Uhhhhh so I guess I just spontaneously came out to my school. I'm in this honors class called Scholar's Colloquium in which we read and discuss articles about interesting stuff each week and it's all kinds of fun. This week the article was about Pokemon (yep I'm in a college class that discusses Pokemon, nbd). Unfortunately, the author seemed to have some really weird and mixed up ideas about gender roles and sexuality. Toward the end of the article, he went off on this completely irrelevant tangent about this girl in one of his fourth grade classes who was a huge tomboy and isn't it weird how it's okay to be a tomboy but not an effeminate boy in our society (true). But then, and this is a direct quote, he says, "This, I think, is the really troubling thing about effeminate boys to adults: not so much their latent homosexuality as their refusal to buy into a power structure that it would seem to their advantage to support." WOAH WOAH WOAH, did I just read that? So we were talking about this passage in class and how screwed up and wrong it is, etc. etc. That turned into a straight-up discussion about homosexuality, and one girl asked the room at large whether we thought societal pressure about sexuality and gender roles affected gays and lesbians differently. Some people gave their thoughts, and then out of nowhere I just said "I feel like I can add something to this, because I don't know how many of you know this, but I'm gay and I totally went through that period in high school of feeling like I had to hide and nobody can know" and so on. Aaaaah I can't believe that happened!
Dude, that's great, what a way to come out! Well done you :eusa_clap How did they respond to that? Damn, can I come along to your next Colloquium, please, they sound so awesome? That article does sure sound messed up though :dry:
That's great! It's amazing what just comes out when we are not trying to censor our thoughts and feelings...How do you feel about it? Did you get any feedback(even though that really wasn't your goal)?
Thanks, everyone! Some details... I think there were two people there who already knew (I had asked a friend if she would be willing to tell them, and I guess she did). There was one person in the class I know to be pretty conservative and closed-minded whom I was really looking forward to tearing apart during this discussion, but he must have skipped yesterday, because there was no sign of him. But it would have been fun. :badgrin: The sense I got was that most people (hopefully everyone) thought I had been out for a while and they just hadn't heard about it, so it wasn't a huge deal, which was EXACTLY what I wanted. After I said it, people started sharing their own stories. One guy's lifelong best friend came out to him his senior year. A girl's dad came out while her mom was pregnant with her. It felt like everyone there was comfortable and even sort of connected by it. Another guy brought up Kinsey, which was cool that he knew about it, so I got to explain about the scale and how not many people are a 0 and we ended the discussion pretty much agreeing that it isn't black and white and that the author of our article had very mixed-up ideas about both human sexuality and Pokemon. A couple hours after I posted this I got that ohmygodwhydididothatwhatdidijustdo kind of feeling that I've gotten every time I've told someone, but now I'm feeling a lot better about it. I think what got me to do it was Kayla Kearney's amazing amazing amazing video in which she comes out to her high school on stage (which you need to watch right now if you haven't seen it: YouTube - High School Senior "Comes Out" in Assembly). Overall I'm feeling good! I definitely still have some work to do. I have a really old friend at school with me, and whether he's heard or not, I think I need to talk to him one-on-one about it. I also need to tell a couple people from high school just so it isn't a secret in that crowd anymore (or maybe to quell rumors, I don't know), and I need to tell my parents. But this is a start, right?
