Happy National Coming Out Day: Twentieth Anniversary!

Today is National Coming Out Day. Twenty years ago today, half a million people marched on Washington for LGBTQ equality and Coming Out Day was born.

Every year, in her Coming Out Day post, Pam poses three questions for straight people: Are you "out" as an ally? Are you able to talk about gay friends or relatives with others? Are you comfortable shooting down homophobes when they spout off during a conversation? Happily, every year I can answer a resounding yes to all three.

Sometimes people ask me why I'm so passionate about fighting for LGBTQ equality when I'm not gay. Here's why:

I fight as a patriot. I believe with every ounce of my being in equal rights. I was taught in school from a very early age, as were we all, that America was a place where all people were seen as equal under the law. When I realized this was not true for certain people, simply because of their sexuality—which has no basis for legal discrimination and the prejudice against whom is rooted in a particular and limited religious interpretation that should not have legal standing—it made me fucking mad. And I’ve stayed mad. For my country to fulfill its promise of recognizing its every citizen as equal, it must extend the same rights to the LGBTQ community that it extends to me.

I fight as an ally. As I've said before, it is foolish to believe that there is more feminist, gender-queer cisgendered straight women, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender persons don't all have in common culturally and politically than that which we do, given the particular restraints and prejudices of the patriarchal structure and its rigid notions of sex, gender, and sexuality conveyed in all its aspects. We struggle to achieve and/or maintain, to varying degrees, autonomy over our own bodies, and, crucially, freedom of choice with regard to what we want to do with those bodies. Life- and identity-changing events hang in the balance for us all—parenting, marriage, gender reassignment, being legally able to keep a job in spite of prejudice. We are natural allies. Though all of us, sans rigorous philosophical exertion, are hapless conduits for every limiting and oppressive archetype upon which the patriarchy depends, conveying the bars of our own cages, very few of us are its unconstrained beneficiaries. Even the average straight, white, middle class American man exchanges privilege for severe limitations on his personal expression and emotional life—and he is encouraged never to examine that devastating trade-off too closely, lest the veneer on the alleged bargain prove thin enough through which to see. We all serve the same callous master, and there's little to celebrate in being the favored slave—especially compared to a life of freedom. None of us should be willing to secure rights for ourselves at the expense of rights for the rest, because we are in this thing together.

I fight as a friend. There are people who I love very much, my family by design, who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender. Until they are no longer treated as second-class citizens, I will not rest.

Sometimes being a straight ally has meant calling out bosses, coworkers, friends, family who use homophobic epithets. Sometimes it has meant writing to my elected representatives. Sometimes it has meant challenging people's beliefs, patiently and logically, finding an argument to which they can relate. Sometimes it has meant getting confrontational and angry. It always means being uncompromising, unapologetic, and unafraid—which is the very least I can do on behalf of a community who has shown me such a fine example of all three.