I was really stuck on what to write about today, so I headed over to Submissive Journal Prompts for some ideas and one of their questions was “How would you handle being outed in the vanilla world?” and that got me thinking!
First of all…. what do they mean by the “vanilla world”? I guess to most people that would be non-scene friends, work colleagues and family, so I’ll take those three sets of people separately. Non-scene friends….. well, to be honest, I don’t really have any of those – maybe it’s a little sad, but most of my social life revolves around scene events and scene people. That doesn’t mean we don’t do “vanilla” things, but just that i don’t have any worry of being outed to them, as they already know what I do. Colleagues, similarly – I don’t have many of them that I’m not already out to, most of the shoots I do involve kink in some way, shape or form, so I’m not terribly worried about those people finding out what I do. I am always careful when doing non-kink shoots, not to give the photographer more information than they may be comfortable with. But that is purely because I don’t feel I need to give intimate details of my life to people it’s not relevant to. If they’ve seen my other work and ask more about it, I’m happy to tell them more, but if they’re not interested, I dont think it’s fair to force it upon them.
There has been one occasion where I’ve been outed at work, though. I used to work in a pub, where we got loads of builders in every morning for breakfast, so I obviously got to know them quite well, and they got to know “the girl who does the breakfast shift” as well. Then one morning they started coming in, and as I was pouring their orange juices and coffees, one of them said over the bar “we’ve seen your pictures on the Internet, love”!! Obviously I blushed bright red and denied all knowledge…….. (actually, I claimed I didnt’ know what pictures they had seen – not a lie at all, but I didn’t know whether they’d seen some of my early hardcore SM stuff, or some comparably tame flashing and nude in public stuff….. it turns out it was the former, but I didn’t learn that til the end of the week!!) But there were lots of mutterings all around until they had all finished. Fortunately, in this situation, I was at no risk of loosing my job – the landlord knew exactly what I was into, and in fact, for several years, allowed us to hold a munch in his pub – but it was slightly uncomfy, because the other two people working with me that morning were older and rather judgemental. They kinda had a vague idea I might be into bdsm, but didn’t know for definite and definitely wouldn’t have liked the idea of me doing porn!!
The last category I mentioned above is family, and this is where it gets a little more complicated. I’m totally out to my mum and her boyfriend, they know what I’m into personally and what work I do, and have seen my blog etc. It’s a great feeling to not have to hide what I’m doing from my mum – we are very close and it would be awful not to be able to share my successes with her. I am out to my little brother as bi – he has met R and they get on well, which is lovely – but the rest of my family don’t know anything. It does make it very hard to be constantly asked by various family members when I’m going to find “Mr Right” and settle down, and up until now it has always been easier to avoid the questions than say “well, actually I’m looking for Miss Right”. That is going to change, as I don’t want R to be a guilty secret – she gets on fab with mum and lil bro and I’d love her to come along to family stuff with me.
As for coming out about the bdsm and porn to the rest of the family, I don’t really feel any need to do that myself, because as they don’t tell me about their sex lives, i don’t wanna tell them about mine. However, I have had threats of outing several times and have discussed it with my mum (another reason why it’s great to be so close with her – she can help with damage limitation!!) and if the situation ever arises, which I hope it wont, we know how we are going to approach the rest of the family. Fortunately my closest family are all fairly open minded, and their biggest concern would probably be my safety and well being. If they can see that I’m safe and happy, they wont object too strongly, although my nan is a worrier, so I think she might unfortunately loose some sleep over it, wondering if i’m safe etc, but I think in the end, she knows I’m strong enough to look after myself.
So, enough about me……… I’m interested to hear how you guys would deal with being outed
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