Coming Out of the Closet

I was talking with Mr. Gilbert [the coordinator of the Teach-In for Peace and Justice] a few weeks ago, and he reminded me of a photograph of mine that he saw last year. I had submitted the photo to a Park School art gallery exhibit called “Photo Stories.” A number of teachers and students contributed their photos, accompanied by a few sentences that told the stories of the photos. We had an assembly where some of the photos were shared, and I was supposed to share mine, but we ran out of time. So after Mr. Gilbert reminded me of my photo, I thought: Well, I have the entire stage to myself this morning, and plenty of time, so this is finally my chance to share my photo with the middle school! So this is my photograph. I took it when I was in college. Some friends and I were in a shopping mall and stumbled upon this clothing store called The Closet. So in this photo, my friend is, literally, “coming out of The Closet.” And what’s even cooler is that a little bit to his left, there is a sign advertising a 10%-off sale. As some of you know, many experts believe that roughly 10% of the human population is gay or lesbian. So here’s my friend, coming out of The Closet with that 10% right beside him! The photo is humorous, but I think it provides a good introduction to the topic of my talk this morning, which is “Coming Out of the Closet.” I want to first talk about what coming out of the closet might mean. Then I want to share a little of my own story of coming out of the closet here at Park School. And finally, I want to discuss how each of you can recognize your own closets and how you might come out of them. That might sound weird to you right now, but hopefully you’ll understand what I’m talking about by the end of my talk.

First, what might coming out of the closet mean? Those of you who have taken language arts—and I hope that’s all of you!—will recognize coming out of the closet as a metaphor. A metaphor means that we’re not talking about an actual closet with a door and hangers, but rather that we’re using the image of a closet to symbolize or represent a larger idea.

But before we get to what the closet might symbolize, let’s first imagine that actual closet. I should be specific as to what kind of closet I’m talking about. I know some of you live in mansions, with gigantic walk-in closets that have framed pictures on the wall and a dozen lamps lining the shelves. But that’s not this closet. This closet is your typical closet, where you open a sliding door and you see a bunch of hangers and clothes and that’s it.

I’d like you to close your eyes for a moment and imagine that you are in such a closet. It’s dark; there is no light in the closet. The air is stale and thick, and it’s difficult to breathe. There’s not a lot of room to move around at all. You’re brushed up against clothes. Some of the clothes might be made of comfortable material, but other clothes feel prickly against your skin and are very uncomfortable.

Now imagine that you come out of this closet. First, before you can come out, you have to open the door. And it’s extremely difficult to get that door open, because when people design closet doors, they don’t design them to be opened from the inside! So there are no handles or doorknobs. You have to figure out how to get the door open—perhaps by placing your fingers inside a very small opening, or using your fingernails, or maybe finding something in the closet that might help you pry the door open.

Now, once that door is open, imagine coming out of the closet. What do you see? You might be in a large bedroom, with the windows open, with fresh air circulating all around the room! There are lights on in the room! You can jump up and down on the bed! You can move around any way and anywhere you want! You feel free!

That is what it feels like to come out of the closet. When you are in the closet, you are hiding, and you feel trapped and constrained and uncomfortable. It’s hard to begin to come out, but once you are out of that closet, you feel free.

Most of the time, when people talk about coming out of the closet, they are talking about gay people. That’s only one way to apply the metaphor, though, and I will discuss other ways in a few moments. But first I’d like to share some of my story of coming out the closet here at Park School.

My story starts long before I came to Park. It starts when I was ten years old. That’s the age I was when I first realized that I had a crush on a boy. And that freaked me out. It freaked me out because I hadn’t ever heard of any other boys who had crushes on boys. No one ever spoke about this, ever. So I thought I must be weird, and I thought I must be wrong to have a crush on a boy. And it seemed like something embarrassing. So I didn’t tell anyone about it. I was in the closet.

As I went through middle school, and had more and more crushes on boys, I went further and further into the closet. I didn’t want anyone to know, because it was something weird, something wrong, something embarrassing.

In fact, it wasn’t until I was in college that I slowly began to come out of the closet. It was difficult to get that closet door open; I told just a few people at first. But by my last year of college, I was out to everyone in my life: family, friends, classmates, everybody.

And then I came to Park School. I started here as an intern teacher in the fourth grade. In fact, a bunch of you were in the first class that I taught! That first year at Park School, I was in the closet.

Now hold on a second, you might think. I just said I had come out of the closet, and now I’m back in it again? How can that be?!? Well, coming out of the closet isn’t a one-time thing. You come out to some people, and then when you meet new people you have to decide whether to come out to them. And I decided, at first, to not come out at Park.

Why not? There were a few reasons, but probably the biggest one was that I was a teacher. And there are some people who get nervous about the existence of gay teachers. In fact, those of you who I taught last year might remember that we watched a documentary [The Times of Harvey Milk] in which we learned about an effort in California to pass a law to prevent gay people from becoming teachers, and to fire any teachers who were gay.

I think some people are worried that if a gay person teaches their child, then that gay person might somehow turn their child gay. I’ve never quite understood this idea. After all, as far as I know, the teachers who taught me were straight, and they sure as hell didn’t turn me straight! I don’t understand why it would work the other way around. And furthermore, I didn’t choose to be gay, just as no one chooses to be straight. We just are. But that’s a whole other speech.

The point is that I decided to be in the closet at Park School. I did come out to a few people that year, but not to most, and definitely not to students.

After my first year, I began to prepare to teach seventh grade language arts and social studies. The seventh grade curricular theme was “the individual and society.” We studied identity, dealing with differences, and, in my class, social activism. And it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to include discussion about gay issues in this curriculum.

I thought of this for two reasons. First, I remembered how I felt when I was in middle school, being in the closet. I remembered that no one around me ever talked about anything having to do with gay issues. And that’s what made me feel weird and wrong and embarrassed. So I thought to myself that if I can prevent just one student at Park School from feeling like I had felt, that would be important.

The second reason was that I read some statistics that were published that year [from GLSEN]. Almost one thousand students from around the country were interviewed about their encounters with homophobia. Phobia means fear, so homophobia basically means fear of gayness, for lack of a better word.

Let me share some of these statistics. 84% of gay students reported being verbally harassed because of their sexual orientation. That includes things like name-calling and threats. 91.5% of students reported hearing homophobic remarks such as “faggot,” “dyke,” or “that’s so gay” frequently or often. 64.3% of gay students reported feeling unsafe at their school because of their sexual orientation.

And here’s the statistic that was most shocking. 82.9% of students reported that teachers never intervened when they heard homophobic remarks such as “faggot,” “dyke,” or “that’s so gay.” That means that teachers heard students saying these things yet did nothing.

I can understand why a teacher wouldn’t intervene. In fact, I used to be part of that 82.9%. Let’s say you’re a teacher, and you hear a student say, for example: “I just ate the worst cereal this morning! It tasted so nasty! It was so gay!”

Now, of course we all know that this student doesn’t mean that his cereal was actually gay. He’s not saying that his cereal is attracted to other cereals of his own gender. Cereals don’t even have genders! But what he is saying is that he doesn’t like his cereal, and therefore that cereal is gay. In other words, gay is bad.

So now, imagine that you’re the teacher who hears this student referring to gay as bad. What will happen if you go up to him and call him on it? If you ask him why he said it, or say to him that you don’t like to hear comments like that? He might turn to you and think (or maybe even say out loud), “Why do you care? Are you gay?” After all, why would anybody care about anti-gay comments unless they themselves are gay? And of course, you as the teacher don’t want him thinking you’re gay—that means he’ll think you’re bad!

Since I didn’t want anyone to think that I was gay, I was one of those 82.9% of teachers who stayed silent.

So anyway, these statistics made me interested in teaching about gay issues in my curriculum. I talked it over with Mrs. Rosenblatt and Dr. Jackson [Park administrators], and they were interested too. So I started preparing materials about gay issues for my class. But I still wasn’t sure if I would actually come out to my students.

An event in early March finally caused me to decide to come out to my students. You all know what happens at Park in early March: eighth grade speeches. And that year, one student presented a speech about homophobia at Park School. She had distributed surveys to upper and middle school students and to teachers. She had done research about homophobia. And in the conclusion of her speech, she argued that the only way for Park School to begin to confront homophobia would be for a teacher to come out of the closet. I was sitting in the audience when she presented her speech, and I realized that she was right.

So I decided to come out to my students. I again consulted with Mrs. Rosenblatt and Dr. Jackson, and I let all of the other teachers know when I would be coming out. I sat my students down on a Monday morning and told them that I was gay. Then I said that I had no lesson planned for that day, that instead I would be happy to answer any questions they had.

And they flooded me with questions! Why did they have so many questions? I think it’s because most of them were never given permission to ask these questions before. All their lives, they had thought of questions about gay people and gay issues, but in our society this topic is something we don’t like to talk about. So they kept all their questions bottled up inside of them. And now, suddenly, here was an adult—their teacher—inviting them to finally ask their questions! I spent four entire class periods that Monday answering their questions.

I placed only one limitation on their questions: I told them that if they had questions about sex, they should ask Debbie Roffman [Park's sexuality educator], because she loves answering questions about sex. But other than that, they could ask me anything. And they did.

After I came out, a number of things happened that were inspiring and incredible. I don’t have time to mention them all here, but I do want to talk about one thing that happened in particular.

The Day of Silence is a day each year when students across the country take a vow of silence to call attention to the silencing of gay students in schools. Of course, this silence is also a metaphor, just like coming out of the closet. We’re not saying that gay students literally cannot speak, but rather that they often don’t feel that they can be all of who they are. In this way, silence is the exact same metaphor as being in the closet.

Last year, almost half of the students in our middle school participated in some way in the Day of Silence. Before the day happened, we had an assembly at which a number of students shared their experiences of feeling silenced. I’d like to share a few of their experiences with you.

One student stood right here on this stage, in front of the entire middle school, and said: “I am dyslexic. Whenever I hear friends or classmates make fun of someone they think is stupid by calling them dyslexic, I feel silenced.” In other words, he felt like he was in a closet. He didn’t feel comfortable speaking up out of some kind of fear. Of course, being dyslexic doesn’t mean you’re stupid; it means that you decode symbols differently than other people do. But still, this student felt silenced in this situation.

Another student spoke about going to family reunions. All of her extended family was very religious, and she felt silenced because she was an atheist. In other words, she felt like she was in a closet, because she did not feel comfortable expressing her beliefs.

Other students, too, shared their experiences of feeling silenced, of being in closets. In fact, each of us is in some kind of closet. Often we find ourselves in many closets at once. Sometimes our closets have to do with not being able to be all of who we are—like me being gay, or like these students being dyslexic or atheist.

Our closets might also be of another type. You might be in a closet if you see some type of injustice, or inequality, or act of violence, and you know you should do something about it but you don’t do anything. You put yourself in a closet, walling yourself off from the problem. We put ourselves in this type of closet all the time. We see someone bullying someone else in the hallway; we witness backstabbing; we see dishonesty or cheating. Perhaps we see ostracism—a group of people excluding another person because they don’t think that person is cool enough for them. And yet we do nothing.

In our seventh grade class, we called this being a bystander—standing by while something bad happens, without doing anything to help or to improve the situation. Often, it’s really difficult to not be a bystander. Just like the teacher who doesn’t speak up when a student calls something gay, being a bystander is often the safe option, even though we know it’s not always the right one.

So we can be in a closet if we’re hiding a part of who we are, and we can also be in a closet if we see something bad happening and do nothing about it. I think it’s important that we recognize when we’re in a closet. And while I can’t offer perfect advice for how to come out of these closets, I can offer some helpful ideas.

This past fall, I went to see a speaker up at Harvard. The speaker was an evangelical preacher named Jim Wallis. Reverend Wallis told us about a woman he knew named Lisa, who was a community organizer in Washington, DC, and has since passed away. Lisa worked on issues of poverty, homelessness, and youth organizing. She had many young people working with her.

These young people would come to Lisa and say, “All these problems are too big. And we’re too small. We don’t have Martin Luther Kings coming to lead us to the Promised Land. It’s just us. The problems are too big and we’re too small.”

And Lisa would say to them, “Don’t you understand? We are the ones who we have been waiting for.” We are the ones who we have been waiting for.

When Reverend Wallis told us about Lisa, I remembered a famous quote by Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

So once you’ve identified your closet, and you think that you are in there alone, look around. You might find that you are sharing your closet with someone else. Someone else who sees the same injustice that you see, but doesn’t know how to respond. Or someone who is hiding the same part of their identity that you are hiding, too embarrassed to come out and be all of who they are. And together, you might become that small group of thoughtful, committed citizens that is the only thing that has ever changed the world.

And when you and your small group of thoughtful, committed citizens look all around the closet for your leader, for your Martin Luther King to lead you to the Promised Land—when you look all through the tightly packed clothes, in the toy boxes at the bottom of the closet, in all of the shelves above the hangers—and you don’t find this leader, remember: You are the ones who you have been waiting for.

Thank you.

mikefishback@gmail.com | Read more here!