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A Belated Celebration of National Coming Out Day.

Posted by John on October 20th, 2008 at 8:06 pm · 4 Comments

I feel bad for missing National Coming Out Day.  Better late than never?  I wanted to reaffirm my position as a queer ally and Mind on Fire as an open and affirming blog.  I also want to acknowledge Sean and Craig and to point you to their Coming Out Day posts, if you haven’t read them already:

Sean: Standing for Something: National Coming Out Day 2008

Craig: my letter to friends, family, and random people on coming out day

Sean and Craig, I have the deepest respect for both of you, and I’m honored that you both choose to spend time on this blog. I hope we can work towards a day when the next generation may reject homophobia the way that we as a society today soundly reject the idea that the skin color determines that one human being can be the property of another.

While I’m on the subject, I’d like to link to a couple more posts:

Chandelle’s queerly yours, which is also a coming out of sorts.  Her post is filled with gems; here’s one paragraph that speaks to me:

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that there is no such thing as a sexual binary. Sure, some people might be 100% “gay” or 100% “straight,” but I think most people fall somewhere on a continuum. I think it’s more natural for people to run somewhere in the middle, but we are almost always prevented from expressing desires that are socially unacceptable, so, just as children become rigidly engendered to their sex through socialization, we become rigidly heterosexual. I can’t identify myself as heterosexual or homosexual because neither of these terms describes me entirely.

And finally, Eric’s Letter in Support of Marriage Equality to the First President and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the LDS Church:

The primary issue, however, is this: despite the suboptimal nature of single-parent families, they are completely legal. There are no laws requiring single parents to remarry lest they lose their children. If our society has no problem accepting single parents, what about gay parents? It seems to me that two fathers or two mothers are even better than one father or one mother. More parenting resources generally means more quality time spent with children. Even if you accept that a mother and a father are biologically optimal, two of either should be better than just one of either, right?

A devastating argument!

Tags: Gay Rights and Queer Issues · Gender · Politics

4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Sean // Oct 20, 2008 at 9:43 pm

    Thanks for the link and the mention! And thanks for being an ally. There’s been a lot of progress in The Great Gay Agenda–er, Cause, to the point where overt homophobia is a lot less acceptable in our society than it once was. But covert homophobia and crypto-homophobia are alive and well, undergirded as they are by a set of antiquated and confining gender roles that do no one any favors. Given that covert racism and crypto-racism are also quite present in society, despite decades of re-education and awareness-raising, it may be a while before our fight is over.

    Eric’s is a devastating argument indeed, and I hope it convinces at least one open-minded person who was on fence about gay marriage. Unfortunately, I don’t think the leaders of the Mormon church have open minds on this issue. They are intelligent men, so they must realize that their arguments in support of Prop 8 are fallacious, mendacious and condescending, but this hasn’t stopped them from spreading the lies anyway. Frankly, it makes me mad and sick.

  • 2 Craig // Oct 20, 2008 at 10:37 pm

    John,
    Thank you. I have the deepest respect for you, your wife, xJane, and others here who truly know what equality is and why it is so important.

    Thanks for being an ally to equal rights. We need more people like you. GLBT people are vastly outnumbered in the entire world. If we are really going to be treated as equals, we need people like you to stand with us.

    Thanks for making this blog a place where I feel accepted, comfortable and most of all safe. That’s not always the case. I am so incredibly moved by the support I’ve experienced from people like you.

    So thanks. You have no idea, no concept of how much this means to me, to all of us who are oppressed, “suboptimal”, and constantly degraded by “friends” and family (though maybe you do – leaving the church is a lot like coming out as gay to many mormons).

    Know that you are making a huge contribution to changing our society to make it safer, fairer, more honest, and more filled with love.

    Thanks.

  • 3 xJane // Oct 21, 2008 at 7:29 am

    I’m also sorry to have missed NCOD, but posted “loves DH & the fact that they’re married. She does not want that happiness denied anyone simply on the basis of sexual orientation.” on Facebook on that day :)

  • 4 xJane // Oct 22, 2008 at 9:55 am

    After having read Sean’s and Craig’s posts, I want to repost this: a point-by-point breakdown of the arguments for Prop 8 in a very logical and unemotional fashion.

    Also, here is more proof that marriage is more than just “domestic partnership”: in NY, a gay person’s first “heir” is not their spouse but their parents. It’s a little dense, but essentially, a married person’s first heir is their spouse (followed by their children and then their parents). Without the full rights of marriage, the spouse essentially gets nothing if there is no explicit will (and the parents get the right to contest the will if there is one).

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