(Note: Posted October 2019, updated in 2020.)
My first crochet project, ca. 2003.
This is no longer my focus. It is still about dates, though. And about time.*
Things change dramatically over time. Sometimes it takes 30 years, and sometimes it takes two years, or a single day. When I had my sudden, startling revelation on October 10, 1989, I was on a safe, supportive college campus, and I knew at the time that October 11 would be National Coming Out Day and that October 12 would be my frosh hall’s Gay and Lesbian Awareness Workshop.** This was only the beginning of my questioning process, so I wasn’t coming out to anyone else yet. But at that point, I knew that the very next day I could stay quiet in a sea of supportive celebration. I knew that the day after that I could sit in a circle and declare myself a lesbian, and no one would know whether I was role-playing or not, and I could get questions answered without fear. I knew I was incredibly lucky.***
A year or so later, I was in the campus GLBA office and noticed a photo on the wall. It was a cluster of students with signs on the National Mall, and it was labeled, “March on Washington, October 11, 1987”. And I stared. I am good at dates, and I am good at patterns. I knew, unequivocally, in that moment, that National Coming Out Day was created to commemorate that march. And that that meant that National Coming Out Day was created in 1988, and that 1989 was only the second one ever. And I was stunned by how close I had come to missing that day of celebration and power and comfort that I had thought was already an institution.
This is not to say I had taken my safe space for granted. It was just astonishment at how quickly and abruptly — and arbitrarily — things can change. After all, there wasn’t any particular day set up to commemorate the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Rights that I did go to, on April 25, 1993. And yet the power of that march resonated later in powerful ways. I always thought, until five or ten years ago, that the national conversation about marriage equality started in 1994, when Hawai’i made its ruling that a marriage had to be able, based only on gender (not on actual fertility or intention), to produce children. But in fact, the 1993 march had a platform of demands, and one of the demands was an expansion of the definitions of family, including the recognition of domestic partnerships and legalization of same sex marriages.
Another thing that began in 1994 was the introduction of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to Congress. Before this (from 1974), the focus had been promoting the Equality Act to expand the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ENDA has still not passed, despite being introduced (with gender identity added in 2009) to every Congress save one until 2014, when support wavered and efforts returned to the Equality Act, which this year passed the House but has not moved in the Senate. Instead, we now have the ACLU arguing employment discrimination cases in front of the Supreme Court, and an unfavorable Court at that.
I found myself surprised this week, however, to keep reading online comments framing these court cases as an unthinkable new disaster in this time, from people who were somehow stunned that it should become legal to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people in employment. And maybe those commenters live in the states where such rights are protected. The truth is, though, that there is no federal law against this discrimination, just years of painstaking work to establish scattered local and state protections. If the justices rule against us, those laws could be superseded, which indeed would be a devastating push backward. But if, by some chance, they vote in our favor, then we would gain federal protection that we have never had.
[Edited in 2020 to add: And they did rule in our favor! See Bostock vs. Clayton County.****]
It’s been very curious being around long enough to see how much the conversation and the climate have changed over 30 years. Watching and welcoming the emerging gender identity movement, particularly over the last decade, has felt new and fascinating and also strangely familiar. From young kids coming out and public activism to bathroom bills and ongoing violence to language change and new books and new accommodation, I keep feeling, yes, this is where we were back in the ‘90s: visibility and backlash and violence and change. And in the nineties I was told by people who lived through the rise of third wave feminism in the ’70s: this is the way it goes: visibility and backlash and change. And so we all keep going, being visible, speaking our truth, and making change.
I began this essay on October 11, and it’s now grown enough that I’m finishing it a week later, and thus I’ve gotten to see, spread around my Facebook feed, the dawning of a new Day: the second instance of International Pronouns Day, begun last year on the third Wednesday in October. This is only the second one ever.
And this reminded me of something important that did happen just after Yom Kippur this year. We shared our break-fast meal that evening with longtime family friends, and since there were people at the table who didn’t know each other, one of the family, in support of her sibling, suggested we go around and do names and pronouns.
Now, I’ve been including my pronouns in my email signature at work for the past year and a half, but, I realised as it neared my turn, this was the first time I’d ever done it out loud. And then I looked at my kid, for whom this ritual was also new, and watched to see what he’d say. And even though he had only “she” and “they” modeled before his turn, he gamely followed the pattern and said, “…and I use he/him pronouns.” And thus we move forward, one word or day or year at a time, toward safe space, toward recognizing human dignity, and toward comprehensive human rights.
——
*Though, to be fair, only about the most mundane type of time travel.
**The CoLeGA (Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Awareness, later renamed BiLeGA [and eventually, in 1999, BiLeGaTA]) Awareness workshop was my favorite of the required awareness workshops, and it was cleverly designed. Everyone would sit in a circle, with two student facilitators, and everyone had to say, in turn, “I am a lesbian” or “I am a gay man”. That was the only thing we were required to say out loud. (To be fair, there were a few students who refused to do the workshop at all, based on this.) What followed was a role-play, in which the facilitators would give prompts, such as, “Tell me about a time you felt discriminated against,” or “How does it feel to tell people?” and anyone who wanted could reply. If we didn’t identify as gay or lesbian (or bi), we were asked to draw on our experiences based on other identities, or to imagine what it would be like. For the second half, we wrote questions on pieces of paper that we didn’t want to ask aloud, and the facilitators read them out and answered them as best they could.
***Actually, I wasn’t quiet on National Coming Out Day; I was fairly loud and enthusiastic, and I’m pretty sure it was even my proposal (earlier in the week) that for our hall’s turn at the dorm’s Wednesday “wine and cheese” on October 11, we serve chocolate chip cookie dough and milk, both colored with pink food coloring. But I wasn’t loud for myself, quite yet.
****Note that this decision, similar to the provisions of ENDA, covers only employment, leading to renewed focus on the Equality Act, including in the Biden campaign: “Biden will make enactment of the Equality Act during his first 100 days as President a top legislative priority.”