SPEECH,NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY RALLY, OCTOBER 11, 2001, UWEC

PROFESSOR BOB NOWLAN

I am glad to speak to you tonight as an openly gay member of the faculty here at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Over the past fifteen plus years I have spoken at many National Coming Out Day events, and written about the meaning and significance of "coming out" in a variety of different forums. This actually makes it somewhat difficult for me because I want to try to say something tonight that I haven't yet said before but I'm afraid I won't be able to do so. Nonetheless, I'm going to try.
 

At the time I first started to become involved in gay organizations people commonly discussed three principal stages of coming out: coming out to one's self, coming out privately to close friends and relatives, and coming out publicly. Although obviously an overly simplistic and even unduly optimistic depiction of how coming out works, what I still find important about this account of coming out is the representation of coming out as involving a series of stages that climax in coming out publicly. When you come out publicly you often do so to people who do not already know you, and who do not already maintain any necessary basis for sympathy with or respect for you. Throughout much of my life, coming out publicly as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender has meant identifying yourself as what many to whom you come out regard as criminally deviant, pathologically disturbed, and sinfully immoral. Even many of those who did not feel these ways still reacted as if you announced to them that you were a weird alien being. 
 

I will never forget the reaction of a dean of a college where I taught in Syracuse, New York in the early 1990s. This woman summoned me to her office in response to student complaints about encountering gay topics taught by a gay teacher. The Dean began our meeting by quickly moving back behind her desk as soon as I entered her office while gesturing to a chair at the far end of a circular table which was ominously propped up directly against the front of her desk in what seemed too bizarre an office furniture arrangement to be merely coincidental. Once we both sat down, the Dean rocked back gently in her chair struggling for a way to begin. She tried the following: "So you are a person with a very, very, very, very different kind of sexual orientation." I immediately thought about responding, "yes, I do it with rabbits," but instead settled for telling her "no, I am gay." To this the Dean replied, "I wasn't sure if I should call you that as I thought 'gay' was considered an insult by you people." I knew I was in real trouble at that point. We did, however, proceed to talk further. In the course of our conversation, she asked me one other especially startling question:"so, your purpose in teaching this material [she meant "gay material"] is to convert your students from heterosexuality to homosexuality?" By this time I simply couldn't hold myself back; I immediately blurted out "if only it was that easy." Of course, this Dean didn't recognize I was joking. All of this happened because we spent a week and one-half in my Introduction to Composition and Literature classes discussing, as well as reading and writing about current controversies concerning issues of sexuality, and because my students knew that I was gay, in a course where we spent even longer periods of time addressing current controversies concerning issues of race, nationality, class, and gender. The Dean's remarks might seem merely laughable today, but they testify, in their own perverse way, to something important: our enemies fear our power. We do possess power, even if this comes in a much different shape than they imagine. The power we possess results from our unity in committed struggle and concern for each other, and for the well-being of all others whose lives suffer the devastation not only of heterosexism and homophobia, but also of sexism and chauvinism, racism and ethnocentrism, and economic exploitation and alienation. When we act together, empowering each other and empowering our communities, we manifest a power that these others rightly fear. 
 

I think it is somewhat unfortunate that many people today commonly talk about coming out primarily, even exclusively, in relation to what this does for the individual person who comes out. While I recognize the value of this dimension to what coming out is about, I think it is ultimately not what is most important. When you, I, and we come out in places like this we make a decision and take an action which effects who we are and what we will contribute as members of a larger community. We take a public stand and declare that we are ready to commit and to struggle on behalf of the stance we take. We declare that our gayness, lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgenderism significantly shape and determine who we are and what we are about, in profoundly positive ways; we contend that it is not in spite of, but rather through our gayness, lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgenderism that we engage within the communities in which we participate as citizens. We reject the idea that our sexuality and our gender are just private, personal matters; we seek to make a difference, not simply to mark a difference. 
 

When I first came to terms with my own gayness many years ago I talked with an openly gay teacher of mine who gave me what has since proven incredibly enabling advice. He urged me to theorize my gayness -- in other words to develop a conceptual understanding and articulation of what it meant for me to be gay, and to live my life as a gay person. He urged me to recognize that my gayness united me with many others past, present, and future, and with a vast, complex, dynamic, rich, moving, and inspiring history, politics, and culture. As I worked to theorize my gayness I came to conceive of it as the manifestation of an ethical and political commitment to dedicate my life working for progressive social change. For me, declaring myself to be gay means declaring that I actively identify with the fight to overcome oppressively unequal forms of intimate and affectional relations, and to create a new mode of human social organization founded upon genuinely mutually enabling, and substantially equal forms of intimate and affectional relations. For me, following the inspirational path of revolutionary gay liberation, the word "gay" continues to represent, most importantly, a social and political identity, a vantage point, that is, from which I seek to intervene against the anti-democratic, unfree, unequal, and unjust configuration of existing power relations in our society. Gayness, as I have come to conceive of it, represents a commitment, furthermore, to feel who I am through my interdeterminate interconnection with others, and to transcend the solipsistic limits of an insular, alienated individuality. For me, gayness is not a single, fixed, static thing; my declaration that I am gay does not therefore mean I simply announce that I have found, rock-solid deep within me, some innately essential, "true homosexual self." I am gay: this means, instead, that I am committed to a practice and a process of becoming in relation to others, toward making myself vulnerable to and trusting of others, toward reaching out and connecting with others, toward tangibly grasping and passionately feeling the inescapable otherness of who I am and that makes up what I call "myself."
 

You may or may not conceive, or come to conceive, of gayness in the same way I do. Yet that ultimately matters less to me than another concern I want to raise tonight. I am concerned because I do not think enough students on this campus, including many gay students, have taken the time, made the effort, or even recognized the need to theorize what gayness means. Certainly, our university does not make it easy for you to pursue this goal; few opportunities at present exist to study glbt topics here at UWEC. This is, however, a serious problem and a significant limitation in the education and service this university provides. If you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, this means you remain cut off from learning about who you are; if you are straight this means you remain ignorant of how far gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, communities, and cultures have contributed and are contributing to shaping the world in which you live as well as your experience of what it means to live within this world. We need much more education on glbt issues at this campus, and you, UWEC students, must lead the way in continuing to demand this education. Believe me, and if you don't believe me, believe the students who have taken my classes in glbt studies, this knowledge can make a tremendous difference for you and for those with whom you will interact over the course of your lives. 
 

Of course, none of this will happen if you remain too frightened to be publicly open about who you are as glbt people, or as straight people who respect, appreciate, and support glbt people. I know how difficult it is to come out, and how risky and costly it can be. Yet the risks and costs of not coming out often prove far greater. We cannot act as gay people to make our gayness the vantage point from which we contribute to the betterment of our communities if we remain afraid of ourselves. We certainly can do little if, worse than afraid, we continue to despise ourselves - and each other. Some people proclaim that problems of discrimination, prejudice, and abuse on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identification no longer significantly trouble this campus or the surrounding community, that everything has simply become steadily more tolerant and accepting in virtually every possible way. I recognize where this position comes from, but I remain skeptical. Let me just mention one reason why. This is my fifth year teaching at UWEC. I have been open about my gayness from the first day of class in every course I have taught from the moment I started here in the fall 1997 semester.  In every one of these courses we have dealt with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues. In fact I have now taught two courses at UWEC explicitly focused on glbt issues. Yet, in all this time, only five students have identified themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual in the classes I have taught. Obviously there continues to be a significant amount of fear, and undoubtedly real reason for fear, about "coming out" on this campus. After all, if glbt students don't feel comfortable being open in my classes then it is hard to imagine they will feel comfortable being open in many others. This concerns me and not only because it puts me so often in the position of having to be "the gay person in the class" -- a quite tiring position. I am concerned because as long as you remain afraid openly to identify yourself in relation to your sexuality and your gender, which are extremely significant dimensions of whom we all are, then you are also likely to be afraid to "come out" publicly in support of what you truly believe is right, necessary, and urgent, especially when this is at the same time unpopular and strongly contested by powerful opponents. You remain, in short, cut off from your full potential as a social human being.
 

War dominates the news of the day at the present moment in time. As a result, our focus here tonight upon coming out might seem a relatively trivial matter. Yet I don't see things that way. We must come out about where and for what we stand if we do not want to surrender the last vestiges of our democracy, of our civil liberties and human rights, to our government and allow this government to exercise imperial powers without question, without challenge, without critique, and without accountability. Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered people, and straight allies who know about and who maintain vital connections with our historic struggles against oppression, and against repression, recognize quite clearly that without justice there can be no lasting peace and without equality there can be no genuine freedom. It is not George W. Bush, it is not Osama Bin Laden, it is not the Taliban, it is not the Al-Quaeda network, it is not the U.S. military that will ultimately decide the future direction of civilized life on this planet, even if it can quite readily seem, at times like this, that we are utterly powerless in comparison with these people; no, it is we who must make the future. We cannot afford passivity, indifference, complacency, resignation, or detachment; we cannot trust that the rich and powerful will take care of everything for us while at the same time leaving us alone. We don't live in that kind of world. Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered people, and our straight friends and allies must maintain vital connections with our collective past of long, difficult, and painful struggle. We must recall, we must understand, and we must appreciate what it means to struggle against enormous obstacles for the right to live freely, with dignity, to determine the shape and direction of our own identity and our own destiny, and to love whom we choose. 
 

Only if we do this can we then even begin to imagine taking on a greater challenge. I will pose this challenge as a series of questions. Why settle for simply trying to make a place for ourselves within existing social arrangements? Why not act to rearrange the ways in which human beings relate to each other and the institutions we set up to organize and regulate these relations? Why not strive to create a society charged with mutual respect, animated by free and voluntary association, founded upon individual and collective self-determination, driven forward by just cooperation and interaction, and embodying real and abiding love? We may not make it no matter what we do, but we certainly won't if we don't even try. None of us really has that long to live as individual human beings, and few of us can predict with anything approaching perfect confidence when the end of our individual lives will come. Yet we live on by way of our impact upon others, upon the world, as participants within a continuum of progressive struggle. None of us needs heroically to change the world all by himself or herself; we need instead to start with little things, as these can well add up, over time and across space, to become quite big things. We need to work together, and through out unity, derive resources of strength and resilience to press on even when we are tired, disillusioned, overwhelmed, worn-out, and burnt-out. 
 

We here at UWEC tonight, this October 11, 2001 - students, faculty, staff, friends, family, residents of the Eau Claire and Chippewa Valley communities - do enjoy considerable advantages versus the vast majority of the rest of the world's people. We do maintain means at our disposal that many others do not. Let's not waste our opportunity. I don't agree that we should look forward to the day where we no longer need to come out. We all - gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and straight - need to come out, and to come out again and again and again. Come out with passion, and come out with compassion. Come out with conviction, and come out with commitment. Don't just come out for yourself; come out for what you value, for what you believe, for what you can contribute, and for the world you would like to help bring about. Come out; make a difference. Thank you.
 
 

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