There are many important decisions that U of T students will have to make during their university career. Where students decide to live or what to study can significantly shape their adult lives. But there is one decision that many young people face that is not often openly discussed: whether or not to come out of the closet.
Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Transgendered of the University of Toronto (LGBTOUT), the main queer student group at U of T, set out to find answers last Friday at the LGBTOUT debate on the question: “Are there advantages to being in the closet?” The event gave a handful of people, both straight and queer, a chance to share their views about coming out.
Rather than stage a two-sided debate, the moderators for the evening, Matt Francino and Bernice Yu, opened up the proceedings to the roughly 20 people in the audience.
Francino began the evening by defining coming out as “an ongoing process” of revealing to people that you are “something other than straight.” He said that it was important to realize that, although it is often the first step, the process does not end when a person comes out to his or her parents. Queer people eventually have to decide whether to come out to almost everyone they know or meet.
The participants were asked to formulate arguments both for and against coming out.
“The queer community is very segregated,” argued Yu, and “bent on categories.” She said that coming out can leave gay men and women open to having their sexuality defined for them by someone else. This is problematic because “sexuality isn’t a designation,” she said, “it’s more of a spectrum.”
But there are even more serious consequences to coming out, and in certain environments it can even be dangerous. One participant suggested that despite there being many people who accept homosexuality, society as a whole is often intolerant. She said that homophobic messages are so common in society and religion that many people “don’t know why they have a problem with homosexuality; they just do.”
Homophobia is a pervasive problem, said Francino. He said that up to 50 percent of all street kids in Toronto are queer, 40 percent of queer kids experience a break in their education, and 41 percent of households with “out” children become violent.
In some ways, however, coming out in itself can help combat these problems. The participants agreed that having openly queer people in a community actually helps combat homophobia by breaking down stereotypes and providing queer youths with healthy role models. One member of the audience, a teacher who used to work for the Catholic School Board-which can legally fire teachers for being gay-argued, “There’s a whole gamut of people who are gay, and they live in our communities. But we don’t see that; we only see the stereotypes.”
But possibly the single most important reason that queer youth decide to come out is a fairly practical one: queer men and women who are in the closet can’t share their experiences with other queer people, and ultimately can’t make physical or romantic connections with them. As Francino put it, “If no one came out, it would be a very lonely world.”
