How "Born to Be Public" Author Greg Mania Was Outed by Google

From Oprah Magazine

In OprahMag.com's series Coming Out, LGBTQ change-makers reflect on their journey toward self-acceptance. While it's beautiful to bravely share your identity with the world, choosing to do so is entirely up to you—period.

At a ripe 18 years old, Greg Mania was living as an openly gay man in New York City, hanging out at bars downtown and blogging about his late-night escapades to the world. The problem? Everyone but his Polish immigrant parents knew about his newfound freedom and bout of unapologetically queer self-expression.

"I was an open book to the world, the internet—essentially an endless chasm of strangers—before I could even offer a glimpse of my authentic self to the people who knew me better than anyone else," Mania writes in his debut memoir, Born to Be Public. "I was the opposite of what my family valued, which is, above most things, privacy."

In this personal essay, Mania, an award-winning screenwriter whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Out, and Paper, reflects on his New Jersey upbringing—and the events that finally got him to step out of the closet.

I knew I was gay for as long as I can remember. I basically came out of the womb on a pride float, but I never reconciled with that fact growing up, nor did I have the language to understand what it meant. On a visceral level, I just knew I was different. My interests were deemed “weird” because I was a boy who liked “girl stuff.” My first CD was Spiceworld.

And I was also never into extracurriculars in school, and not just sports (like the other boys in my class), but any after-school activity: school paper, student council, yearbook committee. That’s because I had somewhere more important to be at three o’clock every day: in front of my TV watching my queen, Tamara Braun, star as Carly Corinthos in General Hospital.

When I was in eighth grade back in 2004, Braun played the acerbic wife of Port Charles mob kingpin Sonny Corinthos (Maurice Benard). And, unless you’re a part of the TikTok generation, you might also recall that 2004 was the apex of DIY paint-on highlights, a time when every TV show was punctuated by commercials for Herbal Essences highlighting kits (“with a one-of-a-kind color-guard formula that will show you exactly where those gorgeous streaks will appear!”).

Braun was no exception to the trend, donning blonde-streaked hair as her character sauntered into court for her husband yet again. She looked like a new person, and other celebrities followed suit. I coveted Jennifer Garner’s red blonde wig in Alias. And that multi-tonal blowout Stephanie March wore when she reprised her role as Alexandra Cabot in season 13 of Law & Order: SVU? It was to die for. With them as beauty figureheads, hair became the hallmark of identity for me. It was their ability to transform that had me transfixed.

I begged my Polish parents—my dad was a former DJ and my mom a former stage manager—to get me my own highlighting kit from the drugstore. They weren’t surprised when I wanted to experiment with my style as they were both equally flamboyant with theirs in their youth. So my mom came home with a box kit of paint-on highlights for me one day. She mixed the formula, and my dad used his eye for precision, to give me that stark contrast I coveted. I emerged, half of my head dark, half platinum blonde. They thought nothing of it, assumed it was a phase. But for me, my new hair became the epitome of self-expression. It awakened something within me that allowed me to express a part of my identity that I was actively suppressing until that point.

I didn’t know it then, but highlighting my hair was my first step towards living an authentic life, towards making a small part of me that was private, public.

Coming out wasn’t a grand jeté out of the closet as much as it was like watching one elegantly-pointed finger waltz forward, followed by an arched foot, until I was fully living the supremely queer life I live today. The changes to my hair and in my wardrobe were modicums of self-expression, but it wasn’t until I moved to New York that the rest of me—both externally and internally—came out to the people around me and, most importantly, to myself.

After becoming a student at Hofstra University on Long Island—a school 25 minutes away from Manhattan—I was introduced to New York City nightlife, which only buoyed my self-awareness, expression, and the overall acceptance of my identity. The downtown scene embraced me. I found a new home on the Lower East Side, befriending creative friends with monikers like “Breedlove,” “Lady Starlight,” and “Darian Darling”—who coronated me with my own nightlife nickname, which was just my actual name, Greg Mania, but pronounced the way everyone else pronounces it (“may-nee-ya”) before I correct them (“mahn-ya”). I let the common mispronunciation of my name become a persona: it allowed me to usher in the totality of whom I was choosing to be. It was a way to fully come out.

I started to blog about my adventures on Le Cabaret De Mania, exploring not just my identity as a gay man, but as a burgeoning writer in college—my hook being the double life I was living: a student by day and (what some may call) a New York City nightlife personality by night. In my writing, I joked about making it to class at 8 a.m. only an hour after I’d just came home to my dorm room, smelling like cheap whiskey and finding a sequin wedged in some bodily crevice. I posted photos of me wearing the ostentatious regalia that club photographers snapped night after night, and my sky-high hairstyle got me featured on the popular blog Humans of New York twice. My own blog became popular, but the double life I was living as a student and nightlife-er forged a major disconnect between who I truly was and who my family back home thought I was.

By then, I was an open book to everyone—my friend Sophia dubbed me as someone “born to be public”—except my family. When I visited home in New Jersey on weekends in college, I’d dodge questions about my personal life, only divulging details about my classes and school friends. But it was obvious that I was hiding something.

During longer breaks home, I always buried my more risqué numbers at the bottom of my dresser. One time, I smuggled a crop-top with Debbie Harry’s face on it under a modest sweater before revealing it at my best friend’s house, who lived only a few blocks away from my parents. My mom found mesh shirts and a pair of leopard-print pants from Trash & Vaudeville in the laundry. And my dad came across a rogue clip-on earring on the floor. Incidents like these started to add up, and they ostensibly had questions, which lead my parents to look for answers I was obviously withholding.

Google outed me. I came home one weekend and my parents told me they found pictures, read the things I was blogging about. I was mortified. Then the bomb was dropped in question form: was I gay? Even though I didn’t explicitly say yes, I also didn’t say no.

The only thing my parents were upset about and hurt by was how open I was to the world, especially the internet—a bunch of strangers—before I could open up to them. They felt as if they were last to know about my life, and I came to understand how that would hurt parents who just want to be involved.

I was scared to come out. I was scared because I worried about what their reaction would be. When you're hiding a secret about your identity, the question that comes to mind is, “Will you still love me if…?”—and it’s not knowing the answer to that question that instills fear.

Sociologist Erving Goffman is known for his theory that humans are essentially performers playing a different role depending on who we’re with—friends, family, colleagues, or in private, “behind the scenes” as he would say. Coming out is similar in this way: how you come out to yourself is different from how you come out to everyone else.

I know many aren’t as fortunate as me when it comes to having an accepting family, but that’s the beauty of choosing your own family. If you’re fearful of whether you’ll still be loved after coming out, know that someone, somewhere will always be there to say “yes.”

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