http://www.thatloserfeeling.com/main/writing/good/comeout.html

Coming out changes the relationship. Always. (always?)

"All the gay men I knew (or, more accurately, I knew I knew) were raging queens."

^^ and that makes ALL the difference

There's a very real chance that they'll tell other people.

People usually feel much more comfortable if they control when and to whom they come out to.
But they don't always have that luxury.

There are FAR more misconceptions about trans people than gay people.

• Possibly explain the differences between GLB and T, though don't get too heady.
• certain men of all orientations seem to have an unspoken and maybe equally unrecognized belief that if some other male-bodied person wants to cut off his penis he poses some sort of threat to theirs
• According to Riki Anne Wilchins, Executive Director of GenderPAC, her organization’s National Survey of TransViolence reveals “that the most common epithet used when [transpeople] are bashed is ‘faggot.’ Transpeople are targeted because of the perception that we are gay. And gays are often picked out because they are ‘visibly queer,’ that is, because they are gender-different.” (Wilchins, 1999).
• With lesbian women, as with gay men, it is usually not so much a question of whom a person sleeps with, but her appearance and comportment as gender-different that first earn her discriminatory enmity.
• It seems to me that coming out with any apparent sex- or gender-transgressive behavior excites fears and antagonisms among people who feel their own VALUES are being transgressed; and, to the extent that they identify with those values, who feel their very selves are being transgressed as well.
• as soon as you say “I’m not a girl” or “I’m not a boy,” people point to your body, sometimes literally, and tell you you’re wrong about your very own identity. ... Where sex is concerned, including orientation, a person’s VALUE may be questioned and demeaned, but where gender is concerned the person’s IDENTITY itself is indicted