One of my favorite bloggers, Isabel of Hola, Isabel (no, not that Isabel, King friends), had a fabulous and thought-provoking series of posts this week on her experience with her gay brother coming out to the family in his late 20s.

Reading the posts and the comment discussions, plus some email correspondence with Isabel, led me to post (finally) some thoughts about what might have someone who comes out under pretty good circumstances still wind up alienated from their family, over on the other blog.

I’m not done thinking about this, but my thoughts haven’t quite gotten clear yet. There’s at least one more post, maybe something else, having to do with:

• Think through why you’re coming out and what kind of relationship you want to have with the person in the long run.
• Try to imagine a few ways people might react when you come out, not just the worst case scenario.
• Who “should” try to open up conversations about “what it means” when you come out.
• It isn’t anyone’s fault that we live in a homophobic world, but we have to decide how we are going to deal with it.
• We have a lot of power to make things be normal or be awkward or be secretive. And by we I mean every single person. Not absolute power, perhaps, but more than we think.
• It is so important to try to find out what is going on in the heads of the people we care about, and telepathy doesn’t work reliably as a source of information.
• Secrets drain people and damage relationships.

I’m curious about your thoughts, especially after you go read Isabel’s posts and mine on the other blog, but even just from your impressions here.