I’m From Oswego, NY – Video Story

by Daniel Cohen

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So before I was working in Boston I was an investment banker. I hated this job. I had done it for two years. I wasn’t out. Finally I made the decision that I was going to Europe, see my grandfather die, the more important things.

 

And I decided alright, well, I’ll come out. So at that point my parents thought, “It makes sense for us to tell your extended family.” And I’m thinking that they’re going to call them. I find out that my mom, the way she plans on telling them is she’s going to draft this mass email and send it out to my family: “Dan Is Gay.” And it sounded…it made sense to her but to me it sounded like a horrible idea. They were gonna get this email it was gonna be kinda awkward and it was going to make it seem like they weren’t really comfortable with it. And what I was really worried about was that I would go to the family reunion a year later and it was just going to be this big elephant in the room – really awkward and nobody’s gonna wanna talk about it. It ended up working out well she decided she was going to start calling them. And she would call them and a week later most of them would end up sending me an email saying, “Hey we got the ‘news’ from your mom and we just want you to know that we still love you.” It was so much easier than I’d ever expected. That it was really easy to do kinda lead me to the point where I’m like…I’m open to trying other jobs and to doing other things so I guess what I’m saying is I saw it was so easy to come out that I gained a lot of confidence that I was at a point where I could try a lot of  jobs. So I left that job doing investment banking and I made this list of things I wanted to do in life and just start checking them off. So I got my pilot’s license, I worked for BMW for awhile and next I want to try modeling and I want to start a business sometime this year and I really attribute it to seeing how easy it was to come out and be genuine.

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