As you may have seen on Facebook, or maybe in the news (or "news"), today is Coming Out Day.
When I became aware the word "gay" had a negative connotation, I'm going to be honest: I went along with it and said, "Eww gross."
In my defense, I was still in early elementary school.
When I was in later elementary school, and people used that word as an insult, I did everything I could to not get called gay, because, well, in my defense, I was bullied.
But as the years wore on, and my skin toughened up a little, I began to ponder why it was so bad to be gay.
It turns out, I had gay friends my entire life.
I can share the stories of people coming out to me, but I'm going to share my story of how I became an ally (a supporter of GLBT - Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, and Transgender - people).
Like I said, I already had lots of gay friends, I just didn't know it. Until I was in high school and some people outed one of our friends to me. He became one of my best friends to this day.
As I made my way through high school, I accumulated a good bit of GLB friends, and when I got to college, I found I had to stand up for the GLBT community, as dorm friends would say negative remarks about the community. Well, the girls all said negative things around me until they noticed this hot guy hanging out with me, going up to my room, with pizzas or Chick-fil-A, to ... watch soap operas together. That's when the girls realized I had something going on with this whole "gay is okay" thing. A hot guy to tote around with and a best girlfriend, all. In. One.
(Disclaimer: This is not only what my best friend is to me. He's my best friend 'cause he's always there for me, he's my partner in crime. And he's my random vacation travel buddy when I get a hankering to go somewhere no one else wants to go to.)
When I transferred to UAB, I spent three semesters trying to make real friends. I eventually had friendly classmates, some of us are freinds on Facebook, but to be honest, we don't ever interact. I would gladly hang out with them, and would love to re-connect, but we've just gone our separate ways.
My last semester of college, I got invited to a Gay/Straight Student Alliance meeting. This was the first time at UAB I actually felt welcome. To this day, some of the people I met through GSSA are some of my closest friends. One of them even lives in my guest bedroom in Birmingham. :)
Four and a half years ago, I was at a GSSA meeting, helping decide a budget for the upcoming year. We were going to ask for more funds than we ever had before, and hopefully do better programs than just have pizza, drinks, and hang out with your friends.
I suggested we have a party for Coming Out Day.
And four years ago, the GSSA had its inagural Coming Out Day party.
I'm not going to lie - the two I put together and third I helped with were very stressful. Locations, foods, decorations, invitations and publicity, fun stuff, etc. The entire week was stressful. What came out of it, though, was event planning experience and the knowledge that people working together makes everything just a little bit easier.
