Author Amy Bright’s Coming Out Story
On this episode we hear Author Amy Bright’s Coming Out Story. One of the things that makes this story special is that she came out later in life after being married to a man.
This podcast series airs every October to celebrate coming out month. As LGBTQIA people we are often seen as different and wrong. By celebrating our coming out stories we see that we are part of something bigger and that there is hope.
Listen to this episode here
The book discussed in this episode
Breaking Point by Amy Bright
Synopsis
Andi and Dawn collide (literally) on a beach in Mexico. This leads the women to indulge in a hot and steamy, but short-lived fling. After returning to their respective homes on the East Coast, they begin a long-distance affair. An affair that quickly turns from casual to serious.
Tess has been Dawn’s best friend since they were seven years old. She has also been in love with Dawn since discovering she liked girls in junior high school. In an attempt to win Dawn’s heart, she has successfully sabotaged every relationship Dawn has ever attempted to have, but still has not moved past the friend zone.
Will Andi and Dawn’s new-found love fall victim to Tess’s sabotage? And just how far is Tess willing to go to have Dawn for herself?
The book discussed in this episode Breaking Point by Amy Bright
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Connect with Amy Bright Online at the links below
Transcript for today’s show
Please note this transcript has not been edited and is automatically generated meaning certain words will be incorrect. [
Music] coming out stories is a short run podcast exclusive to the lesbian talk-show the goal of this podcast is to share real stories from real people in the LGBTQIA community because this is such a personal journey I ask that if you do comment on these shows then please do so positively the more we stand together and embrace our diversity the stronger we get as a community my name is Amy bright I have published one book it is a romantic suspense I guess is the best way to put it it was really kind of just an on-the-fly thing because I wanted to have something for the GCLs convention this past year so I just said well I’m gonna write something really fast and put it out there so I did but I’ve got a full-length novel that I’m working on it should be out by the end of the year what is the title of the romantic suspense it’s called breaking point it’s about two women who meet on vacation in Mexico and they decide to continue their affair once they get back home long distance they live about five hours from each other and then there’s a best friend who is not happy about the situation so it gets all dicey at times okay cool and you here today to talk about your coming-out story so my coming-out story is probably really kind of weird and complicated all at the same time so I was married I had married this guy that I met while I was in college I met him my freshman year we married my sophomore year had a kid and I met this woman online nothing romantic just she’s just a friend and one day she says to me she says you know I think he might consider that she might be a lesbian and I had been frequenting these chat rooms that were women only chat rooms and I realized they were mostly lesbians I had no idea I thought they were just women only cuz that’s just who I wanted to be be around and she posed this to me and I said no no no I’m really not and a lot of my objection to this was that I was fairly religious at the time so there was a lot of needing to reconcile that with my belief system with the potential that my sexuality wasn’t as I so she says to me there’s a book you should read so so she says give this book it’s called as the homosexual my neighbor just read it if you come away from that and you don’t feel like you might be gay you’re probably not that’s okay so I got the book I read the book and then I went to my husband and I said you know I think I’m pretty sure I’m a lesbian so he says to me well I suspect you might should figure that out if we’re gonna stay married so I mean how had his permission and I started dating and I went out with this girl so this is where the story gets a little weird I met a couple of different girls online that I was gonna go out with and one of them I had told that I was married and had a child the other one I did not and it just had never come up it wasn’t like I was keeping it it just hadn’t come up and I got them confused so the one that I ended up going out with was the one that didn’t know so when I went out with her and I mentioned this she’s like you didn’t tell me that and I was like I didn’t cuz I really thought I did anyway we ended up having a really nice time we went out and we talked for hours and hours and hours least I think we stayed at Outback for like five hours I’m sure they were like totally ready to kick us out she kissed me that night and that was when I knew 100% for sure that I absolutely was a lesbian no doubt first time I kissed woman and it was definitely you know not what I was expecting so I told my husband I’m definitely a lesbian and then I found out two weeks later I was pregnant again yeah I had to tell the girl who I had then started dating that I was pregnant that was not a fun conversation and as far as my family went I didn’t tell them one way or the other I just told him that I was divorcing my husband that we you know weren’t doing anything now the same time I wasn’t I also wasn’t hiding that I was dating this woman she was with me all the time I put pride stickers on my car I was wearing prop jewelry I just wasn’t telling anybody I didn’t feel like it was necessary had a sister who is not a very nice person and she told my whole family that you know all these rainbow stickers on her car means that she’s gay so that didn’t go over real well with my family I had sister who gave me Bible tracts for Christmas one year that was fun but what I learned from my experience with this first girlfriend that I have is that the world of lesbian dating is extremely small very very small and this is how I learned this remember I told you that I was talking to two women and when I told about my kids and when I didn’t they had never met each other at that time stresses they had not met each other didn’t know each other Brandin that was my girlfriend we’ve been together for six months and we were not doing well as a couple and it was coming to an end she disappeared for a weekend and I found out that she was cheating on me with that girl ha nothing cheating is funny but the your ass about the school thing so that was my introduction to what she termed the lesbian incest circle and the l-word called the chart you know it’s just we all know each other and I find that that it is a very very very small world how did you feel when you realized came to terms with being gay you know it was really interesting for me because one of the first things that I noticed was when I reflected back on my childhood especially my early adolescence ten years I would develop these really unnatural attachments to women in my wife her girls sometimes women sometimes girls and I just thought well I just want to be friends with him I just want to be close to them I never attributed it to being a crush and I often wondered why I didn’t have those same feelings about about guys like I never really cared about guys when I met my husband he was just a really nice guy and he treated me well and I was like you know this is not bad it wasn’t great but it wasn’t bad so that’s why I married him because I he was a good friend and friendship goes a long way I would have liked to have stayed friends with him but that did not work out really well after once we actually divorced which incidentally we did not divorce right away we separated but then since gay marriage wasn’t legal I refused to pay for a divorce I told him when he wanted to pay for a divorce he could get one but since it wasn’t benefit me I wasn’t paying for it so I stayed married to him for like three years you’re listening to the Lisbon talk-show the lesbian talk-show con you’ll have a podcast information and your kids buy all this is 22 and my youngest is 19 did this come as a shock to them well that’s the second one wasn’t born he’s never known anything else and the other one was so small I don’t think it was it wasn’t relevant him was really close to my second girlfriend we lived together for about a year and he was very close to her but he was again really little when we lived together he was only three yeah well my guess was about four years old he loved her but you know when it ended it wasn’t that big of deal because like I said he was really young and then I met my wife like two years later and she and I have been together now for 14 years and you’re happier now that you’ve sort of discovered your true self oh yeah I mean I was happier in general when I came out because I mean I hadn’t been I wouldn’t say that I was ever an unhappy person but definitely there was a drastic difference in the way I felt once I came out I was certainly happier meaning my wife however was honest to god I have spent the past 14 years of my life in bliss that’s wonderful oh yeah yeah I’m exceptionally lucky so your testament to these non-believers who think there’s no way you cannot know you’re a lesbian and get married to a guy and have kids because you’re a testament that it actually does happen absolutely I mean we’re raised in a heteronormative society so full disclosure I’m a so theologists that’s what I’m educated to be as a sociologist and we are raised in a heteronormative society we’re not really taught that anything other than heterosexuality is an option that’s how we’re all conditioned so when the options not on the table for you don’t consider it and for me especially being raised in the American South even though I was raised in a very progressive family being raised in the American South it really isn’t an option you know people trashed gay people my whole life even though my parents weren’t like that we actually had lesbian friends or they had lesbian friends they were older obviously I was a child but we had spent time at their house and you know I would hear them talking about it because they weren’t out out they were a roommate situation but everybody knew because it was we’re talking about the 1980s and you know I hear my parents talking about well you know they’re lesbians you know it wasn’t it was but they didn’t say anything negative they talked about them in positive terms you know how nice they were and all that so it wasn’t like my parents did that but being in the south it was rough trying to navigate that especially with the religious aspect and my parents weren’t real religious but what happened was they sent me to a private school when I was in middle school because I was struggling really hard and looking back one of the reasons I was struggling is because I was gay and I didn’t know it but I was struggling really hard in middle school so my mom said you know what let’s put you in private school and see if that helps the only private schools in the town that I lived in were Christian schools for three years I was immersed in fundamentalism and I don’t mean just you know a typical adventure local Christianity I’m talking wasn’t allowed to wear pants or shorts to school I had to wear skirts that were below my knee I had to wear culottes for gym I mean it was it’s hardcore fundamentalism so being immersed in that for three years there was some residual effects even though my mom eventually pulled me out because it was totally against you know her believes to raise me that way there was still certain aspects of it that affected me personally so I had to reconcile that with my sexuality and that’s where the book came in the book was really helpful and I think Becky that’s the woman that recommended that book to me I think what she recognized was that what was holding me back from recognizing the truth was my religious issues and that book really pushed me over the edge it made me see that I could be gay and I wouldn’t go to hell for it and it was okay do you think it makes a difference or it would have made a difference if you were exposed as a kid when you’re going through these these hormonal shifts these changes these feelings that you if you had exposure to lesbian media positively that you would have maybe recognized something I think so for sure I think it would have been so I did watch Ellen when I was younger you know in the 90s but again by the time that happened I was already my personality was established I graduated from high school in 1994 so by the time Ellen was you know on TV I was pretty established in my personality traits but had I seen that earlier had I been more exposed to it as a child and seeing some positivity I think it definitely would have impacted me it’s one of the reasons why I want to write Wes Vick I could write anything you know I have four years written lots of different stuff but writing less fit for me is about representation it’s not about well that’s a great market to be in now it is a great market to be in right now absolutely it’s probably one of the fastest-growing markets there is but that’s not what it’s about for me it’s about that’s where my heart lies because I want people to see themselves in books and I want them to see themselves on the screen and I think it’s really super important especially for younger people to have those those images thank me with you I say there’s quite a lot in my various podcasts and stuff but I think that leading the charge in pushing lyric into mainstream is not gonna be the romances it’s going to be the suspense books and the thrillers and the books with incidents of lesbians we romance is not the main thrust of the story and I don’t absolutely disagree with that my plan is to write I have a have a book that I’m working out it’s gonna take probably a few years to get out because it’s gonna be pretty large book and I always have multiple works in progress because when I get writer’s block I can just switch to something else I found that’s really what writer’s block is you just don’t wanna work on this right now something’s you can’t write usually it’s just you can’t write what you need to write so that’s something else that’s been my solution to that I so I always have multiple things that I can be working on at any given time and I’ve got this one and it is a romance but it’s not what you would consider a standard romance by any stretch of the imagination the premise of it is more about human behavior than it is anything else and it’s not strictly about lesbians it’s it’s about women who are straight and women who identify as straight coming to terms with their sexuality but doing it through different means I don’t want to talk too much about it because like I said it’s it’s still a work in progress and what I find is that my characters really do write themselves what I start out with as the premise for something can totally be different by the time it is the book that I published back in June was never meant to be a romantic substance it was meant to be a simple contemporary romance that’s all it was supposed to be that is not where it was that’s why I say I can’t say for sure how things are going to go like the one I’m working on now I’m pretty concrete about where it’s going but it’s taking some turns I wasn’t expecting and because I used to work in law enforcement I think sometimes my books tend to take a little bit of a criminal turn that I don’t expect them to take and that that’s what happened with with breaking point it was just the put it wasn’t even supposed to be titled breaking point there wasn’t supposed to be any suspense it was just supposed to be a simple two women meet they realized that they’re really compatible they go back home they have a little interference from somebody who has some jealousy but nothing you know criminal about it like I said that’s not where it went so you know I never know anyway can people find you online if they are thrilled by this and when to connect with you I’m always on Facebook it’s Amy bright I’ll sign for face book author page which is Amy bright I am on Twitter at out lesbian oh you TLS be in and then I have a website which is a great website if you’re down for just reading some really cute snippets of converse with my wife because she’s adorable and she says really funny stuff all the time so what I do is I’ll take little snippets of our conversation usually three or four lines of conversation and I make blog post about them it’s called conversations with my wife calm nice I also do some book reviews on there and and you know a few other things promote my own work obviously but mostly conversations with my wife thus the name conversations with my wife calm okay cool I’ll add links to the show notes for anybody who’s interested Amy thank you so much for joining me today thank you we think our guest for sharing a very personal part of their lives with us and hope that you connected with their journey you can find our guests online check the show notes for links the Lisbon talk show is all about sharing love and connecting with one another and we hope that these stories help you do that because this is such a personal journey I ask that if you do comment on these shows then please do so positively the more we stand together and embrace our diversity the stronger we get as a community please know that you are under no obligation to come out it is a very personal journey and only you can know when you are ready and whether or not it is safe to come out if you enjoy these podcasts consider becoming a patron of the talk show the link is in the show notes I’m Sheena and this has been coming out stories
