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Jan. 29th, 2008 08:00 amSo, yeah -- today's the 15th anniversary of my coming out. I've always sort of marked this day as a second birthday, since coming out so completely altered the direction of my life.
I sometimes wonder if that's the same experience now. It's hard to imagine now a person getting death threats, losing all their friends, and having to flee in the middle of the night -- which was a pretty normal experience when I was sixteen and coming out.
Intellectually, I know it's just as hard out in the boonies, out in rural areas (or almost just as hard since the internet is a mitigating factor). But Montreal has a talent for insulating a person, making it seem like all problems have been solved.
Sometimes it's hard to focus on how much this country is a patchwork quilt when it comes to change. Change has moved ahead so quickly in urban cores and liberal bastions like universities, while ideas now considered very conservative in those places haven't even begun to see the light of day in many other parts of the country.
Of course, since even progressive Montreal has a gaybashing a week on average -- and since a quarter of its street youth are there because they fled homophobic parents -- a lot of that insulation is just illusion, too, and not real change.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that -- whatever the elitists of our movement and the postmodernists in the universities say -- being out is still crucial, still necessary, and still just as radical as it always was.
I sometimes wonder if that's the same experience now. It's hard to imagine now a person getting death threats, losing all their friends, and having to flee in the middle of the night -- which was a pretty normal experience when I was sixteen and coming out.
Intellectually, I know it's just as hard out in the boonies, out in rural areas (or almost just as hard since the internet is a mitigating factor). But Montreal has a talent for insulating a person, making it seem like all problems have been solved.
Sometimes it's hard to focus on how much this country is a patchwork quilt when it comes to change. Change has moved ahead so quickly in urban cores and liberal bastions like universities, while ideas now considered very conservative in those places haven't even begun to see the light of day in many other parts of the country.
Of course, since even progressive Montreal has a gaybashing a week on average -- and since a quarter of its street youth are there because they fled homophobic parents -- a lot of that insulation is just illusion, too, and not real change.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that -- whatever the elitists of our movement and the postmodernists in the universities say -- being out is still crucial, still necessary, and still just as radical as it always was.