I am lucky that my wife has a well-developed sense of what is confidential and what isn't, thanks to working for various police departments during her career. She told several of her email friends right away, which was fine with me, since they are all geographically distant, and we do not interact with them in real life. Locally, or with anyone who might interact with our neighbours, she was very discrete. This worked well for both of us - I knew she needed to talk to friends, and this was a safe way to do it.
Managing the flow of information once you start to come out is tricky. I had to divide the people I knew into groups that mostly didn't overlap. There was in fact one person who was in two of the groups, so I had to coordinate coming out to both of them. I was able to do it in such a way that nothing blew up in my face. I told most people via group emails, but some individuals got personal emails, depending on my relationship to them. The idea was to make sure that no one heard the news via rumour unless it was someone I literally didn't care about. That way, no one was offended.
It all worked because, with the exception of telling my wife, I did it over a space of about one month. Any longer than that and managing the information flow would have been too difficult.
