In March 1994, Rodney Wilson, a high school teacher in Missouri, was searching for ways to help his students develop a more meaningful connection to the history curriculum. During a lesson on the Holocaust, Wilson came out to his students by recognizing that people like him, who openly identify as gay, would have been imprisoned at that time and made to wear a pink triangle, a symbol marking one as deviant. As one of the first publicly out high school teachers in the nation, Wilson received local and national backlash. I was 14 at the time, and I remember the heated news and talk show coverage. I remember watching shows like Ricki Lake and hearing about the threat that being “out” posed to young people. As a young person struggling to understand her own sexuality, I listened to the coverage, wondering and worrying about the fallout.
Amid the controversy, Wilson worked with a coalition of activists to create and celebrate the first annual LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) History Month in October 1994. The group felt that October was a good choice for this kind of historical celebration because it contains the anniversaries of two important national marches for LGBT rights. The first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights was in 1979, and it was at the second march in 1987 that ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) made widespread national coverage for the first time. In ACT UP materials and official march merchandise, the pink triangle featured prominently.
In light of his experiences, Wilson felt it was appropriate that LGBT History Month would also share space with National Coming Out Day. First celebrated in 1988, National Coming Out Day takes place each year on October 11 and offers us a chance to reflect on what it means to share our identities with each other. In this spirit, I think it’s also important to note that the month-long celebration of queer history was first called Lesbian and Gay History Month—the “B” and “T” would come later.
When October rolls around each year, I embrace the opportunity to reflect on the connection between inclusive history and coming out. As a teenager, I was first able to come out to myself as bisexual after learning about the diversity of gender and sexuality in my own informal historical research. Shuffling through the library stacks after school, I was always on the lookout for books that would help me name this thing that seemed not to fit anywhere. Walt Whitman and Alice Walker often found their way home with me, hidden in the chaos of my backpack. In my reading, discovering the word “bisexual” was an epiphany! Like a puzzle piece snapping into place. But it was also terrifying. As many of us know, the movement between self-awareness and coming out is not always marked by joy and delight. Is it safe for us to come out? How will we be received? And how many times will we have to go through this in our lives? That’s something else I reflect on each year as the leaves fall and October arrives: coming out is often a process and not a singular event.
So as we do the work of remembering our histories and turning those memories into action, I hope that we take the time this October to search for the stories that allow us, in our own time, to come out (to ourselves or to others) and to recognize the diversity of our communities. Now when we celebrate LGBTQ+ History Month, we can embrace the Queer and Questioning in “Q” as well as our rainbow of friends and family standing in the “+”—Intersex, Two-Spirit, Pansexual, Asexual, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, Gender Nonconforming, Gender Expansive, and beyond. For an introduction to these terms—and others!—GLAAD offers a glossary of definitions and The Trevor Project features some helpful articles on understanding the diversity of sexual orientation and gender expression.
-Dr. Londie Martin, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing