In honor of National Coming Out Day, Keshet will be sharing and celebrating coming out stories throughout the month of October. If you have a story you’d like to share, let us know!
“For National Coming Out Day I’m coming out … as a Keshet blogger!”
*crickets*
Okay, okay, maybe that wasn’t a strong opening line. A little too flippant and cute, especially for my first time on here. Alright, let’s start again.
“Hi. I’m coming out. I’m a queer, Jewish, non-binary trans man living in the deep deep south who converted through Reform Judaism, though my personal practice leans more Reformodox / Anarcho-Talmudist.”
*crickets*
Okay, that didn’t go so well either.
So, as you might have been able to tell, this is supposed to be an entry about Coming Out. And I’m going to be perfectly blunt. Yes, I was making light earlier, but coming out is huge. It’s massive and scary and integral. It fills you with terror and hope. It briefly throws your whole world off kilter. It is wonderful.
Until it isn’t. Until it happens every day because it has too. Until for the 20,000th time someone refuses to believe your gender. It’s beautiful until the millionth time someone starts making assumptions about you because you revealed you’re a convert. Or the billionth time you come out as queer in straight spaces and gay spaces and everyone—gay and straight—has problems with it. It’s magical until no one believes you’re disabled because they can’t see it. Until you are constantly coming out over and over and over again because the world won’t stop making generalizations on who you are based on the minimal information our retinas can absorb.
Coming out is freeing.
And it is a burden.
It is a burden to live under the an identity that isn’t yours, to hide yourself for protection and safety. And I think more and more of the world is thankfully beginning to realize that. But its also a burden to have to come out in the first place.
So I issue a challenge. On this National Coming Out Day, support anyone you hear coming out. Support them fully by listening and recognizing the power of that experience, realize how scary it can be to say those words. Wear purple on Spirit Day (October 16th, which is also Oscar Wilde’s birthday). Celebrate LGBT History month this October and learn more about the glorious multi-hued beauty that is our community.
But the bigger challenge is this. The rest of the year we need to support people’s discovery of themselves and support our continually growing identities beyond that one Coming Out moment, beyond the comfort of the known narratives. We need to stop making assumptions about people’s genders and sexual orientations and religions and everything else. We need to let people tell their own stories and not create it for them simply by looking at them. We need to stop over simplifying just how amazing we are, just how complex and complicated humans can be. And one day, maybe there won’t have to be a National Coming Out Day. Maybe we can all just be.
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