Ryder McEntyre, Campus Carrier Graphics Editor
College is about reinventing yourself. It’s about doing things you would never do and discovering yourself for the first, second and even a third time. I reinvented myself by entering Berry as an out gay man, and I’m going to leave Berry as an out gay man.
If you’re like R. Kelly and you’re trapped in the closet, Berry is a pretty good place to start getting out lonely place. I’m not saying you should immediately come out, because that is an incredibly personal struggle that everyone should do on their own time. But let me tell you, coming out is single-handedly the most scary yet freeing thing many of us will ever do.
The scary part is the fact that you can never know what someone’s reaction may be to your closely-held secret. I look at the act of “coming out” as causing four possible reactions.
The first I like to call “neutral surprise.” You come out to someone, they say “I had no idea! Can you pick out my outfit?” This situation is neutral, because it’s great that they didn’t question your sexuality before and are obviously okay with it, but now they are going to constantly come to you for outfit advice. Don’t give them your number.
The second is “angry shock.” This scenario is the worst, and rarely happens, contrary to popular belief. It usually goes like this especially if they are the same sex as you are: “What? You spend the night in my room!” and they go on to assume that you just want to get weird with them simply because you’re attracted to the same sex. This is repulsive. They also rarely get over the fact that you’re attracted to the same sex. If a “friend” responds to you in this way, they do not deserve your friendship.
The third is “genuine understanding via (sometimes) previous knowledge”. The person you come out to just knew you were gay, and didn’t make a fuss about it. Some people just naturally have “gaydar” and/or are completely cool with it because they are intelligent and cool, simple as that.
The final scenario is “ambivalence, then acceptance.” This is the exceedingly common type of a person who has rarely seen a member of the LGBT community, much less interacted with one, but they are a kind and intelligent person who will eventually see past your sexuality because they realize that sexuality is just another part of you.
Bery used to be a much less tolerant place. “Used to,” in this case, means a little over a year ago. Shocking, right? Berry’s environment was not tolerant — in this case meaning not tolerant of the LGBT community — because there was no official LGBT organization on campus. There was an unofficial one, which had been operating more or less in the shadows for over a decade, trying to get the college’s approval.
A lot of things kept LISTEN, the aforementioned LGBT organization, from becoming an official approved group, and finally those things fell by the wayside, thanks to an email sent campus-wide by one faculty member by the name of John Countryman; the email heard around the campus, sent during the spring of 2012.
That spark lead other faculty and staff to come out in support of the very present, if small, LGBT community. Berry was honored in the 2012 Atlanta Pride parade. I cried a bunch. It was awesome.
I entered Berry completely out of the closet. I was cognizantly flippant about my sexuality, because I felt that if I was, everyone else would be. It doesn’t matter what you are. You’re a human being and Berry student, and that should be enough to receive an operational level of respect from your peers.
Berry has become much more openly tolerant of the
LGBT community and it’s time we all took advantage of that. LISTEN gaining official status within the Berry community gave people like me a place to feel safe. It’s like Berry finally noticed us and said, “Welcome home!”
If you’re a member of the LGBT
community, or even an LGBT ally, you should also be a member of LISTEN. There’s not a lot of us, and we’ve got to stick together. Not sure about coming out? Come to the meeting as an LGBT ally, and no one will judge or pressure you into coming out.
Everyone should decide for themselves when they come out, but I just wanted to let you know that college is pretty much the place to do it.