Reading the Ellen article and discussing the whole “coming
out” idea was supremely interesting to me as a lot of my friends, both past and
present, identify in the LGBTQ community and have their own coming out story. But
what came next was relatively shocking to me.
I hang out a lot in the music building and with music students and most of my friends who identify as gay come from this group. I am not by any means saying that all musicians identify as gay or following the stereotype that this is true, I am merely mentioning the people I hang out with a lot and the people I know who have come out to the general public are from the School of Music. What I do however want to point out with this is that even those people who are gay and have come out in a public manner subscribe to the notion that people need to come out and “confess” so to speak what their sexual identity is. I was sitting in the music building between classes last week and overheard a conversation regarding who had come out this year and how far behind in terms of how many had in comparison to last year. It shocked me that people would expect a number of people to come out, it shocked me that there was a running tally of who had, it shocked me that it would matter to the general public who had or how many people had, and it shocked me that being gay and announcing it was such a public event that everyone (even those who do not know the person) should be privy to.
I suppose before spending so much time in the SoM, I would not have thought that those within the community would be so excited about other people coming out and announcing who they like. I would have thought that the LGBTQ community would want people to accept who they are on their own time and not feel the need to announce and proclaim it to others.
I hang out a lot in the music building and with music students and most of my friends who identify as gay come from this group. I am not by any means saying that all musicians identify as gay or following the stereotype that this is true, I am merely mentioning the people I hang out with a lot and the people I know who have come out to the general public are from the School of Music. What I do however want to point out with this is that even those people who are gay and have come out in a public manner subscribe to the notion that people need to come out and “confess” so to speak what their sexual identity is. I was sitting in the music building between classes last week and overheard a conversation regarding who had come out this year and how far behind in terms of how many had in comparison to last year. It shocked me that people would expect a number of people to come out, it shocked me that there was a running tally of who had, it shocked me that it would matter to the general public who had or how many people had, and it shocked me that being gay and announcing it was such a public event that everyone (even those who do not know the person) should be privy to.
I suppose before spending so much time in the SoM, I would not have thought that those within the community would be so excited about other people coming out and announcing who they like. I would have thought that the LGBTQ community would want people to accept who they are on their own time and not feel the need to announce and proclaim it to others.
In connecting all of this back to the Ellen reading it is a
really vivid example of how being gay requires a sort of announcement to the
general public and the power relationship this creates between those who are
demanding the announcement and those who are doing the announcing. The SoM
conversation I listened to also correlates directly to the discussion of if
confessions are liberating or if they are constraining. In this instance they
appear to be more constraining because people expect others to come out and in
fact have a strange desire for it to happen, yet the confession also has the
possibility of being liberating as it allows the person to come to terms with
who they are and become more self-aware. This specific conversation I think
also plays on the idea of coming out and being gay as a personal thing in that
it is still a personal decision for the person announcing it, those who want to
hear it and are expecting it to happen are in a way stripping the personal
nature away by creating such an established audience.
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