Looking for advice on how out to be on law school applications

By way of brief summary, I'm not out yet, in large part due to the fact that I didn't even figure out that I was gay until a few months ago. I do, however, intend to be out from day one when I go off to law school next year, it seems like in general it makes the most sense to never be "in" when I'm meeting an entire group of people for the first time (and I'll have almost a year to get fully comfortable with myself between now and then anyway, though I'm not sure yet about timing of coming out to family and friends).

Here's the question. I'm going to be applying to some top tier, highly competitive law schools where I probably have a 50/50 chance of getting in and being able to stand out would probably help my chances, and a white girl from a middle class family who went to a private college doesn't exactly stand out. In my personal statement, I'm planning on talking about how I'd considered law school right after college but how I feel like my life experiences in the years I've been out of school and away from academia will make me a better lawyer than I would have been then, but talking about being gay and figuring that out post-college as part of that would put my little white-privileged self into a discriminated against minority group and that's the sort of thing that does look good on applications. The thing is, I feel kind of sleazy doing so, like I'm co-opting decades of struggle for my own benefit when I'm not even out yet. At the same time, I'm also thinking that if I'm going to spend however many years until we get full equality being treated like a second class citizen, I might as well take full advantage of one of the few situations where being gay might actually give me an edge and help me get ahead.

Any advice on what I should do would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks for the advice. I guess now I need to figure out how to work that in to a personal statement, particularly considering that I'm wanting to get into the IT side of intellectual property law. It would be a heck of a lot easier to work my sexuality into a personal statement if I was wanting to do something like human rights law or family law.

 

Thing is, it's not like I've "struggled with it for so long," in the grand scheme of things a relatively few months of working through confusion isn't that big of a deal.

That wouldn't be true though. Equality and justice and all of these things are important to me, but they were important to me long before I ever started suspecting that I wasn't straight. The only real difference is that I've realized that I actually belong to a group that doesn't have full equality, but it doesn't change the fact that I still hold the same views I've held for years.