Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm your host for this week, Dame Wilburn. It's Pride Month.

Woohoo! And this year we're talking about an age-old ride of passage for the queer community.

Coming out. And just like all queer things coming out includes a multitude of experiences.

It can be equal parts thrilling, scary, joyful, casual, or vital. But fundamentally, all folks who have to leave the proverbial

closet are facing a world which, at best, sees them as an other. And, at the worst, is openly hostile towards them.

So to look that world in the eye and say, screw you, I'm here and this is who I am. There's no small feat.

Today we'll hear two stories about that defiance and the not so easy road to get there.

Our first storyteller prefers to go by just her first name, Sejal. Sejal told this story at a story slam in Berkeley

where the theme of the night was endings. Here's Sejal, live at the Moth.

Growing up in Bangalore in South India, I, my only exposure to the LGBT community, was in offensive

Bollywood movies that featured clearly heterosexual actors pretending to be gay by wearing floral

prints and speaking affirmatively. But then I moved to America and college greeted me with a group of

liberal friends who would say love is love and I would go to Lady Gaga concerts and scream baby I was

born this way and feel completely empowered. But then I would go home to India for the summer, the winter,

and people would ask me do you have a boyfriend and have you thought about your future and your partner,

and I would say I just haven't found the right man yet. And I see I knew in the back of my mind that

even though I came out to all my friends in my junior year of college that I would explore my

sexuality for a few years and you know have fun and discover the side of myself and then eventually

I would make it work with a man. I was kind of bisexual right so I could do that. See coming out to

my parents, my family it never really felt like an option to me. It felt like the end, the death of

so many things that I had imagined. The end of my relationship with them as I knew it, the death of

the future that they had always imagined for me. And so as I tried to avoid this inevitable ending,

...