You know, I just realized for the first time that nearly all my closest friends know about my love for slash... funny how I never noticed before, I'd never have thought that there's so many "insiders" (okay, only four, but still, I think it's pretty much for my standards). I didn't come out and just simply tell them, it was more like a matter of giving and/or not denying certain hints, I guess... except for my sis, who walked up to me one day and downright asked me if I was familiar with the term yaoi and if I ever read something of the sorts before and so on... turns out she's into slash, too, but when she bombarded me with these questions I thought for sure I'd drop dead at first LOL (she was the first to ever approach me about it head on ^^;) Since then I got a little more relaxed about it, but I still don't see a reason to go around boasting that I like slash. First of all, I don't think that's of anyone's concern really, and second, I picked up certain signals from certain people... and I didn't like them one bit (the signals, not the people - although by giving off those, they also lost a certain amount of my respect, they made me so angry!). However for me, not telling those people about my being "one of those fangirls" isn't about some form of cowardice or being pathetic, I'm not afraid of them being disgusted with me and quitting friendship or something equally childish - to put it Bilbo's way: "I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve." (or maybe the opposite, you never can tell...) - but I just don't think they'd ever be able to understand given their obvious ignorance, and so I opt to just keep quiet and keep it to myself.
(Same here! XD Though I don't think Spongebob really counts, somebody just declared it "KULT" one of those days and then like all of a sudden everybody was- oh, sorry, HAD of course ALWAYS been watching it... -_- But most of my RL friends are pretty open about such things as well (best friend only wears comic socks and despises people who wear plain white socks with a passion XD)