When I went to summer camp at 16, I found my first queer community. The experience helped me come out.

• While studying in Hong Kong and Britain, I didn't feel like I could express my queer identity.
• At a summer camp in the US, I spent time around students who were happily and proudly queer.
• This gave me the confidence to begin coming out to my family and close friends.

I grew up in Hong Kong, but when I was 15, I began studying in a British boarding school. 

When I joined the school, no male students were out of the closet. The teachers were nothing but welcoming, but as far as I was aware, the school administration's only explicit gesture toward recognizing queer students was a page on the school's website about LGBTQ+ Pride. The site hadn't been updated in years.

I'd known I was bisexual for some time, but I never fully entertained the idea of coming out because my school's environment didn't seem to welcome it.

During my first year, I kept to myself, growing wary of revealing too much about any aspect of who I really was. But when I went to a summer camp, I surrounded myself with queer students who helped me come out.

At 16, I went to a summer camp in the US that changed everything for me

The Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, known as CTY, hosts summer courses at various American universities on topics including astrophysics and philosophy. At the end of my school year, I packed my suitcases and headed to Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania to spend three weeks in its advanced-fiction course.

Not much happened in my classes. I wrote two short stories, examined fiction by authors such as Octavia Butler and Jorge Luis Borges, enjoyed hanging out with the other campers, and drank excessive quantities of root beer. 

I also experienced something I never had before: openly queer students. The camp had always featured plenty of extracurricular events and traditions hosted by queer students. At camp, I attended a forum for LGBTQ+ people and allies. I listened silently and nervously. 

I also shared a dormitory hallway with a trans camper. I chatted with them about celebrities and superheroes. My first day of classes began with all of us sharing names and pronouns. I listened to friends talking about their experiences as queer students and how their identities were sources of joy and confidence.

Every one of these unassuming moments gave me a new sense of community.

I returned home transformed by this experience and came out to my family and friends

After just three weeks at the summer camp, I learned that being queer didn't need to be a difficult or solitary experience. I'd never told anyone — not even my friends at CTY — that I was queer, but after my time there, I knew I would be able to handle the experience of coming out.

I went back to Hong Kong after the summer camp ended. One evening, I told my parents that I had something to say to them and told them I was bisexual. They took the revelation in stride, asking only one follow-up question about whether I had a crush on an older student I admired. I didn't.

When school began the next term, I came out to my friends in a similarly low-key way, telling them as we were leaving a school event.

I then worked up the courage to ask the school's administration for permission to update the school's website about queer issues, adding as much useful information about queer issues to the page as I could. The updated page met a muted reception, but to see teachers supporting this effort was heartening.

While my coming out was anticlimactic and the opposite of the stories I wrote about in my course at CTY, I now realize how important it is to have a queer community by your side.