hadriantemple: October 11th is National Coming Out Day. For those of you who didn’t know, Comi
hadriantemple: October 11th is National Coming Out Day. For those of you who didn’t know, Coming Out was pioneered in the 1860s and began to become more common in the 1960s as a strategy to fight the oppression that gays and lesbians experienced almost everywhere. Harvey Milk helped make Coming Out a strategy to oppose anti-gay legislation in California, arguing that the reason straights were hostile to gays was that most straight people didn’t realize they knew any gays and therefore accepted the stereotype of gays as predatory child milestones. It worked. Studies have shown that a homophobe can maintain their hostility to LGBT people if they only know 1 or 2 of us—they can tell themselves that the one they know is ‘different’, the exception to their stereotype. For most people, the magic number is 5. Homophobia crumbles when a homophobe knows five LGBT people, because the stereotype can’t hold up under the weight of knowing real people. I’ve seen that happen for myself. So if you can, if your circumstances make it not a serious risk, come out to someone today. Be someone’s Fifth. Every time someone comes out, it makes another little hole in the homophobia that oppresses us all. People like Harvey Milk and Marsha P Johnson and Tom of Finland and Wanda Sykes made life easier for us, so we owe it to them to make life a little easier for those who are still trapped in the closet. -- source link