant or grew up by your side. Girls that said you’d be a bridesmaid will cross the street to avoid you, and it’ll hurt like hell.

While the initial coming out and navigation of your queerness may feel like your entire world is collapsing, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

With every step you take into your authentic self, your authentic friends and family will appear. Take solace in knowing that these moments of pain and suffering that you experience when you come out allows you to clearly see those who are willing to walk through fire for you.

Thankfully for us, the younger generations of Eastern Europeans are much more accepting than the generations before. I realized this when I came out after years of hiding my sexuality from my Slavic friends and cousins. My first cousin, bless her, was my test subject in seeing how my extended family would react.

I have this obscure habit of coming out to people in odd situations and places. For example, taking a short corner with my friend and teammate at soccer practice.

Or in the instance of coming out to my cousin, the bathroom of a restaurant while at dinner with family.

She thought I was joking at first, she asked “really?” a few times, but then shrugged her shoulders and told me she didn’t care. She asked if my parents and siblings knew, and that was that. Since then, I have never felt the need to filter away my queerness for her comfort, because as it turned out, she didn’t care. It was beautiful.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the proverb blood is thicker than water, but what they don’t tell you, is the full proverb goes like this: blood of the covenant is thicker than water of the womb. Take this proverb as gospel when it comes to navigating your relationships post-coming out.

You don’t pick your family, but you get to choose them. And when they love you the same way you love them, they’ll choose you back. With friends, you choose them and they choose you and you continue to choose each other over and over despite the chaos that surrounds your lives.

Your queerness isn’t going to scare away the right people. Not everyone is out to get you and not everyone wants to see you hurt. Not everyone is willing to let something as uncontrollable as your sexuality determine the future of your relationship.

I promise that you will find those people. And when you do, you’ll see how easy it is to keep choosing each other, over and over again.