National Coming Out Day

Today, October 11th, is National Coming Out Day. The day was "founded" by Robert Eichberg and Jean O'Leary twenty one years ago in 1988 in celebration of the first gay march on Washington D. C. Dr. Eichberg, now deceased, was a prominent research psychologist who studied the effects of coming out, and not coming out, and wrote the book Coming Out: an Act of Love. Jean O'Leary was a gay rights activist and former nun who helped create the gay rights movement. O'Leary, among other accomplishments, was the first openly lesbian delegate to a national political convention. She attended the Democratic convention in 1976, and served on the Democratic National Committee for twelve years, including eight years of service on the Executive Committee.

In broad terms, "coming out" means not only personally accepting your sexual orientation but it also disclosing it to friends and family. The idea behind coming out, historically, was to acknowledge same-sex sexual orientation as a way of making a statement about non-heterosexual orientations as a state of being that is neither good nor bad in and of itself. In plain language, "coming out" is about putting a face, a known, familiar, personal face, to the word "gay," or "lesbian" or "bisexual" or . . . wherever one is on the entire QLTBG spectra that S.F. writer Nicola Griffith refers to as the "quilt bag."

There are all sorts of Guides and "how tos" about coming out. There's even an helpful but humorous (it's very tongue-in-cheek) etiquette guide for heterosexuals about how to respond to a friend or loved one coming out—A Straight Person's Guide to Gay Etiquette.

It's slightly better, in some ways, now for people "coming out" than it was in the 1980s. But we still have DOMA, the Federal "Defense of Marriage Act" [sic] which "defends" heterosexual marriage (and presumably divorce) by denying marriage as a Federal status to people of the same-sex—even if their union is recognized by the state in which they reside and pay taxes. Obama's recent statement, and the Department of Justice brief both describe DOMA as discriminatory—but as of now, DOMA still stands—and gay and lesbian couples are paying more taxes with fewer benefits than their heterosexual peers. More than twenty years after that first 1988 march, we're still dealing with policies like DADT, policies that remove trained lesbian and gays from active service—and that seem to be specifically targeting lesbian women.