Last Monday, David and I went to Musical Mondays at Splash in New York.

(for other non-New Yorkers like me, Musical Mondays is a simple construct. A gay bar, a ton of screens, a nonstop playlist of clips from musicals and guys like me who love musical theatre.)

It was, on his part, a masterstroke of an idea. I’m an old-school show queen (even though I hate that moniker), and the three-hour parade of clips from Tony Award broadcasts, concerts and move musicals hit my musical theatre sweet spot, the place in that little corner of my heart that sprouts feather boas and sequins at the sound of Kander and Ebb vamp.

It was fun. We had a few beers, we laughed, we sang along to the tunes we loved (“And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going.” Jennifer Holliday. Tony Awards telecast. Guilty.) and we particularly enjoyed the enthusiasm of one young guy at a table near us.

He was maybe 22, thin and adorable in a Spider Man t-shirt, and he knew every word of every song from every show they played. Sure, you’d expect the kid to know stuff from Wicked, but when he rocked every word and even aped Streisand’s gestures for “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from the Funny Girl film, we both couldn’t help but laughing in amazement.

“It must be genetic,” David said. “He must have been born with all those songs in him.”

Lucky him. I had to spend hours listening to every cast recording I could get my little hot hands on, renting every movie musical under the sun – even Mame, yep, suffered through that, and I even sat the whole film of A Little Night Music – just to get my fairly commendable grasp on the musical theatre canon.

Not that I’m bitter.

What I loved about that kid was his utter completeness, and that’s really the only way to describe it. He was so complete, unafraid of every song aching to burst from his heart, and he didn’t care if it was a showtune, he didn’t care if that made him a “silly queer” or a “faggot” or whatever epithet you could throw at him, he reveled in the song because the song was something he loved, something he embraced, something that made him… him.

National Coming Out Day is just a few days away, and that kid got me thinking about what it means to own who you are and how important it is for those of us who can, without repercussion, come out, be public, speak our truth in a way that matters.

So often, coming out stories are painted in painful strokes, they’re cautionary tales, they’re rife with rejection, argument, abandonment, isolation. Especially where I’m from, in the South, in less forgiving places than New York City, coming out is a Goliath, an Everest, a source of fear, anxiety.

I didn’t have that story. My coming out was, well, wonderful. At every turn, at every pronouncement, I was greeted with acceptance, support, love. My father only had one question for me when I told him I was gay.

“Does this make you happy? Because if it makes you happy, then we support you. Because your happiness is all that matters.”

I feel that I’ve spent every day since paying forward that gift, being out in the classroom, being out at work, writing and producing shows about the gay experience in my little Louisiana town and now writing here, writing this: paying forward the gift of being loved unconditionally for who I am.

It’s our duty, when we can, to sing that song. To let it flood out of us when we’ve been blessed with the gift of knowing the words.

Because we are the difference between that kid singing showtunes at Splash on Musical Mondays and a kid contemplating suicide in his Mississippi bedroom because he’s afraid of what his family will say when they find out he’s gay. Our public lives are a testament to the joy of coming out, of opening yourself to the truth, of feeling at home in your own skin, of being complete.

So speak your truth. You never know who’s listening.