prejudice |

October 11 is National Coming Out Day. On one hand, it is pretty awesome that there is such a sense of community engagement that there is a day of national awareness. On the other hand, it is really sad that there has to be a national day of awareness in the first place.

The first National Coming Out Day was in 1988, when I (and probably the majority of people who read this blog) was still young enough that I wasn’t really sure about the difference between boys and girls yet, other than if I hit my older brother it was OK, but if he returned the favor he got into trouble. Not that I ever used that to my advantage …

There are so many reasons for members of the LGBTQ community not to come out:

The list goes on and on, punctuated by violence and discrimination, hate and fear.

But somewhere between 1.6 and 10 percent of people identify as LGBTQ, and according to the Human Rights Campaign, one out of every two Americans has someone close to them who is lesbian or gay. Planned Parenthood says one out of four families has a member who is LGBTQ. To put those numbers in perspective, in Tucson, that means, statistically, between 16,000 and 90,000 people identify as LGBTQ.

The process of coming out is different for everyone, and different every time. It is also something that, on average, LGBTQ people are doing at a younger age than previous generations. And, thanks to the Internet, there are some amazing resources to help.

In honor of National Coming Out Day 2014, I have something to say: I am gay.

That is a terrifying thing to say, no matter how many times I say it. Continue reading →

Award-winning author Stephanie Coontz has published a long list of books and articles about the history of family and marriage. She has written about the evolution of those two institutions from prehistory to today, in works that have been widely praised for their intelligence, wit, and insight. In her most recent book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (Basic Books, 2012), Coontz takes us back 50 years to a breakthrough that changed the role of women in American households.

“Equal marriages require more negotiation than unequal ones.”

In 1963 it was clear that a revolution was beginning. After its approval by the FDA at the beginning of the decade, 2.3 million American women were using the birth control pill, the oral contraceptive that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger had been instrumental in pioneering. And on February 19, 1963, 50 years ago today, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a book that sold millions of copies in its first three years. It quickly became the object of both derision and acclaim for awakening women to aspirations beyond what discrimination and prejudice had long defined for them. If oral contraceptives were the breakthrough in medicine that finally enabled women to plan their reproductive lives around their educational and career goals, Friedan’s landmark book was the breakthrough in consciousness that gave many the resolve to do it.

Friedan was a magazine writer whose experience surveying women at a college reunion was the spark that drove her to uncover “the problem that has no name.” She was referring to the dissatisfaction and depression she found widespread among housewives, not just at the reunion but in many other encounters she had with them as a writer. Convinced that it would help married women — and their marriages — if they sought their own identities outside of the home, Friedan synthesized a wealth of research to make her case in The Feminine Mystique. Stephanie Coontz’s A Strange Stirring is a social history of The Feminine Mystique that takes readers from an era of far-reaching sex discrimination in the early 1960s when Friedan made her breakthrough, to the contemporary era when many of Friedan’s appeals have been realized but new challenges hinder equality. Continue reading →

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National Coming Out Day: A Day for Love to Win Out