Christopher Lee Nutter, author of 'The Way Out: The Gay Man's Guide to Freedom No Matter if You're in Denial, Closeted, Half In, Half Out, Just Out or Been Around the Block,' recently spoke with AOL Book Maven Bethanne Patrick about how coming out is a process of self-realization. Here are excerpts from that interview:

Bethanne Patrick: Chris, I know there have been other books about gay men coming out, but this one is really a guidebook and it's from a young man's perspective, and so I think that it's a fairly new thing. Would you agree with that?

Chris Nutter: I think it's new in terms of what I consider its genre to be, which is classic self-realization. I think there is a lot of good self-help out there for gay men in a variety of forms but I think this is the first time that the classical tools of self-realization have been applied to gay men's experiences and really the question that the reader is directed to propose to himself is "who am I?" and that's taking it on a very deep level. So I think in that respect, it's a first.

Bethanne Patrick: It's very interesting. Now how and when did you know that you had to write this book and that you had to write it this way -- using the principles of self-realization, and really, a sort of spirituality?

Chris Nutter: Well, that's very interesting, because I did not plan on writing this book. I had a book proposal out through my agent that was entirely different and the editor, Amy Hughes at HCI, had an idea for a self-help book for gay men, and that was just a very general idea. She was looking for a writer, and she came across my book proposal, called my agent, and asked my agent if I wanted to write a self-help book for gay men. When he called me it was like stadium flood lights went on over my head because I did not realize that I was preparing to write this book for years and years if not my entire life.

Especially for the previous five years, I had been consuming veraciously theology, philosophy and self-help and I had had an awakening and gone through all these tremendous changes. Yet all of the texts that I looked to and all the various world traditions which informed me, the reader was always assumed to be straight. What's so amazing about that is that growing up in this world gay, I became so numb to not being acknowledged that I did not even see the gap. You're so used to listening to the pop song or watching the movie and it's always he and she and just transposing, and so I was doing all this transposing of this wisdom to speak directly to my experience as a gay man that are unique, but it never occurred to me to write it.

Bethanne Patrick: Oh, that's very, very interesting -- the transposition and the fact that you're acting as an interpreter your entire life for yourself.

Chris Nutter: Correct. And I think that's why when she called the flood lights went off and I coughed that book up like a hairball. It was sitting right in me. I mean, seriously, the index, the order of events, the chapter names and then the content is all that I originally wrote for the publisher to look at, was 99% intact by the time it wound up on the book shelf.

Bethanne Patrick: Now you famously came out in an essay for Details Magazine in 1994, and in a way, that was sort of the start of coughing up this hairball. So, how did that come about, and how did that experience shape how easy it was for you to write 'The Way Out?'

Chris Nutter: That's a very interesting question because the book is, in many ways for me, kind of like a looking glass through the Details article. It's also a giant step forward. At the time I was living in Mississippi, I had graduated from college, and I wanted to be a writer. A friend of mine who was going to journalism school in New York said "Well, you can work in magazines. There's a way to work as a professional."

So I had gotten all these magazine subscriptions and my brother had sent me one of the Details, and I was reading them, cover to cover and I came across this editors letter in Details and they said they were going to start a section called 'The Readers' Voice' where readers could write in stories, and for the first time in my life I became aware of something I've since labeled 'silent voice of knowledge' but you could kind of interpret it emotionally by calling it certainty. And I knew what to do. I knew to write an essay about being in the closet because I was in the closet, I was frozen about it, and desperately needed to come out but I was completely constipated about it and the idea hit me like a lightning bolt, and I knew what to do. I wrote it and I sent it in. I didn't actually think that it would happen and then they called and it was a very revolutionary idea at the time. So they wrote a big introduction to it with a photo and made a big deal out of it in the magazine. I came out of the closet to the world in one step, then became a gay image in the media, and launched my career as a writer, and it showed me the power that I had to do the impossible and it also showed me the power of writing. So when I went in to write this book I did have that as an experience to know that it could be done.