Today’s National Coming Out Day is filled with hope and sorrow, following the recent suicides of several gay teens.
The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Friends club wants students to recognize the power that words and actions have on the gay community, said Duke Lambert, president of OU’s GLBTF.
“These are people,” Lambert said. “You may not see them all that often, and you might say passing words like ‘fag,’ and you think it’s not doing anything. But people are battered by that every single day, and they lose faith in themselves, faith in the community.”
GLBTF, as well as many other LGBT student groups, want to use Coming Out Day as a way to welcome students who aren’t comfortable with themselves or with coming out.
The LGBT resource fair will be held from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the South Oval. GLBTF’s open mic night will be held 9 p.m. at Second Wind Coffee Shop on Campus Corner.
“There will be performers, but it’s also for people who want to come out and want to tell a coming out story but never got the chance to,” Lambert said. “We can all be there and have a really open environment.”
GLBTF will also host a suicide prevention discussion at 7 p.m. Wednesday in Devon Energy Hall, Room 270. After the discussion, they will meet in the Unity Garden on the South Oval for a candlelight vigil for LGBT acceptance, during which Zach Harrington and Tyler Clementi will be recognized, Lambert said.
Norman’s Zach Harrington and New Jersey native Tyler Clementi both recently took their own lives as a result of hatred directed at them because of their sexuality. Lambert said he hopes that this year’s Coming Out Day will also raise awareness of prejudice aimed at gay people, an ongoing problem that has plagued the gay community for years.
“If we try to hide or pretend like everything is going smoothly and don’t recognize that there’s this sort of stuff happening to our community, like the recent suicides, we’re not being honest,” Lambert said. “The reason we want to advertise for Coming Out Day is that we’re acknowledging who we are. We’re uniting around these things that are happening.”
Lambert said he hopes that this year’s Coming Out Day will remind the OU community, as well as the community at large, how important sexual identity is.
The Oklahoma Daily is pleased to provide you the opportunity to share your thoughts about this article. We encourage lively debate on the issues of the day, but we ask you refrain from using profanity or other offensive speech, engaging in personal attacks or name-calling, posting advertising, or straying from the topic at hand. To comment, you must be a registered user of OUDaily.com. Thanks for taking the time to offer your thoughts.
You must be logged in to leave a comment. Log in | Register
DylanC94 1 year, 7 months ago
Mustafa! You forgot one! You closet case!
braceyourself 1 year, 7 months ago
I wish I could like comments on here.