It’s National Coming Out Day – Helena Exley & Yvonne De Villiers
It’s National Coming Out Day – So Here We Are
With National Coming Out Day happening this Friday, we could think of no better time for Forum to ‘come out’ into the public eye of RHS. This day is a time for exploring diverse love and identities, and recognising the difficulties some people face accepting their sexuality. It is also a time to remind people of LGBT+ History Month, coming up in February, when we will have the chance to learn more about this community through history.
Forum is a group in RHS that allows LGBT+ students and individuals, who want to take an active role in supporting equality, to come together, and discuss the current issues in the global LGBT+ community, and ways we can help those within this school. It means people who want support, want to make a difference or just want to have a chat have a space to do so.
It is abundantly clear that, even in the 21st Century, LGBT+ people face difficulties others may not have considered – from those in the 72 countries around the world (nearly 40%) that have to face their homosexuality being declared as illegal, to the everyday decision of LGBT+ people in this country of whether or not to hold hands with their partner walking down the street.
The attempted suicide rates of transgender people (those who feel they aren’t the gender they were assigned at birth) was a staggering 50% last year – this shows that there is still a significant problem, even in a developed country such as the UK, with accepting this community. Even the little things we can do, such as using someone’s chosen pronouns or choosing not to casually use “gay” as an insult, can make the world a more accepting place and normalise this element of human experince.
Many people do not realise quite how documented LGBT+ people are throughout history – they are not a ‘modern invention’. It was, for example, expected and entirely socially acceptable for a Roman man to have sex with both men and women, whilst various poems and love ballads written in the Middle Ages show the presence of LGBT+ people in English society, despite persecution. And that’s before we consider the now well-known and massive presence of gay animals around the world – from dolphins to chimpanzees, countless species have shown that being gay is extremely common – it’s only humans that choose to alienate it.
This Coming Out Day it’s time to think a little differently about your peers and your actions – it’s easy to internalise language that isolates LGBT+ people as ‘different’, such as saying something is ‘bent’ as a criticism or using slurs casually in normal conversation. You may not notice, but the gay person next to you might. You may not consider it, but a transgender person you pass in the corridor could be thinking about it all day. Constantly associating an integral part of someone’s identity with negativity can significantly affect their outlook on life and will make RHS a much less welcoming place. This day is a chance to help those choosing to come out by making the world more accepting, and to start a conversation about a part of our lives that will be present for the rest of human history.
*Forum meets at lunchtime on Tuesday Week B; interested pupils should speak to Mr Johnson for more details.
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