Hildred Billings’ Coming Out Story
On this episode we hear Hildred Billings’ Coming Out Story. She talks about the girl who broke her heart, coming from a really small town and having a mom who had no idea that Hildred was gay.
Listen to this episode here
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.
The book discussed in this episode
The One That Ran Away
Synopsis
Their love was written in the stars, but one of them wasn’t yet ready for fate.
Ten years ago, Jess Mills had her life changed when she crossed paths with Shannon Parker, the most beautiful girl at their small liberal arts college. But what Jess assumed to be nothing more than a crush on a straight girl turned into the night of her dreams senior year.
Then? Nothing. Shannon was gone before graduation.
One of them has moved on. The other is just getting started.
Shannon bumps into Jess shortly after moving to Portland, a place her ex-boyfriend decided to call home. Both single, and both reeling from post-college life, Shannon realizes that it’s no mere coincidence she’s once again encountered the girl who defined her co-ed years.
It’s fate.
Jess’s love for astrology and divination is about to come in handy now that Shannon is determined to face her feelings and understand the whim of the universe.
She isn’t running anymore.
The One That Ran Away on Amazon
When you use the links in this podcast and buy within 24 hours of clicking then we get a small commission that helps us run the site and it costs you nothing extra
Hard To Get
Synopsis
What do you do when the hottest and richest woman in town asks you out?
Run, apparently.
NADIA
No one has seen more billionaire-matchmaking carnage than Nadia Gaines, receptionist to the most expensive office around. If it’s not some old (and married) guy trying to impress her with diamonds and trips to paradise, then it’s…
Well, it’s Eva Warren, an old-money heiress whose tabloid exploits are as sordid as they are really, really gay.
Nadia is no stranger to lesbian lust. But no matter how much she wants to give in to Eva’s seduction, one mantra lurks in the back of her mind: Never date a billionaire!
Until the one night she does give in, anyway. Then everything goes to hell.
EVA
Life as a billionaire heiress isn’t all sunshine and kitty whiskers, especially if that heiress is Eva Warren. She’s managed to shake off tabloid gossip that’s ruined more than one woman’s life, but she’ll never be able to shake the two things she wants most: to work for her family’s business, and to date every beautiful woman she meets.
Curvy Nadia isn’t like the others, however. Even though the mutual attraction exists, for some reason she keeps shooting down Eva’s advances. Until Eva finally gets Nadia right where she wants her…
So begins one of the hottest games of hard to get to ever befall womankind. High society might not survive it.
The book discussed in this episode
When you use the links in this podcast and buy within 24 hours of clicking then we get a small commission that helps us run the site and it costs you nothing extra
Connect with Hildred Billings 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.
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 comments on these shows then please do so positively the more we stand together and embrace our diversity the stronger we get as a community welcome to coming-out stories I’m Sheena and I’m joined today by the fabulous author Hildred Billings Hilda thank you for joining me no problem thank you for having me all right so you get to share your coming-out story with us today yeah about what age did you sort of start feeling like you were not of the strictly interesting heterosexual persuasion that’s a kind of a weird question the answer simply because I grew up in a really really small town like 100 students in my whole public high school kind of small town and when you grow up in that situation literally almost literally every kid you go to school with is somebody you watch pee themselves when they were four years old so there wasn’t a lot of dating going on in general and the whole idea of like going out with this boy or going out with that boy it was like ear he’s like my brother at this point so I mean I had like had crushes on like you know Legolas and if there was a boy band member who had blond hair I was totally into him but for the most part I kind of knew from a very early age especially because my mother was very I guess you could say supporter of in the endeavor of making sure I knew I could do whatever the hell I wanted and that I shouldn’t I feel pressured to do anything I didn’t want was that when I was in high school I thought yeah I don’t want a date I don’t want to date anybody I’m not ready for that yet so not only did nobody ever asked me out I didn’t ask anybody else out and it seemed totally normal yeah I didn’t really have the whole I think I might be you know not straight idea until college really when I thought okay I’m ready to start dating now you know I’m 19 I mean College I’m away from home I want to start dating oh my god why won’t anybody date me and it turned out that I was just I was looking at the wrong people expand on it how did you win did the in cream sauce I guess I just kind of woke up one day and thought you know what I think I’ll try dating girls I didn’t really have this like oh my god I’m gay moment not not with myself that came later with my mom okay and then when you when you decided okay you gonna start trying to state girls now then um well that didn’t happen because it turns out boys and girls were not interested in me yeah the whole I’m really gay thing started revving up inside of me actually when I met this one girl and it’s the kind of meeting where you know ten years later I sit here thinking back about her a lot and how she affected in my life and how she affected my writing and the odds of her even remembering me at all are like slim to none because we didn’t have even like a friendship it was more like a very one-sided acquaintance ship with myself because I was kinda sort of obsessed with her which I feel like it’s a very you know 19 20 year old just coming out just figuring out who you are what you kind of want to be thing to do and because you have nothing to model your behavior on you done like you have all these intense feelings but you don’t necessarily have the role models in your life to to go okay this is how when appropriately behaves in the situation yeah I guess not because that my my college is you know GSA this gay-straight Alliance I was the only one there who identified as lesbian so I didn’t have like acquaintances who were gay I didn’t have friends who were gay definitely didn’t have anybody to kind of tell me oh yeah that’s normal you know I was kind of figuring out all by myself along the way everybody else at the GSA was either you know a guy or the most pretty much all of the women and my school’s gay-straight Alliance we’re either straight allies or you know they were they were bisexual which is fine but it was a very they were living a very different experience from me because most of them had most of them have boyfriends the Muslim did have experience with dating girls and I didn’t and that was weird to them too and then how did it progressed from thee well I pretty much spent my entire college years not doing anything about it because there was nothing to do about it there’s nobody today I was basically just hanging out online talking to people and screaming into the gay void and I think that’s part of the reason why I kind of latched on to anybody I was semi attracted to because it was the only way I knew how to express myself as a little young 20 year old lesbian I get that and then does the story have a happy ending that I’m saying somebody said for you yeah I mean if I ever talk about my youth and how lonely and sad I felt it does feel sad but you know I’m 32 now I have a long-term partner and I actually didn’t go on my first date until I was around 25 26 and it was just somebody off OkCupid and it was terrible she was not very kind but luckily I fell I didn’t fall in love with her first but I had a friend on tumblr of all places I somebody contacted me through the messaging system on tumblr one day saying hey I really like your blog I had this um this 1980s Japanese music blog pacifically about women from that time period and you know you post pictures you post you know gifts you post you know video links and one day I woke up to somebody in my inbox saying hey I love your blog I loved these artists thanks for doing this for fans like us and we started talking and we never stopped talking and now we live together and we have two cats and we’re probably gonna get married soon that’s wonderful she lived across the country for me so it must be love how long have you been together now I’ll be four years next month so you didn’t get you’re happy about it yeah I just I like to tell people that I might not have a lot of quantity of dating experience in my life and I make sure it’s quality fair enough you don’t need quantity always let’s talk about your family when you came out to them so there’s actually a lot of backstory to me actually coming out to my mom who’s the only one that matters I guess everybody else had figured it out and did not give a crap at all whatsoever but my mom bless her heart was / is a very oblivious person she she kind of has tunnel vision what she sees to be real is what’s real in her life and of course why would she have a gay daughter that doesn’t make any sense she’s just so heterosexual herself how could that happen the short end of it was that there was this girl as there always is and you know she was perfect in every way and she’s you know straight out of a romance novel we even had a meet-cute where I was walking to class one fine 9:00 a.m. on a fall autumn day and I said Kristin cool the leaves are falling it was nice and sunny and I was walking across campus and all of a sudden this lady passes me she was so beautiful I had to stop and step ahead of stop and stare at her just like oh my god it’s just beautiful people actually exist in my vicinity that’s amazing and you know that I just went off to class and thought nothing about it because you know oh I had never seen her before so she must not live on campus she must not go to any of my classes and who cares right okay that’s nice I saw a pretty person but then it comes I come to find out that not only do we live in the same dormitory we’re in the same class and it turns out we have many of the same mutual interests and for some dang reason we hadn’t met because this happened like um sophomore year which is second year of for your call and I don’t know how he made it about 13 months without me seeing the most beautiful woman in the world but here we were and it was one of those things where I was lonely enough and yet somewhat confident enough and who I was now that I decided to at least pursue like a friendly acquaintance with her just to see what would happen and what started was about three years of me slowly losing my mind and will also kind of oh I don’t even know how to put it there was just so many great anecdotes about what happened with her so a couple years ago I had written all of these misadventures I had with this woman who shall remain nameless because ten years later I am still petrified she’s gonna find out about all of this and think I’m so weird stalker person and I wrote all my misadventures and okay I’m gonna date myself now I wrote about everything that happened all the way from like these conversations we had together – oh my god she looked at me today oh my god she blew his cigarette smoke in my direction oh my god I wrote them in my live journal so I decided about a couple years ago to go back through and read these these aren’t these entries and I thought wow there’s there’s a romance novel here I just have to change the MT they actually end up together and that’s kind of how I came up with my book the one that ran away which is actually compiled of fictional retellings of actual events that happen in my life between myself and this girl who shall forever remain nameless but in the book I named Shannon so we’ll call her Shannon you’re listening to the news Ben talk show [Music] the lesbians all choked on you have of podcast information so that was your Facebook no that was PI my I don’t know 60th book I read a lot of books okay how did you end up writing so I’ve been writing since I was about four years old and I can’t remember the day when I took a sheet of eight by eleven printer paper cut it in half and started writing on it and made it look like it was a real book and I gave it to my mother and said here I wrote you a book and it was about my grandmother when she was a little girl and a unicorn comes and visits her at night and they go off on this really weird adventure together and it kind of just spiraled from there over the years and how did you get into writing this book well I got into it just because it was the most natural thing for me to write when I decided to start publishing because I was in a place in my life it’s just probably when I was about 25 26 maybe 24 and I I was in a place where I was very uninterested in men and like every aspect I didn’t want to read about them I didn’t want to hear about them didn’t want to think about them just because this has there’s no like reason or event in my life that led to this it’s just who I was at the time so I would have been incapable I love to write romance novels I love to write fantasy novels and at the time I would have been totally incapable of writing a heterosexual romance novel like I also do now so when I decided to pursue you know KDP Amazon self-publishing it was just such a no-brainer I was gonna write a lesbian romance you never actually told us about your mother though no I was getting up to that flash-forward to senior year of my college experience and I show up a week early because I was doing this you know early days helping freshmen get oriented with campus thing and honestly it was just an excuse to be there a week early and hopefully you know see some friends maybe meet some cool people before the whole brush um you know the school year starts and I was sitting at this fountain by the parking lot near the gym and she comes by you know the lady who would soon be renamed Shannon I was riding by on her bicycle and she stops on the other side of the fountain and I’m thinking oh my god are you kidding me why is why is every interaction I have with her feel like fate and she gets out her phone and she’s you know completely ignoring me and keep in mind we’ve had you know more than a few conversations over the years and we have in fact we’ve had a couple not intense conversations but definitely beyond the usual oh hi how are you how is class kind of conversations at that point so she definitely recognized me but she completely shut me out and it wasn’t like a malicious thing she just didn’t care if that makes sense like I wasn’t on her radar kind of thing while she was on her phone and then she gets back on her bike and she rides away and that was kind of when I had my moment of it’s never gonna happen like why am I wasting my time on this why do I care so much about talking to her I need to I need to sort myself out and of course it was very hard it’s not so much that it was hard to accept but it meant to like this giant change in my worldview it meant doing other things and then putting my focus on other people in other pursuits especially since it was senior year and I had to start thinking about you know what am I gonna do after college and I just I just suddenly really wanted to talk to my mother and I kind of knew that I couldn’t just call her up and start crying without explaining why I was crying and up to this point I had a I had been completely in the closet to my mother which is weird because I was not in the closet to anybody else like if you met me the first thing you learned about me was I was pretty gay and I never talked about it at home not because so much my parents were you know socially conservative or they wouldn’t understand but because it just though I know I mentioned earlier that my mother was very tunnel vision II she had this idea of what life was like and while she very much encouraged me to do whatever I wanted and that I shouldn’t she asked she would put if she goes don’t settle for a man who makes you feel like because she had been in that position many times in her life and there’s anything she wanted to tell me it was how to avoid that kind of situation but she still very much had this image of being you know getting married to a man and having kids even though I had told her a hundred times I didn’t want kids I think that finally sank in but I still hadn’t gotten around to telling her I’m probably never ever gonna marry a man and that’s all there is to it because I knew it would just create this whole well what do you mean by that we’re like when did this happen or I mean I guess the thing you have to understand about my mother is that she grew up in suburban Los Angeles during the 1950’s and she just had a very set worldview and while by all accounts she was a pretty liberal lady it was a lot harder for her to accept change within her own family so here I was sitting on this fountain thinking about how much everything sucks how long I felt and how uncertain I was of the future and all I could think about was I just want to call my mom so I called her up in the moment she says hello I just start crying I was bawling in this public square luckily there was nobody else around so that was nice and I’m crying I’m crying and of course you know her reaction is oh my god what is wrong what’s happening are you okay are you hurt and I just I just sat there and then I just kind of solved mom I’m gay that was the thing I was crying about and her reaction bless her heart was there’s this pause and then all of a sudden I hear you are I completely blindsided her with it which was funny because she took it upon herself later to tell her husband my stepfather and a couple other people I finally had a tell her to stop telling people I’m gay because we do come from a very small town and I didn’t want it to cause problems for her and apparently everybody had figured it out but her because they just kind of she said they just kind of looked at her like yeah of course she can tell Debbie and so you out yeah I was pretty much it but it felt like this giant weight off my shoulders and it was so nice to finally just be able to say hey mom there’s this girl I’ve been in love with for two or three years and she’s just pretty much broken my heart by just you know not acknowledging my existence in a way my 20 year old self needs to be acknowledged and she just did the very classic mom like Walden they’re not good enough for you yeah yeah so what would you say to somebody who’s going through the process of self-discovery right now who’s struggling to come out I think that’s hard to answer simply because so much has changed in the 10 years since I did it because it has been about almost 10 9 10 years which it honestly feels a lot longer because so much has changed and I’ve been sitting here watching all this change happen and I keep I see kids back from my old high school which is still like a hundred kids in this very isolated community and they talk about LGBT stuff they talk about maybe I’m bisexual maybe I’m trans and all I can think is ten years ago that would have never happened absolutely never you have gotten the crap kicked out of you and so you know I feel like a kid today you know a teenager 20 year old in college having these kinds of feelings is going through a completely different well it’s not a completely different process but I feel like the states are different now and if I was to give advice to somebody who is you know Gen Z generation Z whereas no I’m the aging cynical millennial I I think I’d 5 just say you know you just got a it’s got to be yourself and there’s never been a better time just be yourself because I wish I mean I had it pretty good I I was on a very liberal campus I had very accepting friends who just kind of okay you’re gay whatever but I still had that dread about telling my family about telling my mom I’m not saying that doesn’t exist today especially since every family every community is different but I do kind of wish I had you know the media to back me up I wish I had politics to back me up because this is when my state of Oregon had just you know made it they had just voted on a constitutional amendment to make gay marriage illegal and my parents voted for it which also played into my thinking that I should probably not tell them for a while that is rough yeah okay so if people have not read your work what book do you suggest they stop us well I’ve got some pretty steamy books that’s probably what I’m most well-known for is I write billionaire lesbian girlfriend fantasies I guess you could say and I do so under the name the co-written name of both Hildred Billings and my pen name Cynthia Dayne because the thing you have to understand is that Cynthia Dayne writes male female billionaire romance you know thinks Fifty Shades of Grey crossfire series whatever and Hildred rights you know lesbian of different flavors different heat levels different links whatever and when their powers combined we get hot lesbian girlfriend billionaire fantasies set in the rest of the billionaire universe and my best-selling book of all time and this is both unless Vic and in straight fiction if you want to call it that is called hard-to-get and it’s about a receptionist in an office building who has a very insistent pursuer in the form of this very flamboyant very elegant yet exuberant heiress who is bound and determined to make her her girlfriend so by the time this podcast comes out the sequel will be published the highly anticipated sequel called hard to please should be out so that’s exciting you should go check that out and we can people find you a nun if they want to connect I’m on Amazon of course I also have some books that are wide so to speak on iTunes Barnes & Noble Kobo Google all that good stuff most people come and find me at my facebook group that’s where I do most of my interaction and it’s a private group just for you know privacy sake go figure and it’s called Hildred and Cynthia’s backroom parlor and we will we will allow pretty much anyone in as long as you don’t look like a bot or a stalker so don’t don’t let the happening to apply to join thing put you off because I just pretty much get the notification on my phone and go okay except yeah it’s on Facebook though so if you don’t have facebook the easiest way to get a hold of me is through my email which you can find on my website holder Billings calm baby just thank you so much for sharing your story with us today yeah it was great to be here thank you [Music] we thank our guests for sharing a very personal parts 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
