Everybody's doing it

My paternal grandmother and her soon-to-be sister-in-law were fast friends when they had their "coming out". The were some of the last young women in the 30's and 40's to have a proper debut, and what lovely debutantes they were in their frilly white gowns. At what must have been my own debut, my high school graduation party, I wore a summer dress with blue flowers and bright blue flip flops.

When I got home to do my blog quick-catch-up from google reader I noticed a theme of "coming out" issues, so I thought I'd let one out of the bag that just kinda happened tonight. You see, I get one-on-one time with my team-lead for half an hour once a week. Normally we review my progress month to date, stats, quality, the business side because really that's what our meetings are for. But tonight we went over my bonus for about 2 minutes and then spent the rest of the time just talking about life and stuff. We don't get a lot of time to do that and we were both super stressed out and on our periods and cranky. So somehow we got on the top of the halloween party I'm attending tomorrow, and the party I attended last weekend and she asked me what my costume was.

So this is my first "real" job and I'm not really sure how much information I can give to people and still keep it "HR appropriate". And I don't really know how much I want to share about my personal life with people at work. After a little bit of probing to find out if she would be "safe", I decided to just tell her about my corset and my fishnet tights and all. And my plan to wear my work clothes so that I would be "forcefully disrobed" upon arrival. She just laughed and said I was funny. And she offered me a gracious moment of recognition, too - Boss said I seem to party a lot and I said "no, not that often, they haven't taken me out to the [aforementioned] gay dive bar [where the kiss story happened] in quite awhile." She said "oh yeah, [hot stud supervisor in neighboring work-group] said she was going to take me there but I didn't really know if I would belong there......." Just by the subtle recognition she validated my company's commitment to diversity and assured me that being a lesbian in her work-group is fine by her. I appreciate that.

So now, she knows I'm a bit on the naughty side (away from work, anyway) and now I know she knows I'm a lesbian and that it's all good. yey!