Under the Button

QSA wore pink yesterday, so it must have been National Coming Out Day. Several friends of mine met this wildly important news with a pause and an, “Um… wait… so what’s the point?” While I fully understand the idea of a day of solidarity to say something that can otherwise be difficult to discuss, judging by the low turnout to the QSA’s Locust Walk march, I think most Penn kids are beyond that.

I have more than one friend who defines his or her sexual identity with the qualification “mostly.” “Mostly gay,” “mostly straight,” “mostly with chocolate on Tuesdays” (What? We all have that friend). The idea of a “queer spectrum” and the realization that not everyone fits into a binary category have gained a lot of support recently. But it sure makes coming out hard. I can just picture the phone call to my parents.

“Mom… can you get Dad on the other phone? Okay, now… I have something to tell you… It’s kind of hard to say… It’s just that… I’m a two on the Kinsey scale.”

I feel like the reaction would probably involve some confusion about earthquakes. Less dramatic, huh? Hell, if we have a scale and a coming out for that part of our sexuality, why not the rest of it?

“Mom… Dad… It’s something natural in me, something I can’t change, as hard as I try not to think of it… But I’ve realized… I can mostly only have sex with people with good hair. But sometimes I get really attracted to the personality of someone who doesn’t fit that category and I don’t want to limit myself, so…”

Maybe I’ve been semi-involved in gay activism for too long. Maybe I don’t hang out with people who care a whole lot about who their friends sleep with, date, or compulsively Facebook-stalk. Maybe it’s that I just wrote a long paper, the conclusion of which implies that coming out at all is playing into the current power structure and making it more difficult to resist in any effective way.

Whatever it is, I say this: Screw who you want and get coffee with whomever you would like. Take a lesson from gay men: Think outside of the box. Tell people, if you want, keep it to yourself if you’d rather, or write a detailed sex blog and prove Chloe wrong about how interesting they can be. Regardless, have fun, take off your headphones, and connect with someone.

Then throw on your pink shirt and come walk down Locust with me next year in the hope that maybe someday soon National Coming Out Day will be outdated everywhere.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 11:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.